Chris Whitaker, WE BEGIN AT THE END
[0:01]Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Momstone Have Time to Read Books.
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[0:35]Okay, now back to this amazing podcast.
[0:38]Chris Whitaker is the author of We Begin at the End.
[0:41]Chris lives in the United Kingdom with his wife and three young children.
[0:45]When not writing, he works part-time at a local library, where he gets to surround himself with books.
[0:50]And as you'll hear in this podcast, he tells us a lot more about his super-interesting biome.
[0:55]Welcome, Chris. Thanks for coming on Momstone Have Time to Read Books.
[0:58]Thank you for having me. I'm very excited.
[1:01]So we begin at the end, but actually we're going to begin at the beginning today.
[1:05]So we'll just start right in by talking about your amazing novel.
[1:09]Okay, first of all, tell listeners, this is your third novel, What This Is About, and What inspired you to write it, please?
[1:16]Okay, so the book we begin at the end, it's a story that follows kind of the year and a year in the life of a 13-year-old girl,
[1:24]named Duchess, she tries to protect her family and the wake of a convicted killer moving back to the small California town that she lives in.
[1:32]And kind of in doing so, she sets off this chain of events that kind of wreck everything around.
[1:37]And yet it's kind of like, it's hard to describe, but I describe it as a coming-of-age crime story.
[1:44]Some people say it's a mystery, some people say literary fiction.
[1:47]It's probably a book about, it's a book about sacrifices that people make for those that they love,
[1:52]and it's about making mistakes and learning how to move on from them.
[1:55]It's a book about life. That's my pitch.
[1:57]That was a good one. I like it.
[1:59]Way to bring in a lot of different things.
[2:01]I cover all the bases.
[2:03]Yeah, who does that not appeal to now? I mean, there you go.
[2:08]If you're interested in life, you will like my book.
[2:11]Yeah, I'm going to use that as a blab now.
[2:15]Yeah, there you go.
[2:16]So how did you start writing to begin with?
[2:19]Let's go back to that because I read in your bio, you're in finance.
[2:23]So I was in finance.
[2:24]Yeah, so I'm going to take you all the way back to go.
[2:28]Let's go.
[2:29]Right. So I messed up at school.
[2:31]Didn't know what I wanted to do.
[2:33]I was kind of always jealous of my friend's new.
[2:35]You know, someone had to be doctors, lawyers, things like that.
[2:38]And I just had no idea what I was going to do.
[2:40]The night before my economics exam, I got really drunk and woke up in hospital.
[2:45]So I missed the exam.
[2:46]So I completely wrecked all my chances of going to university.
[2:49]My parents were thrilled about that.
[2:51]And then I bounced from job to job.
[2:53]You know, I worked in a bakery and a supermarket.
[2:55]I loved working in a bakery.
[2:57]I worked in a supermarket.
[2:58]I sold electrical cable.
[2:59]I was working as an estate agent, a real estate agent.
[3:04]And I was out dropping leaflets to people's doors.
[3:06]And then someone came up to me and asked if they could borrow my phone.
[3:10]And you know, when you kind of get a bad feeling,
[3:12]you know, this is going to go badly.
[3:14]And then they asked for my wallet and and I put up a fight.
[3:18]Yeah.
[3:19]So I put up a fight because I've always been a massive boxing fan.
[3:22]So I thought I'll fight him.
[3:23]But just because you watch boxing doesn't mean you can box as I found out.
[3:27]But I kind of held my own for a while.
[3:29]And then he pulled out a kitchen knife and stabbed me in the side a few times.
[3:34]And yeah, it was really bad.
[3:36]And I dropped the phone, dropped my wallet, he picks up everything and ran off.
[3:40]And I was kind of left standing there bleeding and got myself to the hospital.
[3:44]They stitched me back together again.
[3:47]And I was okay.
[3:48]You know, physically, I've still got the scars and stuff.
[3:51]I tell I make up different stories to my kids about what happened all the time I
[3:54]shark by and things like that.
[3:55]So I'm really cool.
[3:57]And then I had a really tough time after that.
[3:59]You know, I didn't know anything about PTSD.
[4:02]And my kind of friends, my dad slapped me on the back.
[4:05]You know, you did well.
[4:06]It was a brave thing to do.
