Lisa Jewell, THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS
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[0:48]and subscribe yourself. I'm thrilled to be talking to Lisa Jewell today who is the internationally
[0:53]best-selling author of 17 and a half novels, including The New York Times bestseller,
[0:57]then she was gone, as well as I found you, The Girls in the Garden in the House we grew up in.
[1:02]Her latest book, The Family Upstairs, is already a number one bestseller in the UK
[1:06]and is a book of the month club pick. Her novels have sold 2 million copies around the world.
[1:10]She currently lives in London with her husband and two daughters. So welcome, Lisa. Thanks so much
[1:15]for coming on mom. So I have time to read books. Oh, thank you for inviting me. So can you please
[1:19]start by telling listeners what your latest novel The Family Upstairs is about? Okay, so the
[1:25]family upstairs, it's about, well, it's a story told from the point of view of three different
[1:29]people. But the first person we meet is Libby Jones. And Libby is 25 years old and she lives in a
[1:36]small town just outside London and she sells designer kitchens for a living. She's a very
[1:41]sensible girl. She's a very organized girl and she doesn't really do spontaneity or surprising
[1:48]things. But she was adopted as a baby and she's known all her life on her 25th birthday. She'll
[1:54]find out what her birth parents have been holding in trust for her. She's got no idea what it is
[1:59]and we meet her in the first chapter opening a letter from the solicitors to tell her what this
[2:04]is, her bequest from her birth parents. And she discovers that she has inherited an eight-bedroom
[2:11]mansion in Chelsea overlooking the River Thames, which is quite extraordinary thing. But she also
[2:17]finds out when she goes to visit the house with the solicitor that this house comes with a whole
[2:21]host of terrible, terrible dark secrets. She was actually found as a baby in a wide awake
[2:27]gurgling well looked after welfare clean and happy. While downstairs in the kitchen, there were
[2:33]three dead bodies on the kitchen floor dressed in black robes and a very strange suicide note
[2:39]suggesting they might have done some sort of cult related masour aside. Yeah, so that's what Libby
[2:46]is landed with in the first couple of chapters of the book. There's much more to it, but I'm sure
[2:50]we can talk about that as we go on. I love how in one of the videos that you have online,
[2:55]you show a picture of a house in Chelsea as you imagine the house to look like we're in the
[2:59]outside. That was great. Yeah, that's because I'm a lazy researcher. I don't do research. I could have
[3:05]got off my bum and got a tube over to Chelsea and found a nice house in real life, but instead I
[3:10]did a Google image search. That looks like the right sort of house. Strange when my publisher's
[3:17]actually said, we're going to take you to that house. We're going to film you outside it as well.
[3:20]it's first time I've ever been there. That's awesome. I love that. So you've written 18
[3:26]novels, correct? 17 in the hall. 17 and a half. Okay, sorry. How do you keep coming up with the
[3:32]ideas? So this was a fantastic work and plot twists and kept you going on the edge of your seat,
[3:38]but this is like you've done this a billion times already. How are you coming up with these ideas?
[3:44]It's a bit hit and miss, really. I, yeah, I don't, I'm not one of those writers who has a notebook
[3:50]full of ideas. I know people who do and they'll sort of, you know, when it comes time to write
[3:54]their next book, they'll go to their notebook and think, oh, that was quite a good idea. I had two
[3:58]and a half years ago. Maybe I'll go back to that one. I literally have one idea a year and sometimes
[4:02]I don't even have one idea a year. Sometimes I will have finished a book and it will come today
[4:07]one of starting the next book and I will literally not have any idea what I'm going to be writing
[4:14]about. And then I have to go for a long walk and just sort of slap myself around the face a bit
[4:19]until something comes to me. So that for me is one of the hardest things. And so what I tend to do
[4:24]because I don't have a lot of ideas, which is such a myth about writers that we've all got
[4:29]all these ideas, when I get even the tiniest glimmer of an idea, I jump on it like a lunatic,
[4:36]like a mad woman. I can most bodily throw myself on it right. Your mind, I'm going to make
[4:41]you work. I'm going to do something with you. And that was the case with this book. I very much
[4:46]jumped on something really tiny, which was a glimpse of a woman in Nice in the South of France
[4:51]when I was there two summers ago on holiday with my family. And there is a chapter in the book
[4:56]where a character called Lucy sneaks her children into a shower block of a posh private beach club
[5:02]in the South of France. And that was based on seeing this woman in real life, sneaking her
[5:07]children into the shower block of a posh beach club in the South of France, which maybe most people
[5:12]would have seen such a vignette and not thought anything about it, but I saw this vignette
[5:16]and couldn't stop thinking about it. And I kept thinking this woman that terribly interesting
[5:21]that she looked like, she had a backstory, she looked like bad things had happened to her.
