Art & Creativity Quote by Dawn French

French turns the indignity of being "known" into a punchline with teeth. The first jab is structural: she doesn’t dispute the biography on lofty ethical grounds; she grades it. “Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written” is a comedian’s scalpel, collapsing two separate offenses - fabrication and incompetence - into one neat insult. It’s not just that the book is wrong. It’s that it’s artistically lazy, a second betrayal for someone whose public life is built on craft.

The deeper sting is the asymmetry of modern celebrity: other people get to narrate you in permanent ink while you’re still mid-sentence. “Unauthorised” carries the legal chill, but French plays it as a social absurdity: strangers feel entitled to stitch together a person from gossip, projection, and marketable trauma. Her complaint isn’t “I want privacy,” it’s “I want authorship.” Control over the story becomes control over the self.

The closer - “if I’m going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first” - is classic French misdirection: it sounds like a whimsical quip about aging, then lands as a critique of the biography-industrial complex. We demand a tidy arc (rise, fall, redemption) before the mess is finished. The line doubles as a defense mechanism: humor as boundary-setting, reclaiming power without pleading for it. She refuses to be embalmed while she’s still alive.