[4:08]I couldn't kind of handle what had happened.
[4:10]And so I went through a really tough time.
[4:13]And I remember sitting down to read a book and being stuck on the same chapter,
[4:17]at the same page for hours on end, you know, watching TV.
[4:20]You just couldn't focus on anything.
[4:22]I'd go out running and I'd run so far that I'd have to get a bus back home.
[4:25]Which, you know, it's just it was this really strange time.
[4:28]And I wasn't eating.
[4:29]I wasn't sleeping, but I kind of projected that I was okay.
[4:33]Because you know, everyone expected me to be okay.
[4:35]And things got really bad.
[4:36]And I started, um, I was just, you know, you know, when you haven't slept for ages and ages,
[4:41]and you kind of don't feel yourself.
[4:44]So you can be in a room full of people and you just feel like you're not there.
[4:47]You're not connected to anyone.
[4:48]And I felt like that for ages.
[4:50]And I felt really depressed.
[4:51]Like I'd look in the mirror and not recognize the person I saw,
[4:55]you know, I didn't want to be that person.
[4:57]And I started holding painkillers.
[4:59]And I thought I'm just going to just take a load, you know, just end things.
[5:03]And then I sat down and I was going to write a note to my parents just to explain
[5:09]about how I was feeling and what happened.
[5:11]And I'd read something about writing this therapy, how you can,
[5:15]you can take the thing that happened to you, the traumatic incident,
[5:19]and you can change the characters involved.
[5:21]And I gave it a try.
[5:23]And I sat down that night and wrote, and I wrote the character of Duchess.
[5:28]He's in, we begin at the end.
[5:30]Obviously, I didn't know she was Duchess.
[5:31]I just wrote about this girl that had kind of the weight of the world on her shoulders.
[5:35]Everything was going wrong for her.
[5:37]She looked like a victim.
[5:39]And then that night I slept for the first time in ages.
[5:42]And then I wrote some more the next day, some more the next day.
[5:45]And it was a long process.
[5:47]But I felt a bit better, you know, and I was able to kind of deal with things.
[5:53]And probably a year or two past of me just writing bits and pieces.
[5:57]They were kind of disjointed.
[5:59]It wasn't the beginning of a book or anything like that.
[6:01]It was just this girl and her life and her troubles and things like that.
[6:05]And I was kind of projecting everything that was happening to me
[6:08]onto someone else and it helped.
[6:10]And then I read an article about a stock broker in the newspaper.
[6:15]And there was a picture of him and he had this Ferrari.
[6:18]And it was like this dream life.
[6:19]And I thought I'm going to be a stock broker, which is ridiculous.
[6:22]Because I'm terrible at maths.
[6:24]And I had no qualifications or anything like that.
[6:27]So I went into the city, printed my CV, which was terrible,
[6:31]marched into the city, managed to talk my way into a job.
[6:35]I don't know how. I think they took pity on me.
[6:37]I really don't think they looked at my CV and felt sorry for me.
[6:40]So they gave me a job and I worked my way up.
[6:44]I loved it.
[6:44]I love working in the city.
[6:45]I was a stock broker for ages.
[6:46]And but I really wanted to be a trader.
[6:48]I wanted to work on a trading desk.
[6:50]And eventually, so I was about 24.
[6:53]My boss called me and said we're going to give you a chance on the trading desk.
[6:56]But if you lose $20,000, stop trading, we'll talk about what went wrong.
[7:01]So I said fine.
[7:02]And then the next day I came in and lost $2 million.
[7:06]I know.
[7:06]I know.
[7:09]And I didn't tell anyone again.
[7:11]And I know.
[7:12]So one of my friends worked in the back office.
[7:14]And I said to him, let's don't tell anyone about this.
[7:17]I will make it back, which is ridiculous again.
[7:20]Because it's $2 million.
[7:22]I don't really know what I'm doing.
[7:23]So I lost a bit more carried on trading.
[7:26]And eventually, I went into work one morning.
[7:29]And the bosses were sitting around a boardroom table with lawyers,
[7:33]things like that.
[7:34]And they sat me down.
[7:36]And I started to make money at this point.
[7:38]So I went on quite a good run.
[7:40]And they sat me down and said, we know what's happened.
[7:43]We know everything.
[7:44]And they kind of said, we can go to the police.