[5:24]And I thought I could write a book about this woman. So that was the starting point for this one.
[5:29]So it was tiny. And of course, you know, since that moment, it's grown layers, you know,
[5:33]you've read the book. So you've seen how many layers there are beyond just a woman taking
[5:38]her children into a shower block. Yeah, that's such a tiny moment in the context of the rest
[5:42]of the story. But yeah, how interesting that that's started it. It's just like you never know.
[5:47]It's amazing. But it can be bigger things than that as well. You know, there's the sort of
[5:51]what if scenario as well. So then she was gone, which was three novels back from this one.
[5:56]The starting point from that was not it was a bigger seed. It was just the idea of what if your
[6:02]child had been missing for years. And then you found out that they'd been living next door the whole
[6:07]time. So something like that, you know, so yeah, it could be anything small or big. But yes,
[6:14]I'm very greedy for I do. So the minute something comes, I'm on it.
[6:19]So one over one of the chapters, which was told from Henry's point of view, you wrote the following,
[6:25]you said, birdie hasn't known who mouse to turn to as an adult man now of 41 years old,
[6:30]I have often used this refrain to get people to do what I want them to do. I didn't know who
[6:34]else to turn to. It gives the person you're trying to manipulate nowhere to go. Their only option
[6:39]is to capitulate, which is exactly what my mother did. So talk to me about this a little and I'm
[6:44]wondering, have you ever used this to your own advantage? Okay, this is really interesting because
[6:49]this wasn't me. This was, and I've very, very rarely take things, you know, when you're friends
[6:54]with a writer, you're constantly thinking they might be using bits of you to put into their books
[6:58]and always, you know, that based on someone we know. And it never is. It's never based on anyone
[7:03]I know. And it's never based on anything that anybody who I know has done all said. But in this,
[7:06]in this exact example, this was my friend, my friend said this to me. We were talking about the
[7:12]conundrum. And she said, what you have to do is you have to just go to that person and say,
[7:17]I didn't know who else to turn to. And then they'll have to do. And it never is not, you know,
[7:23]that wouldn't necessarily be my approach to a situation, but it was her very, very clever
[7:27]manipulative approach. And did you take her advice? It's not really my style. I don't like putting
[7:33]people in corners and making people feel uncomfortable and pressurized. But, you know, this wasn't me,
[7:37]this was birdie. And it was absolutely perfect. No, it wasn't birdie. It was Martina talking
[7:42]to birdie. So it was the absolutely perfect person to use that little gift that my friend gave me,
[7:48]which I don't think I ever told her I put it in there. So I thought maybe I could use it with
[7:53]my kids. Like, I really need somebody to get me that water bottle. And I have no one else to turn
[7:58]to. Let me just test it out. Yeah, never know. I just stored in my back pocket. Yeah. You also have
[8:06]this passage where Lucy, the character you were just referring to, came from the woman taking the
[8:11]shower in the beach club. She's walking through the house where previously she had been abused by
[8:16]her husband. And she has to go back. And I won't say why, but yeah, for various reasons, she has
[8:20]to find herself there. And you wrote the following. You wrote, she averts her gaze as she walks away
[8:24]from the spot at the foot of the stone staircase where she ended up with a broken arm and a fractured
[8:29]rib when Michael pushed her when she was four months pregnant with Marco. She averts it from the spot
[8:33]on the wall in the corridor where Michael banged her head repeatedly because he'd had a bad day at work,
[8:37]or so he explained an hour later when he was trying to stop her from leaving because he loved her
[8:42]so much because he couldn't live without her. Oh, the irony because here he is married to someone else
[8:47]utterly and entirely alive. Talk to me about this passage. Oh, yeah. I mean, I guess it's a trope,
[8:53]isn't it, writing about abusive relationships? I've never been in a physically abusive relationship.
