Sarah Lyall on Why the Brits Are Different

What about achievement?

In Britain, when you achieve, you're not supposed to really feel proud about it. Or if you are, you're supposed to keep it very much to yourself and pretend that your achievement was the result of luck or some kind of fluke that just happened to you. And you really have to play it down and not go around boasting, because boasting is a bad thing to do here.

Americans are much more straightforward about being able to say even something like, "I had a really good day at work today." That would be straightforwardly happy. A Brit couldn't come and say that to a bunch of friends over a drink. They'd have to make some joke about how they screwed up somehow.

Relationships?

If you think about men in America, or the complaints that women in America make about men, they would say that they're uncommunicative, they're not helpful around the house, they fold into themselves and are only comfortable around other men. I think British men are just extreme examples of that. They're really uncommunicative. They really don't want to talk about feelings. They really don't understand when you're having an emotional meltdown. It's one of those things you have to laugh at and make fun of. That's one way to have a relationship with any kind of Brit. If you make fun of them, they can really understand that and then you're getting somewhere.

You write in your book about how there seems to be a lack of strong national identity, or an inability to define what Britishness is.

Yes. They've had a lot of debates about that recently. In the old days, it was the empire that defined Britain. It didn't have to explain itself because it knew who it was and it felt superior to every other country in the world. With the loss of the empire, its ego took a huge battering and there was never any equivalent to help cement the people together and give them an identity.

At the same time, you get a lot of immigrants coming in who don't really sign up for British-ness the way Americans sign up for American-ness. You don't really have a British dream. A Pakistani immigrant to America, after two generations, would probably refer to themselves as Pakistani-American. Here they would just keep calling themselves Pakistani.

The next Summer Olympics are going to be held in London. Is that going to help Brits temper their low self-esteem?

It's so hard to know. There's always an upswell of British pride before the World Cup. Everyone gets really excited about the British team, but then they always lose and then everyone gets bitter and angry and denounces them for letting down the entire country. What's happened until now is the Londoners have grumbled repeatedly about how annoying it's going to be to have the Olympics here. "Costs overruns are enormous, the traffic is going to be terrible, they'll never figure it out." All of a sudden, there's a little surge of pride and people are saying, at least this week, maybe it'll be great for the city.

How long are those good feelings going to last?

It'll last until the next bill comes in and they see how much more expensive it will be then they originally planned for.