Alexandra Potter, a European Road Trip, and Two Bad Ass Women

[1:38]Zibby Owens: This is Zibby Owens and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zippymedia.com, and follow me on Instagram at zippy owens. Today's episode is with newly minted USA Today bestselling author of So I Met This Guy. So excited because we published this book by Alexandra Potter. We talk about it in the interview, but she is just so amazing. I had her on my podcast for her last book, Confessions of a 40, F Up. And now look at this. She's on the USA Today list, I'd loved interviewing her live at Tolley Book Live in New York, which was amazing and just totally excited. By way of bio, Alexandra Potter is the bestselling author of numerous books in The UK, including, as I mentioned, Confessions of 40, F Up, which is now the basis of the major TV series Not Dead Yet, which was on ABC. Her novels have sold more than 1,000,000 copies in 25 countries. Yorkshire born and raised, Potter lived for several years in LA before settling back in The UK. She currently lives in London with her Californian husband and their Bosnian rescue dog. Enjoy. Welcome to Totally Booked Live at the Whitby. I'm here with the amazing Alexandra Potter in from The UK. So excited to be talking about So I Met This Guy. Welcome. Thank you for inviting me. I'm thrilled to be here. Of course. Alex, you and I last did an event in, what, 2023? Yeah. Back over at Zippy's Bookshop. Yeah. Alex had come in, she was helping me with the launch of my book, and she made some sort of joke like, Oh, I wish that, And she had already been on my podcast for her last book, and she made the joke like, oh, I wish, like, you had published one of my books. And I was like, really? Because she sold a million copies in The UK and is amazing. I was like, I feel like we could make that happen. And so we did. We published this book, so I met this guy which just came out, and I couldn't be more thrilled. Thank you. Yes. Before we jump into the latest book, give everybody a little bit of a background

[4:27]Alexandra Potter: if they don't know much about you. Okay. Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. It's really nice to see you all. I just got in last night from London, so I'm super excited to be here in New York. I've been writing for twenty five years now. I've published 15 novels. I started wow, I think I had my first book published just before my thirtieth birthday, which was kind of super exciting. I tend to write I've written all kinds of books, but all fiction, romantic comedies. I like to write uplifting fiction, stuff that's going to make you feel good when you've finished reading a book. And my most recent book is So I Met This Guy, which I hope if you get to read it, you'll absolutely love it. And I think this is it's got a serious message, but it ultimately has a very uplifting,

[5:26]Zibby Owens: empowering message, I think. Okay. Give them a little more about the book. Okay. So

[5:31]Alexandra Potter: this a book about a romance fraudster, but I believe here you call it more catfishing. And it's about a woman called Maggie, she's 49, and she meets a man who she believes is the love of her life. He is the perfect guy, and that was the idea for the title of the book, So I Met This Guy. And it turns out that actually he is not the love of her life, he is a conman, and he steals her heart, her life savings, she kind of takes out a mortgage, a business, and she loses everything. She loses her home, and she ends up living in a caravan in a field in the middle of nowhere. And a young reporter gets to hear of this story, and she's looking for her big break. And she meets Maggie, and she convinces her that, you know what? I found this guy. The because the police don't really want to know. They say it's you know, he was your boyfriend. You gave him the money. It's kind of and so she's like, let's go find this guy. Let's confront him. You know, sort of let's let's get revenge. And so they fly to Monte Carlo. He slips the net, and they go on this crazy two week trip of a lifetime road trip across Europe trying to find this guy. But what they really find is themselves. What a great pitch. Right? And how did you think of this? So I'd been hearing a lot of stories about women that had been conned by these men, and it was on the news a lot. I kept reading about it in the newspaper, And I thought it was a really terrible crime because it's not just the financial damage, it's the psychological damage and the emotional damage because women feel that they have lost someone that they really loved, and they feel stupid, they feel foolish, they feel ashamed. A lot of women don't even tell the police, they don't tell their families. So it was something that I really wanted to write about, but then I like to use a lot of humor, I like to write funny books, and I absolutely love traveling. That is my big thing. And I just thought, let's wrap this book up in a two week, sunshine filled road trip across Europe. And I put in all the places that I wanted to travel to. I made up this itinerary. I thought, I'm going do a bit of road a bit of research because often I'm sitting in my little bedroom office writing, and I thought this time I'm going to go out there. That was really good fun. I did some fun research trips. I called my sister up and said, Hey, do you want to come to Monte Carlo? Play roulette? And she's like, Yeah, I'll come. That's how the book came about. So fun. Okay. Where did you go that we all have to put on our bucket list of where to go? Wow. So I sat there and I thought, where can these two characters go? And I took them to Monte Carlo. I took them down the Amalfi Coast. If anybody's been there, that is a really terrific trip. It's kind of scary. I did it with my husband, and it's a lot of hairpin bends, and it's it's yeah. You've got to be a good driver. I went to Sicily in the book, which is pretty fantastic. They go to the islands of Biza, Majorca. They go to Spain. They go to Tangia. They go everywhere.