[8:59]I've been in a mentally psychologically abusive relationship. And I don't know. It's just one of
[9:05]those things that as a writer, it's really interesting to get your teeth into it to imagine how you
[9:11]you would feel if you had found yourself in that position of being, you know, in her example
[9:17]in a long, long marriage with someone who treated her like that to someone who tried to kill her
[9:22]and was, yeah, physically that violent. So yeah, that whole, writing those scenes because I think
[9:30]there's two or three scenes set where Lucy goes back to this guy's house and there's a very particular
[9:35]reason why she has to geek like the, you know, her worst nightmare come true and she never wanted
[9:38]to see him again. They were really easy chapters to write. They were, it's a horrible thing to say
[9:43]but they were kind of juicy because it's all there, isn't it? And I was just with her when she was
[9:47]walking into the house and I was looking at the house through her eyes and imagining all the
[9:52]memories, you know, the shocks and the pain and yeah. So those passages were incredibly easy and
[9:59]and exciting to...
[10:00]right from a righteous point of view.
[10:02]It just seems so visual to me.
[10:03]I can feel, you know, you could feel,
[10:06]like as if you're, I don't know,
[10:07]doing one of those map, you know,
[10:09]the maps where you can like actually have a 360 view
[10:11]if you turn yourself around,
[10:13]that's how I felt in that moment with Lucy.
[10:15]That's how I felt writing it.
[10:16]I very much, and even while we're sitting here
[10:18]talking about it now, I'm there.
[10:20]I'm there in that hallway.
[10:21]I'm looking at the bottom step.
[10:23]I can see the steps and I can see the wall
[10:25]and I can feel how she was feeling.
[10:27]So yeah, it's very, very peacant, very real.
[10:30]And I guess all of us have some sort of place
[10:32]where something unpleasant or traumatic
[10:34]or something has happened
[10:35]and then you go back and how do you feel again?
[10:37]So.
[10:38]Yes, oh, absolutely.
[10:39]Yeah.
[10:40]I was going to use an example from my recent life
[10:42]but it's so pathetic.
[10:43]No, I can give it to you.
[10:45]Well, I moved out of my house very months
[10:47]to have renovations done.
[10:49]And we rented this beautiful, beautiful apartment
[10:52]up the road, which we were terribly excited about living
[10:54]in because it was very luxurious.
[10:56]And it ended up being eight months of hell
[10:59]because of the neighbors in this building
[11:00]were just so obnoxious and spiteful and horrible.
[11:04]And still now, even if I just see,
[11:06]and it's quite close, it's only a few streets up from here
[11:08]and I can't walk past that street anymore
[11:10]because my blood runs cold
[11:11]and I just dark shadow envelops me.
[11:14]So yeah, we've all got those places
[11:16]even if it's not quite as horrific as in Lucy's case.
[11:19]You are so speaking of another room
[11:21]that you actually feel, you really did a good job
[11:24]of making people feel like they were in
[11:26]when Libby and Miller find themselves trapped overnight
[11:30]in a room and can't get out.
[11:31]I literally was sitting there reading,
[11:32]like my heart was bading, I was like,
[11:34]I can't have a panic attack reading this bug.
[11:37]This is not good.