[7:46]Or you can sign a contract and you can pay us back half of it out of your own pocket.
[7:50]And we'll let you carry on trading.
[7:52]So I signed it.
[7:53]And I went home that day as a 24-year-old with a million dollars of debt.
[7:59]And I was getting married.
[8:00]I was engaged at the time.
[8:01]And my wife thought we were doing really well.
[8:03]You know, this is how I was projecting this image again.
[8:06]I was really successful.
[8:07]And so the wedding cost was spiraling.
[8:09]And I had this terrible secret.
[8:12]And I felt like a completely screw up.
[8:15]I couldn't talk to anyone about it.
[8:16]And I went back to writing again.
[8:20]I was starting, we were looking at churches in the day.
[8:22]And in the evening, I'd be checking my life insurance policy and stuff.
[8:25]Because I just couldn't.
[8:26]I was back.
[8:27]How I felt when I'd just been stabbed and all that happened,
[8:29]I felt like that again.
[8:30]You know, like, I can't cope with this.
[8:32]I don't know what to do.
[8:34]I don't know how to tell anyone about it.
[8:37]So on our honeymoon, I was writing, writing more duchess,
[8:41]more of that character.
[8:43]And then I went back to work.
[8:46]Worked for years, worked very hard, paid it off, got to my third,
[8:50]just before my 30th birthday and was about to get a promotion.
[8:54]And then I read a book called The Last Child,
[8:56]but an article John Hart, which I loved.
[8:58]It was a brilliant, brilliant book.
[9:00]And then I read an interview with John Hart.
[9:02]And he talked about how he turned his back on a career in law,
[9:06]that successful law career, to write his book.
[9:08]So right there.
[9:09]And then I quit my job.
[9:10]My mom called me and offered me the promotion.
[9:12]I said, I don't want to do it anymore.
[9:13]I'm miserable.
[9:14]Quit my job.
[9:15]My wife was pregnant at the time.
[9:17]And the student, so we had no money.
[9:19]So I came home and said to her, I'm going to write a book,
[9:22]which she didn't know.
[9:23]I'd written ever written anything.
[9:25]So it's another one of those.
[9:26]She notes completely, it sounds completely mad.
[9:29]But she was really supportive.
[9:31]And she knew I wasn't happy.
[9:33]And I suppose it's kind of striking that balance, isn't it,
[9:36]of doing something that makes you happy
[9:38]and doing something that you love and supporting your family.
[9:41]And we sold our house car, changed our life completely,
[9:46]moved to Spain for a while, where I wrote my debut book,
[9:50]It all looks.
[9:51]And I didn't even know that you needed a literary agent
[9:55]or a publishing deal or how any of it works.
[9:57]I just kind of just knew that I wanted to write.
[10:00]So I wrote this book, came back to London,
[10:03]luckily got an agent, got a publishing deal,
[10:05]the book was published.
[10:06]We went to this, got nominated for an award,
[10:08]like this fancy award ceremony we went to,
[10:11]and I was completely out of my depth.
[10:12]It was like all people, big name authors
[10:15]and black time, things like that.
[10:16]And then my book won against,
[10:18]I was the longest of long shots.
[10:21]And we got back to the hotel
[10:22]and my wife just first introduced and she was,
[10:25]yeah, because it had been really tough for her as well.
[10:27]You know, she had been watching me kind of go through
[10:30]all this stuff.
[10:31]And yes, that almost brings us up to date.
[10:33]And then I wrote another book before I thought about
[10:37]going back to Duchess again, you know, off and on.
[10:39]And I didn't, it wasn't a story that I ever thought
[10:42]I'd share and it wasn't, I didn't think it'd be a book,
[10:46]but I had some help from Amy, I and my editor
[10:49]and the team at home, you know, they're amazing.
[10:51]And yeah, and she, I gave her a very rough draft
[10:55]of this story and she helped me to get it into the shape
[10:58]that's in now, you know, there's a finished book
[11:00]which I have here and no, no one can see this,
[11:02]but I'm holding up the book.
[11:04]And yeah, so it's been a long journey from then to now
[11:08]and now I get to talk to you about it, which is really cool.
[11:11]Whoa.
[11:12]Oh my gosh, that was amazing.
[11:17]I don't want you to stop talking about that.