[9:03]Zibby Owens: It was it was it was quite some trip. Now we all get to go just by opening the pages of a book. How do you like that? I know. The notion of catfishing and trusting someone was so interesting the way you depicted it in the book because at one point, Maggie says, well, but I still love him. Yes. Right? Like, feelings don't necessarily go away just because someone

[9:27]Alexandra Potter: because they're not reciprocated or because somebody does something terrible. How do you get over that feeling? Talk a little about that. Yeah. I think it was a really it's a really interesting question because I when I was reading a lot about what personal stories of this happening to women, they said that the guy that they fell in love with still existed in their mind and in their heart, even though they'd found out that he was not that guy. And it was like somebody had died. And so in my character, Maggie, she's sort of too ashamed to admit it, but she's still in love with that guy. But that guy was never real. And I think that is the real psychological trick that these men are so manipulative, and they will feed you everything that you want to hear. And read about love bombing, and I read about coercive control and bread crumbing, and all these terms I'd never heard of. And it's quite amazing how they draw you in so that you are hook, line, and sinker, and then they just disappear.

[10:34]Zibby Owens: And not to suggest that any of you in the audience will be victims of catfishing by dashing men or anything like that, but are there any warning signs? You did a lot of research on this.

[10:46]Alexandra Potter: You How be sure that the person you're falling in love with is actually who they say they are? I think one of the key things that I discovered when I was researching is that they like to take you away from your friends. So they often say, you know, you only need me, and they create a little bubble and so people stop, they stop sort of telling their friends thing or involving their friends. And one of the first things they do is they often ask to borrow a little bit of money from you and then they pay you it back. So you think, oh, okay, you know, he's borrowed $500 and he's given me the $500 back. So he's a good guy. But it's sort of like a little test that they do and then the things start happening. There'll be a medical emergency. There'll be relative that's not well. There'll be some issue where they can't get hold of some money. I read about women that they said they want to buy a house together and they're going to pull their money, and so they set up an account and they put their money into this account and the account doesn't exist. It's really an elaborate fraud. And if you are someone that's quite trusting and if you do fall in love with someone, and it's very easy to be conned. I when I used to read these stories, used to think, it couldn't happen to me. It just couldn't. But I think it can. You know? You've got to be so careful.

[12:09]Zibby Owens: Gosh. As if it's not hard enough. I know. Oh, my goodness. The female friendship in the story is also amazing, and what women can do when they put their heads together and all of that. I love the angle. Although I have to say, when I read the very first draft of this, it was talking about, you know, Maggie being this older woman, blah blah blah. And finally, you get to the point where, like, midway through the book, and you're like, Maggie's 49. I was like, 49? Like, my head, she was like 82 or something like that. I'm like, 49 is not I'm 49. Anyway I know. Yeah. I'm

[12:42]Alexandra Potter: 55.

[12:44]Zibby Owens: But anyway, we all get to a point where age kind of doesn't matter anymore. Like, my kids are at the age where, you know, one grade makes all the difference. And now it's like, Oh, you're friends with people who are 20 years older and it just doesn't matter. And there's a big age gap, but we see how it collapses when they're in pursuit of something together. Talk about female friendship. I love

[13:08]Alexandra Potter: writing about female friendship because I think it's a transformative, powerful thing that we're very lucky as women, I think, to have our female friends. And there is a lot written about romantic love, a lot of movies, a lot of books, songs, poetry, not so much written about the love that we have for our female friends. And I think female friendship is something that carries us through our lives. And sometimes relationships come and go, people get divorced, but I've got friends that I've had from school and I've had these friends. Often they can be the longest relationships in your life, I think female friendships. And then another interesting thing, I think, is that the friends that I've also made as I've got older. I know when I was younger, they had to be the same age as me, and now I've got older. I've got friends that are in their seventies, their eighties, a big age gap, but it doesn't feel like that big age gap because we have so much in common. And I think that with friendship, age is just a number. I have friends that are younger, in their twenties, and you can learn a lot from each other. And I really like I really like to write about female friendship in in my novels and especially the intergenerational ones because that, to me, is such an important part of our life. And even though the book is, you will call it a romantic comedy, there is a guy in there, it's more about the friendship between these two women. And ultimately, like I said, they're trying to find this guy, but what they do is they find themselves, and it's their friend the friendship that they both have that is so empowering and really changes their lives.

[14:53]Zibby Owens: How many people came here today with a friend, with a close female friend? Look at that. Every like, lot of people. Not to shame you if you didn't, but that's amazing. Next time you can. Oh, that's amazing. What which one friend, if you had to pick, is someone you've had the most adventures with, and what did you, like, learn from her?