[11:38]Like this is not my life.
[11:39]I am just reading.
[11:40]I can close the book if I need to,
[11:43]but it captured that.
[11:45]And I felt like they were pretty chill relative
[11:48]to how I felt about them in that situation.
[11:50]Yes, I think I got them just to peek.
[11:52]Just as they were about to peek,
[11:54]as they were probably about to start screaming
[11:56]and banging on doors and having panic attacks
[11:58]and what have you, just at that moment,
[12:00]I got to them with, you know, no spoilers,
[12:02]but I took them out of that situation
[12:05]at just a moment where they might have been about
[12:07]get terribly messy.
[12:09]I don't think it's that big a spoiler.
[12:10]I mean, it was early enough in the book
[12:11]that you know that they're, they're,
[12:13]I mean, I don't know.
[12:13]Or anyway, whatever.
[12:14]I'm not exactly, I don't know.
[12:16]I'll just move on from that.
[12:18]So Henry and Finn, two of the other characters
[12:21]who lived in the house, Finn says,
[12:23]I know I'm so worried I'm going to spoil some things.
[12:25]So I don't want to say anything.
[12:26]But anyway, Finn says to Henry in one conversation,
[12:29]all men are weak.
[12:30]That's the whole bloody trouble with the world.
[12:32]Two weeks to love properly, two weeks to be wrong.
[12:35]And then Henry thinks, my breath caught
[12:37]at the power of that statement,
[12:38]I immediately knew it to be the truest thing I'd ever heard.
[12:41]The weakest of men lay at the root of every bad thing
[12:44]that had ever happened.
[12:45]So tell me more about that.
[12:46]Is that what you believe?
[12:48]Um, another friend perhaps?
[12:51]No, I can't say that's come from a friend.
[12:54]That just is one of those things
[12:55]that just suddenly lurched out of my psyche
[12:59]and onto the page.
[13:00]And I think I'd probably do believe it
[13:03]to a certain extent, particularly the world
[13:06]we're living in at the moment,
[13:07]which is appears to be full of some very weak narcissistic,
[13:11]dreadful pathetic men who seem to be held bent on spoiling
[13:14]everything for everyone.
[13:16]Yeah, I haven't, I can put something like that
[13:18]in a novel through a character
[13:20]without having to analyze it too deeply
[13:23]because I'm not speaking for myself.
[13:25]So therefore, I can think that sounds good
[13:28]and I think there is a certain amount of truth
[13:30]and depth to that.
[13:31]But I'm not going to now extrapolate
[13:34]into some sort of long analysis
[13:35]of whether that's true or not an example
[13:37]through history and research and statistics.
[13:40]And, but I think, yeah, I very much that came from me
[13:44]through a character, but that came from me
[13:46]because I think on a certain fundamental level
[13:48]I do believe it's true.
[13:50]But I can't back it up with research.
[13:52]That's okay.
[13:52]I wasn't looking for, I was not looking for statistics.
[13:56]I was just wondering if that's something
[13:58]that you happen to believe.
[13:59]Yeah, it's okay.
[14:00]I won't delve too deep.
[14:01]I won't, I'll let it just go.
[14:03]I don't want to offend my male readers.
[14:06]So you had one of the most memorable lines in the book
[14:10]was in your acknowledgements
[14:12]and you ended like this in the acknowledgements.
[14:14]And lastly, thank you to the two double vodka and tonics
[14:17]that's already through the last three chapters
[14:19]of this book laid on a Friday night
[14:20]and helped me find the last few lines
[14:22]that I knew were hidden away and there's somewhere.
[14:23]Cheers.
[14:24]Yeah, I saw the hair about that.
[14:28]Yeah, I'd love to.
[14:29]Oh, that was amazing.
[14:30]So I was rushing, rushing, rushing to my deadline
[14:33]and I really wanted to get this book finished
[14:35]by the end of the week.
[14:36]And it was Friday and about six p.m.