[11:19]I want you to think we got back to the,
[11:21]go back to the second book.
[11:22]I feel like you skimmed past the second book.
[11:25]Tell me about that one.
[11:26]So the second book, All the Wicker Girls
[11:28]is a book set in Alabama and it's about twin sisters.
[11:33]One of them goes missing and then this small town
[11:36]in Alabama and this cloud appears over it.
[11:39]And it's not super natural in any way,
[11:40]but it just stays there and it gets darker and darker
[11:42]till it's nighttime, 24 hours a day.
[11:45]And it's kind of a metaphor for what's going on
[11:48]in the town and there's a lot of religious connotations
[11:51]like that and yeah, so that came out.
[11:54]And then, but I had this book,
[11:56]I had we begin at the end kind of bare
[11:58]and I kind of thought the urge to write it for years and years
[12:01]because I knew it would be difficult
[12:02]and it was difficult, it was, so probably of the years
[12:08]it took to write, most of those were duchess,
[12:10]the character of duchess and getting her dialogue
[12:13]right, probably a solid years then just writing
[12:15]and rewriting her dialogue and it becomes that agony.
[12:18]You know, I'd draft a paragraph and then delete it
[12:21]and rewrite it and change the single word
[12:22]then lie, lie, awake at night, just worrying
[12:26]that it's not as good as it can be.
[12:27]And I just refused to send it.
[12:29]You know, if I didn't feel that I couldn't,
[12:31]I had to feel like I couldn't write a better sentence
[12:34]in that book before anyone could read it,
[12:36]which is madness because I could read it back now
[12:38]and change loads of stuff, you know,
[12:40]which I would do because I'm like that,
[12:42]but yeah, it's been a long strange journey.
[12:46]And I feel like I've just talked at you for ages,
[12:50]I loved it, that was great, thank you.
[12:52]I was like totally in the room just to listen.
[12:54]I'm like listening to my own podcast, it's perfect.
[12:57]Wow, what a story, but the funny thing is like
[13:00]you would never know, I mean, you would never know anything.
[13:03]First of all, why are you writing stories based in the US?
[13:07]Like, what is that about?
[13:08]Like, I thought before I knew anything about you
[13:11]and I was just like reading the book at first,
[13:14]I kept looking, I was like, is he American
[13:17]but he's living in London, like that must be it?
[13:19]And I was like, no, it looks like he's actually British.
[13:22]What's going on?
[13:22]Because this is like, it's like a Americana almost,
[13:26]it's anyway.
[13:27]Yeah, it's partly, so when I'm reading a book,
[13:30]I like to escape totally, you know,
[13:32]I like to move to a different area, you know, in my mind.
[13:35]And partly that was true for writing when I sat down
[13:38]because I was having such a tough time.
[13:41]I needed to set a story a long way away from my life.
[13:44]And America, so I went to America when I was a kid
[13:48]with my dad and we did the theme parks.
[13:50]Not my parents were out when I was quite young
[13:52]and I missed seeing my dad quite a lot.
[13:53]And he took me and my brother to the theme parks
[13:55]in America, it was the best time I think I've ever had, you know?
[13:58]And I look back on it fondly, you know,
[14:00]if I'm looking for a happy memory,
[14:02]I go back to that place.
[14:04]And we, I kind of grew up, you know,
[14:07]we watch a lot of your TV shows and read a lot,
[14:09]you know, I grew up reading Dennis LaHain and Stephen King
[14:12]John Grisham and, you know, the masters of kind of
[14:16]their genre and it felt right.
[14:18]And I needed, so we begin at the end, it's a massive story.
[14:21]You know, it didn't start out that way,
[14:22]but it spans a year in the life of this girl
[14:24]and a policeman.
[14:26]And I needed this kind of big canvas to tell it on.
[14:29]And America was just such an amazing country.
[14:32]It feels like a world within a country.
[14:35]You know, and there's a point where Dutchess goes
[14:37]on this big road trip at the end of the book.
[14:38]She starts in Montana and she ends up in California.
[14:41]And it just wouldn't have worked anywhere else.
[14:44]It's just, yeah, it's hard though.
[14:46]You know, I don't know.
[14:48]I do a lot of research.
[14:49]And, you know, I feel like I just,
[14:51]I set out to make it as difficult as I possibly can
[14:54]for myself.
