father - ­ I was "an idiot anyway", as Guillaume Depardieu said of himself. But the shadow was there ­ and it made any effort at real success seem valueless.

Nonetheless, writing was what I was good at: eventually, therefore, I became a journalist, and then a novelist. Yet the Oedipal conflicts remained. My literary fiction was still a conscious attempt to best my father.

This was brought home to me a few years ago when my dad called, to tell me they were going to make a Hollywood film of his book. Half of me was pleased for the old man, but the other half was angry: I had been enjoying his gentle decline since the 1980s, now he was back in the game. He was going to outrank me all over again.

It was a watershed moment: I realised there must be another way, that my straining to defeat my father was defeating myself. Moreover I was broke, and my novels had failed to flabbergast Graham Greene. So I decided to relax, and just do my own thing.

Soon after I wrote a comic sex

memoir, Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You, which actually sold in several countries. Next year I'm publishing a thriller, The Genesis Secret, which is already being translated into 18 languages.

The book is not an attempt to win the Pulitzer, it's simply a ripping yarn that I enjoyed writing. But that, of course, is the point: this book is just me - not me trying to Out-Do Dad.

Put it another way: it's only when I stopped trying to be more successful than my father that I became quite successful. The irony might make a good novel.

'The Genesis Secret' will be published in the UK by Harper. 'Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You' is published by Bloomsbury. DM Thomas's 'The White Hotel' is published by Indigo