[14:38]And I wrote while the children were at home.
[14:40]I never normally write while the children were at home
[14:42]normally the minute they go home from school
[14:44]with that top shut and I'm done.
[14:46]But I thought, no, I want this wrapped up
[14:48]before the weekend.
[14:49]So I wrote the last chapter by about six p.m.
[14:53]And I walked off thinking, oh, I finished my book
[14:55]and then I thought, I've really haven't finished my book.
[14:57]That was the wrong ending.
[14:58]That's not how this book should have ended.
[15:01]The scene I'm talking about since you've read it
[15:03]is the scene when they're in the restaurant
[15:05]on celebrating Libby's 26th birthday.
[15:08]And it just felt pat and bland.
[15:12]And oh, everybody's, you know, I can't say
[15:15]because it'll be a spoiler.
[15:16]And then being six p.m. on a Friday night,
[15:18]I always celebrate six p.m. on a Friday night
[15:20]with a double vodka and tonic.
[15:22]And I did this and the minute I had it,
[15:24]I just needed to get straight back to the manuscript.
[15:27]And so I opened up my laptop again and just wrote this chapter
[15:32]which, you know, it's hard to be objective as a writer.
[15:36]But I felt very strongly that I'd made the book,
[15:39]that that chapter was what totally completed the book
[15:42]and gave it depth and meaning and everything
[15:47]that it needed for it to be a fully satisfying read.
[15:50]But so yeah, vodka, vodka did that.
[15:53]Well, thank you, vodka, for that fabulous last chapter
[15:56]that is like haunting me.
[15:58]And now I can't like get it out of my mind.
[15:59]So thank you for that whole name as well.
[16:02]Right?
[16:03]Oh my God.
[16:03]I totally wanted by it.
[16:06]So I heard somewhere that someone offered you a free dinner
[16:10]if you could write three chapters of a book.
[16:12]This was like a dare.
[16:13]This is how you started to write.
[16:14]Yeah, it's wonderful.
[16:16]I was 27, maybe even 26.
[16:19]I was a secretary.
[16:21]In fact, I was an out-of-work secretary
[16:22]because I just lost my job.
[16:24]And I was very much not the sort of girl
[16:27]who had any grand ambitions.
[16:28]I didn't go to university.
[16:30]I didn't have a degree.
[16:32]I had no, you know, I wasn't like Libby in the book.
[16:36]I didn't have a career plan.
[16:37]I was very much just going to keep on working
[16:39]as a secretary and see how much money
[16:41]I could possibly earn doing that.
[16:43]And yeah, so when I was out of work
[16:45]and I had this amazing conversation with a friend
[16:47]where she said something that I think everyone should say
[16:50]to someone when they've just lost their job.
[16:53]Because I said I'm going to sign up
[16:54]with some temping agencies for a while.
[16:56]I'm not ready to go out and get another full-time job.
[16:58]And she said, you know, a lot of people use redundancy
[17:01]as an opportunity to change the direction of their life.
[17:03]Well, you know, they can use it as an opportunity.
[17:05]Is there something deep down inside
[17:07]that you've always wanted to do?
[17:09]And because I'd been a very bookish little girl
[17:11]and it was something I'd wanted to do
[17:13]when I was eight years old.
[17:15]So I just found that myself saying,
[17:17]well, I think I might like to write a book,
[17:18]which was a very strange thing for me to have said
[17:20]because I'd never really thought it.
[17:22]And yeah, my friend, she did not laugh.
[17:25]She did not say don't be ridiculous.
[17:26]She said, why don't you just write three chapters
[17:29]and see where it goes?
[17:31]And if you write three chapters,
[17:33]I'll take you out of the dinner to your favorite restaurant.
[17:35]And I did and she did.
[17:37]And that was the first three chapters of my first novel,
[17:39]which was a massive success, a huge bestseller over here
[17:42]in the UK.
[17:43]And here I am 20 years later.
[17:45]So that's an amazing story.