[14:55]I succeed, but again, you know,
[14:57]I have an amazing copy editor and team that catch my mistakes.
[15:02]And I work in a library as well a few days and weeks.
[15:05]I use all the resources I have there.
[15:08]I'm forever looking at maps and reading books
[15:11]and travel guides and I get obsessive about it.
[15:14]You know, it needs to feel authentic.
[15:16]So have you not actually been to these places in the book?
[15:19]No, I haven't.
[15:21]So you haven't been there.
[15:22]Oh, my gosh.
[15:24]I know.
[15:24]So the towns are fictional,
[15:26]but the locations they're in are real places.
[15:29]So I will build my town in my head and on the screens
[15:32]and then I'll plunk it down somewhere, somewhere real.
[15:36]And so you have this beautiful town called Cape Haven
[15:39]on the coast in California.
[15:41]And the cliffs are eroding.
[15:42]So every now and then part of the town slides into the sea.
[15:45]And it kind of mirrors the cat.
[15:47]There's a character called walk, a police chief.
[15:49]And he is battling, he's not very well.
[15:52]And he's kind of, he was happiest when he was the teenager
[15:55]and he lived in this perfect town.
[15:57]And now everything's kind of changing
[15:59]and he can't handle it.
[16:00]And yeah, it was, I loved writing that.
[16:03]Duchess goes to Montana for a big chunk of the story.
[16:07]And it was so much fun writing there.
[16:09]It was like, I'd have a really tough day
[16:10]and I'd get back to my office and sit down
[16:12]and escape to Montana.
[16:14]And so when I was a kid and I was at Disney World,
[16:18]we were in the line in a queue to go on a ride.
[16:21]And we were behind this family.
[16:23]And we got talking to them.
[16:24]My dad was talking to the dad
[16:25]and he was telling us we had to visit Montana.
[16:27]And he said it's like switching from portraits to landscape.
[16:30]And that stuck in my head.
[16:32]And all these years later, I just think it's,
[16:35]so I always wanted to write a book set there.
[16:39]And I do want to visit as well.
[16:41]But I was supposed to be in New York
[16:42]in a couple of weeks, but it's not happening
[16:45]because no one can go anywhere really, again, like so.
[16:47]I'm hoping later in the year
[16:49]because I hadn't been to America since I was 21.
[16:53]Which was, yeah, too long ago now.
[16:55]Well, I recently went to Montana, not that recently,
[16:59]for the first time.
[17:00]So I can send you some pictures if you would like.
[17:02]I would love that.
[17:02]I'm really love it.
[17:03]Yeah.
[17:04]Is it your brother spends a lot of time there?
[17:06]It's gorgeous.
[17:07]It's really gorgeous.
[17:09]I can imagine.
[17:09]I'm doing an interview with the Montana press
[17:12]people later this week.
[17:14]And I think they're going to get me for something else.
[17:18]They're going to test me on that.
[17:20]Oh my gosh.
[17:21]Oh my gosh.
[17:22]So I was switching from portrait to landscape.
[17:25]I love that.
[17:25]I can't believe even remember something said online
[17:27]at Disney World when you were a child.
[17:29]That's crazy.
[17:30]Yeah.
[17:31]Well, I don't remember much else.
[17:32]I just have these certain things that you just,
[17:37]you don't know why you remembered something.
[17:38]But yeah.
[17:40]So when I was reading it, I was so struck by the way
[17:44]I was trying to figure out what you were doing
[17:46]and you're writing to keep the reader so like
[17:49]on the edge of their seat, right?
[17:50]What tools you were using.
[17:52]And I feel like it's because you had such short paragraphs.
[17:56]Like every new line.
[17:59]It was like every line was a new paragraph.
[18:01]And it just kept going like boom, boom, boom.
[18:02]So you never got like it was, it was like in page 200
[18:06]or something you first had like a really long dense paragraph.
[18:10]And then I was like, wait, there are no paragraph.
[18:12]Like everything is very short.
[18:14]And so it makes it like the pacing of it.
[18:16]It makes it very rapid.
[18:18]Was that intentional or that just happened?
[18:20]It's something I'm not aware that I'm doing.
[18:22]It's something that gets pointed out to me now
[18:24]and by my the editorial team and things like that.