[15:15]Alexandra Potter: Gosh. I have I have gosh. I've got some really good friends. I've had a friend from from school that I've I've done lots with, but I I have a friend that I made. I lived in LA for a while and I met a girlfriend there and she's five years older than me. And it's really funny because when I was at school, I would never have made friends with someone that was five years older than me. They would have just seemed so much older. And and now we're really close, and we've we did a we went to Sicily together to research this book. We did in the book, the characters do a a cooking class, and we did this cooking class together with this kind of very scary Sicilian woman. When we originally heard about this cooking class, it sounded really good fun, and I was texting with her, and she was texting back, and I was like, Wow, her English is amazing! And obviously I didn't realize about Google Translate. And then we went to her house, and she you know, she didn't speak a word of English, but she would kind of wrap on the thing with the rolling pin, and we had to make we made lasagna, and it was actually quite a stressful experience because you were having to make the lasagna sheets thinner and thinner and thinner, and they would be coming through the machine, and she would kind of wrap our knuckles whatever the Italian word is for, thinner, and we were like, Oh my God, you know. And anyway, we made this amazing lasagna and we made tiramisu, and it was really good fun. But is her name's Dana, she's great, and she's just going on her sixtieth celebration actually next month in Spain. So I'm going to meet her. So we've had a lot of adventures together. Amazing. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[19:14]Zibby Owens: I was actually with a bunch of my old friends last night. My college did a joint, like, fiftieth birthday celebration for our entire grade, which was such a good idea, so efficient. And being around old friends, you become who you were too. There's something about that. Not to mention all the memories they have. Like, I feel my whole life has become basically a brownout where I can't retrieve memories, but if someone mentions something, I'm like, Oh, right, that. And I feel like that's the role of friends as we get older, too, is, like, reminding us of situations we were in and who we were then and how we felt. Otherwise, these moments

[19:51]Alexandra Potter: can get lost. Do you feel like that? Yeah, I do. Mean, I often say there's just nothing like being with old friends that you've known a long time because you can you do forget how old you are now and you do I won't say you regress, but you can be with your girlfriends and it's how you were when you were a teenager or how you were in your early twenties. They'll remind you of something that you did and it's it's it's such a nice feeling. They really know you, don't they? And they have been with you through thick and thin, and they have seen you. I think there's something about friendship is you feel seen, and they love you no matter what. It's it's just I mean, it they've friends just carry me through life. When I look at all my WhatsApps and all my text messages, it's just all my girlfriends.

[20:40]Zibby Owens: Yeah. All my girlfriends. There's also something about the group too, not to keep going on about this, but you can have your individual relationships. When you have a group from college or a group from this or the mom friends or whatever group there, when you all get together, the dynamics immediately come back that can't be replicated just with coffee with one of those friends. And there's something so neat about that. Yeah.

[21:01]Alexandra Potter: Yeah, know. Okay.

[21:03]Zibby Owens: I'm I'm waxing philosophical about all my friends, but it's fine. Okay. Alex, before So I Met This Guy, you had two bugs that I loved that were like a continuation of each other. Talk about

[21:15]Alexandra Potter: Confessions of a 40, f up. So I wrote a book. I was kind of in my forties, and I remember it was kind of when Instagram really blew up. And I remember looking at Instagram at all these perfect lives, and I just thought, wow, my life just looks nothing like it's looking on social media. And I was like, Where are the messy lives? Where are the lives that kind of went a bit wrong? And I was speaking to some friends and I was like, You know, 40. 40 doesn't look anything like I imagined it was going to be. And they were like, Oh, tell me about it. And so I had this idea to write a novel about a girl who gets to 40 and she hasn't got the life that she thought she would get when she was younger. She hasn't got married, she doesn't have children, she's kind of lost her job, she has to move from America back to London, and she can't afford an apartment, she has to rent a room in a house, and I called it Confessions of a 40 F up. And the idea is that all her friends that were all single are married with children now and apparently have these kind of perfect lives, whereas she doesn't. And so she sets up an anonymous podcast where she tells it like it is. And the book came out, and it came out during the pandemic. So it sort of had a very soft landing. All the bookshops were closed, and I thought, oh, it's just not going to sell. And then slowly, by word-of-mouth, this book started to sell and sell and sell and sell. And it just became this phenomena because it turns out that everybody related to this character, Nell, and she has a friend in it called Cricket, who's a narrator, and her life hasn't worked out how she thought. And everybody can feel like a bit of an f up. And and then it was made into a TV show here in America, and it kind of just blew up. And then I wrote the sequel to that one. And I think I get so many messages from people saying that that book has found them at a really tricky time in their life when their life kind of went wrong. It's sort of it's like how you pick up when your life's gone wrong, however we perceive life going wrong. And I like to write about women. They're not victims. They pick themselves up, they sort themselves out, they turn their life around, and you actually end up having a life that you were always meant to have, but it might have not been the life that you thought you were going to get. And I think that's that's seems to be kind of a universal theme for a lot of people.