[17:48]And conversations really do have the power
[17:50]to change a whole life.
[17:51]And that was one of them.
[17:52]Are you still friends with her?
[17:54]I am still friends with her.
[17:55]I had dinner with her on Sunday night in fact.
[17:57]She's awesome.
[17:57]That's amazing.
[17:59]Love stories like that.
[18:00]You mentioned that at three o'clock
[18:02]when your kids come home from school,
[18:04]I think you said three or maybe I was just thinking
[18:06]that was my life.
[18:06]But anyway, you said when your kids come home from school,
[18:08]you shut down the computer and that's it.
[18:10]So tell me about your writing process
[18:12]and maybe how it's changed over the years,
[18:14]you've been writing since before you had kids.
[18:16]When and where do you like to do it?
[18:17]Yeah, it's, sorry, I'm just putting a bit of a new end
[18:21]on that question.
[18:22]I, yeah, so I started writing as you say before,
[18:25]I had children, which meant that I just had all day.
[18:28]I'd been working nine to five jobs all my life.
[18:30]So it just made sense to me to write from nine to five.
[18:33]And then I had my first baby in 2003
[18:37]and thought I would never write another book
[18:38]because how could I possibly write a book
[18:40]with a baby in the house?
[18:41]And then I managed to write a whole book
[18:43]in an hour and a half a day while she was napping.
[18:45]So ever since then, you know,
[18:48]and you're little bubbles of oxygen
[18:50]get bigger and bigger as your children get bigger
[18:52]and bigger, my children don't get home from school till 4.30.
[18:55]So I'm almost back to the possibility of doing a nine to five,
[18:58]but I will never do that again
[18:59]because I now know that I don't need to sit at my desk
[19:02]for six, seven, eight hours.
[19:04]So yeah, I spend a lot of time at home doing stuff
[19:08]on my computer.
[19:09]There's an awful lot of stuff involved behind the scenes
[19:11]that's not writing novels when you're a writer.
[19:14]I have a bit of housework,
[19:15]I'm gonna just squeeze a bit of housework in.
[19:17]And then I will most often take my laptop
[19:20]into a coffee shop and do my actual writing there
[19:23]because then you've got that feeling of space
[19:25]and removed from the domestic bubble,
[19:27]which is quite important sometimes.
[19:28]If it's raining, I'll probably just stay at home
[19:31]and write at the kitchen table.
[19:32]But yeah, so I do a thousand words a day every day,
[19:36]generally in the afternoon.
[19:38]And yeah, it takes me about two to three hours.
[19:42]And that's my day.
[19:43]The important thing for me when I'm writing though
[19:45]is my life has to be really, really boring.
[19:47]So yeah, just having too much stuff in the diary,
[19:51]chopping and changing and not being in the same place
[19:54]or not having a, you know, that sort of flexibility is,
[19:59]yeah, bye.
[20:00]kind of puts me off my stride a bit.
[20:01]It's very important to me that my days are dull
[20:03]and empty and routine.
[20:05]Which they are at the moment.
[20:09]Why writers must have the most boring lives ever.
[20:12]Exactly.
[20:13]Late.
[20:15]So at this pace, so if you're doing a thousand words a day,
[20:18]five days a week, 5,000,
[20:21]I'm trying to do the rest of how many words
[20:23]you're writing every year.
[20:24]So about 25,000, no, they can't be right.
[20:27]25,000 words a year, that's not enough.
[20:29]You must write more than that, 50 weeks.
[20:31]Oh, I spoke people aren't very good at maths, are we?
[20:33]So a 5,000 words, that's 20,000 words a month.
[20:38]And there's 80,000 words a month.
[20:39]So it's four months, which is basically
[20:42]about how long it takes me to write a book.
[20:43]So yeah.
[20:45]So every four months that adds up to a book.
[20:47]Yeah.
[20:47]So you've read about three books a year.