[18:27]But I'm not really, I just sit down right.
[18:29]And I build a scene like I work across three screens.
[18:33]And I build the scene that I'm gonna write on the screens
[18:35]with photos and things like that.
[18:37]And I need to, I want to feel what they're feeling
[18:40]before I write anything.
[18:41]So it's a long process.
[18:43]But as for the actual physical, you know,
[18:45]the actual writing of it.
[18:46]I don't know.
[18:47]It just is the way that I write.
[18:49]I don't, I've had friends that are all the friends
[18:52]that have done courses and things like that.
[18:54]And you know, creative writing courses.
[18:56]And I always feel like they know a lot more than I say,
[18:59]but about how to do it and how to plan
[19:01]and how to, you know, execute a novel.
[19:04]And yeah, I don't, it just happens.
[19:07]And it happens that, you know,
[19:08]I probably wrote the book twice over, you know,
[19:11]hundreds of thousands of words
[19:12]before it starts being cut back again.
[19:15]So basically, Zibi, I don't know what I'm doing.
[19:18]I just, I'm just winging it over the back.
[19:23]I mean, nobody really knows what they're doing.
[19:26]So it's just, you just have to either admit it
[19:28]or deny it.
[19:29]So you might as well come clean and I feel like
[19:32]your entire narrative is like, it's like against all odds
[19:36]or like, look what happened to me by mistake
[19:38]or like, it's like, it's like,
[19:40]it's like, it's like you were trying to not be successful
[19:45]in some way, right?
[19:46]You kept like hindering yourself.
[19:47]Yeah, it does feel like that.
[19:50]And I kind of, yeah, and I kind of think I wrote
[19:52]Duchess in that way, you know,
[19:54]because you've got this girl that kind of keeps
[19:56]screwing up all the time and making these terrible decisions
[19:59]and you keep.
[20:00]rooting for her and she's the sole character of her mums and an addict and her younger brother
[20:06]is kind of in her charge. She has to cook for him and care for him and she can't really do that
[20:12]for herself and she doesn't really know childhood. She has nothing like that in her life.
[20:18]You know what kind of reading about a child struggling is quite an emotive thing I think
[20:23]and you kind of rooting for her the whole time you know that she's going to against all odds
[20:28]is going to get her at the ending that she deserves. You had this scene where her mom was being
[20:34]attacked and she said her mother was screaming and she's trying to figure out how to handle it.
[20:40]Should she call the cops? Dark is like stealing the receiver the phone from her and it is so intense
[20:46]right and she's debating and you're like in it with her like what is she going to do? Is she
[20:51]going to escape? There's this big strong man like terrifying her. The mother's like you know
[20:58]is she going to come fight for her? I mean this is like massive like tension and a lot to put on
[21:04]the shoulders of a child and then of course how can you not then go on in the book or in the
[21:09]in Duchess's life without all of that like heaped on and that's just one little scene.
[21:16]Yeah she has a tough time and her mom teaches her a young age that you know selfless acts or what
[21:21]making a good person and that is kind of the one thing that her mom teaches her in a kind of
[21:25]it sticks in her mind throughout the story and she kind of spends most of the book looking for
[21:30]her selfless act you know in a way to prove to herself that she's not bad you know she's not a
[21:35]bad person and though she does these terrible things and she's got a foul mouth you know she
[21:40]she curses a lot she's just a kid you know trying to get by and she's been dealt with losing
[21:45]hand and she's trying to change her she doesn't even really care about herself it's a little
[21:50]brother you know she wants the best for him and she wants she wants to him to have his happy ending
[21:56]and even if that means that she doesn't get hers. Do you have a little brother? I have an older
[22:01]brother yeah I'm the youngest and I have a step siblings as well and they're older as well so
[22:06]I've always been the baby. So are you would you ever write a memoir of your experience? Have you
[22:14]written about it? I wrote something that went in something similar to the story I just told you and
[22:21]it ended up in the Guardian over here and my parents read it and that was the first time they
[22:26]never heard any of that story and I got a call yeah and I got a call from my dad and he was you know
[22:32]what what is this is this true and you know it was the strange time because I think you know you
[22:39]think you know your children you know me as a parent you know my kids are quite young but I think
[22:45]I would hate to read something like that in the paper you know and they feel like they
[22:49]they couldn't come to me about something but um I felt like it was mine you know it was my
[22:55]problem to deal with I had got myself into this mess I'm not so much the the stabbing but the
[23:00]trading side of it you know yeah I've got myself into this mess and and I needed to find a way out
[23:06]wow yeah well I think that should be a book I think you should write that yeah yeah you pick
[23:12]whatever place in the United States you could pretend I think I mean that story was riveting to me
[23:17]I mean I mean the book was also riveting and amazing but I don't know the fact that it's a true story
[23:23]yeah yeah yeah a lot went into it a lot went into that book you know it feels like it's been
[23:29]20 years in the making and yeah and there's a lot you know it's a book it is a book about families
[23:34]you know and about not having anyone there you feel like you can talk to and how that can change
[23:39]as you get older and yeah it was a long time coming so do you have another book in you are you
[23:45]working already on another one um yeah I'm about to yeah I'm about to start work on the new
[23:51]book that I'm supposed to deliver I think a Christmas but I mean there was he's not going to
[23:57]happen and I use yeah I use this platform to be to tell my editor that I'm going to miss my deadline
[24:07]on the podcast
[24:12]I'll just email her the transcript ahead of said give her a little heads up yeah yeah do that
[24:17]when I and I'll switch my phone up for a while I'll be CC you I will hopefully you know
[24:25]um do you have any advice to aspiring others? I clearly don't know what I'm doing but I will tell
[24:31]you one thing that's helped me and my agent said you know right at the beginning when I signed
[24:35]with her she said if you're not enjoying it you're doing something wrong and that's kind of stuck
[24:39]with me because you know you get a say you get a level of success with a book and people want
[24:45]to read it and and you start to feel the pressure of writing another book you know and delivering
[24:51]something and you get deadlines and you get PR commitments and things like that and you
[24:55]I think it's easy to forget why you did it in the first place you know and what you know it's
[25:01]something that you do because you love and and I try and remember that all the time because when
[25:07]I'm in the kind of the eye of the storm it's hard to see out sometimes and it's you know I forget
[25:13]how much I love it how much I love telling stories and entertaining people and that's why I do it
[25:20]well is this going to be a movie by the way? When does this go out podcast? I don't know I have to
[25:24]look I think in like two weeks two weeks. Okay let's find that yeah because it's not announced
[25:29]till tomorrow but Disney have just told them for the rights. No way. I know so I had this I had this
[25:35]crazy time where I was meeting all these Hollywood studios and you know I live in a small town in
[25:42]the UK and work in the library so this is a world away from my life and then yeah and I'm a believe
[25:48]were in heart overhead you know in general and gut feeling and things like that and but Disney was
[25:55]you know I just it's Tommy Kale who directed Hamilton and I thought Hamilton was a masterpiece
[26:02]and he's such a lovely guy and yeah we just hit it off and it felt right and him and Jennifer
[26:08]and their team they're just yeah they're amazing so it's very exciting. And I'm so full circle
[26:14]with your theme trip to Disney World. It's like perfect. So I just need for them to pay to send
[26:21]my kids to Disney World. I need to put that in the contract. Wow I mean I'll take your kids to
[26:28]Disney World that you really want you could I have four kids you could just like throw them in the
[26:31]back seat and I wouldn't even notice they were there. Yeah you can raise them as well. Send them back
[26:36]when they yeah because Mike we've got a seven month old in her first tooth it's just appeared this
[26:40]moment. I know but she's all of a sudden she's turned into a monster. She was very sweet and loving
[26:48]and now she's angry and aggressive. She took a little Jack Daniels on it. Yeah yeah some for her
[26:55]some for me. All right well thank you so much Chris this was so much fun and thank you for this
[27:03]fantastic book and congratulations on bringing Duchess into the world really and now I hope to see
[27:08]her on the screen that'll be so cool and just congrats this is amazing. Thank you very much
[27:13]for having me. It was fun. It was my pleasure. All right and sorry to your editor for the delay.
[27:18]All right bye thank you. Yeah bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of moms don't have time to read
[27:25]books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibi Owens and at moms don't have time to read
[27:30]books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibi Owens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet
[27:35]lots of authors on zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for
[27:40]the Sound Editing and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and
[27:45]now trim music.