[20:49]No, I write one book a year,
[20:50]but I spend a lot of the year doing other things,
[20:52]like editing books, because yeah,
[20:55]so that I say 80,000 words is a draft.
[20:59]Yeah, so obviously there's a lot of work
[21:01]that goes into it before it becomes a book.
[21:03]And then I will start a book,
[21:04]generally I usually deliver at Christmas
[21:06]and then I start a book in March.
[21:08]But I start really, really slowly
[21:10]and I just sort of muck around really
[21:12]and somebody says, hey, are you free for lunch today?
[21:14]I'll say, yes, I am free for lunch today
[21:16]and I'll go out for lunch.
[21:17]It's sort of, yeah, at this point
[21:19]in the writing process, we're now in October.
[21:21]Now I turn down invitations for lunch
[21:23]and, yeah, serious,
[21:25]nose to the grindstone, getting on with it.
[21:28]And so what are you working on now, if you can say?
[21:29]Yes, I can.
[21:30]I just today reached the magical 200 page mark
[21:37]on book eight in the side of, yeah,
[21:39]pretty much over in 17 and a half books as of today.
[21:42]And it's, yeah, it's very different.
[21:44]It's actually based funnily enough
[21:46]on the dreaded house that I had to live in
[21:48]for the eight months when we were having our house
[21:50]renovated with the weird people in it,
[21:52]but it's not really about that.
[21:54]It's not about bad neighbors.
[21:55]I felt like I kind of covered that quite,
[21:58]quite substantially in the family upstairs.
[22:00]So it's actually about a man called Owen
[22:02]who's just one of those guys where you look at him
[22:05]and you think, oh, you're a bit weird.
[22:08]I wouldn't put anything past you.
[22:10]You know, the sort of guy who makes you feel
[22:12]a bit creeped out and a bit sort of, no,
[22:14]I don't like you, you're wrong.
[22:16]But I wanted to get inside the head of a man like that
[22:19]and he is accused of something he didn't do.
[22:22]So it's a book about injustice really.
[22:25]Yeah, and that should be coming out next year.
[22:27]Do you feel any pressure now that you are such a best
[22:30]selling sort of in the limelight type of author
[22:33]that like there has to be some sort of message
[22:35]or anything other than entertainment
[22:38]and thought provoking literature?
[22:40]No, I don't think, I don't feel like that about messages
[22:43]or thought being thought provoking at all,
[22:46]which is why it sometimes really stumps me
[22:47]when I'm talking about my books and people try
[22:49]and kind of weedle out some sort of messages
[22:53]and just I know there really isn't all the only pressure
[22:56]I put myself under is to be entertaining.
[22:58]My biggest fear is that someone's reading one of my books
[23:01]and they're bored.
[23:02]So that's the pressure that I have is that I'm going
[23:05]to write a book that's boring or that's not as entertaining
[23:09]as the last one.
[23:10]And you know, if that is that sort of pressure rather than,
[23:13]I should be writing about big themes and big issues
[23:16]and making people think about things.
[23:18]I don't necessarily want people to think about things.
[23:20]I just want them to feel a bit creepy,
[23:22]feel a bit uncertain, feel a bit scared,
[23:24]feel a bit frantic to get to the next chapter.
[23:27]So yeah, that's my main motivation.
[23:29]I think providing that escape for people
[23:31]is one of the most generous things you can do, honestly.
[23:36]Really, it's like you get people out of their own heads.
[23:38]That's what the best thing a book can do.
[23:39]Just get them to escape, right?
[23:42]That's the only thing I could have many good at.
[23:43]So that's just as well.
[23:45]I watched a video of you on Facebook somewhere
[23:48]and I'm sure this must have been an older video
[23:50]but it said that your books had not been adapted to film.
[23:52]Is that even possible?
[23:54]Correct at this current moment in time
[23:58]when my career first started, there was a little flurry
[24:00]because I was a big hit over here
[24:02]and so I got a little taste of people running
[24:03]after you sort of option money saying,
[24:06]well, none of that never happened.
[24:08]And then it all went very, very quiet for a very long time
[24:11]and now my career has taken a little upward peak again
[24:15]and I've currently got four books under option three
[24:18]in Hollywood.
[24:19]I mean, yeah.
[24:20]So three, I don't know, statistically,
[24:23]if I've got three under option,
[24:25]statistically, surely one of them's got to come off.
[24:28]I don't know.
[24:28]So yeah, the family upstairs is under option.
[24:30]Watching you is under option and I found you is also under option.
[24:34]Oh, good.
[24:35]It would be lovely if it did happen.
[24:37]I don't know if I could handle the intensity
[24:39]of watching a movie of this book.
[24:41]I don't know.
[24:42]No, I'm kidding.
[24:43]I mean, I would, but well, that will be intense.
[24:46]Yeah, very intense.
[24:49]Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?
[24:51]Oh, it's really hard because there's two things.
[24:55]There's you've got to be able to write
[24:56]and you do need some sort of evidence that you can write.
[25:01]So when I was writing my first novel, for example,
[25:03]I was sending chapters as I wrote to my friend
[25:06]who I had that amazing life changing conversation with
[25:10]and she kept reassuring me that I could write.
[25:12]She's going, no, no, no, no, you can write.
[25:13]This is brilliant.
[25:14]Just keep going, keep going.
[25:15]But I don't know how you get that.
[25:17]I don't know how, I'm not sure
[25:18]not everybody can get access to someone
[25:21]who will give them the truth about whether they can write
[25:23]or not.
[25:24]But of course, there's any one way of finding out
[25:26]whether you can write or not.
[25:27]And that is to try writing.
[25:29]I think it's very important for anyone
[25:30]setting out to write a novel for the first time
[25:33]to bear in mind that it's really, really, really difficult.
[25:36]Even if you're writing something quite light-hearted
[25:38]and funny, just structuring a novel
[25:41]is really, really difficult.
[25:42]Keeping going, keeping the momentum going,
[25:45]not losing faith, seeing the big picture.
[25:48]It's incredibly difficult.
[25:49]So you have to sort of go into it with your eyes open
[25:52]that number one, you may not actually be a very good writer.
[25:55]Number two, even if you are a brilliant writer,
[25:57]it's still going to be incredibly difficult.
[25:59]And beyond that, even if you're a brilliant writer
[26:01]and you manage to write a whole book,
[26:02]it may not have been the right book for the market.
[26:04]So I don't know, that all sounds very negative.
[26:07]A positive side is...
[26:08]Yeah, it's a numbers game and it can happen to anyone.
[26:15]And it's kind of this slightly magical
[26:17]about the publishing industry.
[26:19]If there's no formula,
[26:20]I think people think there is a formula, but there isn't.
[26:23]And that's what the publishing industry is always looking for
[26:25]is that thing that they didn't know they wanted
[26:27]until it suddenly appeared.
[26:29]So yeah, I would say sort of go into it as a realist,
[26:33]but also just keep it a little bit of that sort of magical
[26:36]optimism alive as well.
[26:38]Excellent.
[26:39]Well, thank you so much for all of your time
[26:41]coming on Mom's No Time to Read Books,
[26:42]and for all of your amazing novels,
[26:44]and I can't wait to read the next one.
[26:46]Oh, I can't wait to finish it.
[26:48]Yeah.
[26:49]Thank you very much.
[26:51]Thank you.
[26:53]This episode has been sponsored by Book of the Month Club.
[26:55]Book of the Month.com,
[26:57]enter code Zibi to get your first book for five dollars.
[27:00]Thanks for listening to Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[27:02]You can follow me on Instagram at Mom's Don't Have Time
[27:05]to Read Books.
[27:06]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound
[27:09]for the Sound Editing.
[27:10]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[27:12]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.
[27:15]Thanks for listening.
[27:15]You can always email me at zibi at zibiowans.com.