[24:07]Zibby Owens: What was the name of the TV show here again? Oh, it was called Not Dead Yet.

[24:12]Alexandra Potter: Anybody watch that? And it was a a b c. Oh, yeah. So that was was fun. I got to fly to LA and I got to go on set and meet everybody, and I think it Gina Rodriguez, and it was fun. It was really good. Amazing. And what are you what are you working on now? So I'm writing the third in the Confessions series, actually. Nelly's turning 50. Her friend, Cricket, is in her eighties. I put on Instagram, What would everybody like more of? And they were like, We want more of Cricket! Because everybody loves this wise, 80 year old woman who's she's lost her husband and she is not taking it lying down. She's out there and she's living her life and doing lots of really cool, interesting stuff. I actually wrote that character for my mom, who's in her 80s, and I didn't feel that she was being represented in fiction. I just felt that everybody thinks an 80 old they're an old woman. They're kind of knitting and sitting in an armchair, and my mom's not like that, and her friends in her eighties are not like that. So I kind of wrote that book as a love letter to her and all her friends. And it's been people people really love this character of cricket, they say, I want to be like her when I grow up. And another interesting thing people say is, Where do I find a cricket? And I'm like, They're everywhere. You've just got to look. Because I think people can see an older woman, and I don't know, you can they can be invisible. And actually, if you talk to a woman who's older, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, you know, they've got brilliant stories to tell, and they've got full, lives. You just gotta look. You just gotta strike up a conversation.

[25:51]Zibby Owens: My mother is now my most popular Instagram feature. That's all people want. I've seen your I've seen those. Telling you. That's like she's so funny. It's just Yeah. Who knew? You just have to ask. You just have to look. So, Alex, when you start writing your novels, how do you approach it? You have an idea, then do you just dive right in, or do you do you plan the whole thing out? Tell tell us. I'm called a friend of mine who's a writer says, I'm the queen of the corkboard.

[26:19]Alexandra Potter: I am a huge plotter. I do know people that set off and write a novel and they just start typing. For me, I have to plan out a book. I have a huge corkboard in my office, and I plot all the chapters from beginning to the end because I kind of think that otherwise it's like sort of getting in your car and you're setting off driving. Well, you don't know where you're going, so you've got to have a destination. And then I like to put some twists in and some reveals and some I like to develop characters and give them all a storyline. And I'm a very visual person, and so every character has a different colored Post it note. And so when I stick them on my corkboard and I stand back, I can say, oh, a bit too much pink, so we need to spread that character out a little bit more. So I I that's how I stand back and look. And then you can move scenes around on the board. And And once I've planned it, then I begin to write. And then I think if you get stuck in the middle of a book, you know that that chapter's coming, so you could always move further along in the story. It's quite a handy thing to do.

[27:28]Zibby Owens: Then do you make yourself working hours where you have to write? Yeah, I work Monday through Friday.

[27:34]Alexandra Potter: I treat it as a proper regular full time job. I don't work weekends. I used to work weekends, but then it can just be you just feel like you're working all the time, unless you're on a really major deadline. Yeah, I work from home. I occasionally might sit in a coffee shop. I used to work in a library that I loved. There's a museum in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum. I used to love working in that library, but then I moved and I was a little bit too far. But, yeah, it's it's it's kind of my job. It pays the mortgage. It's, you know, it's it's it's I used to when I first wrote my first novel, I had a full time job, and I wrote that book. I used to get up super early. I'd work weekends. I'd work nights. I'd work in my lunch hour. And that's how I wrote the first one. You can write a novel even if you have another job. I think the trick is you do little you know, you might just do, like, half an hour or twenty minutes and try to get 100 words, 100 words, 100 words, and eventually they will all stack together to make 100,000 words. Just

[28:35]Zibby Owens: like that. Just like that. It's kind of how you read a book, though, isn't it? Little by little by little, and you get to the end. Do you have other authors who you admire or you're like, oh, lots. Lots. Or I want to be in this category with these people. Who? Wow. There's so many. I I've always

[28:51]Alexandra Potter: I did English literature at university. There's so many authors that I absolutely love. I love all the classics, you know, the Brontes. We were just talking, I haven't seen Wuthering Heights yet, so I'm really interested to see that. Jane Austen, I, you know, I actually wrote a book called Me and Mr. Darcy, which was the idea of imagine if you could date Mr. Darcy. And then obviously, you know, people around today I love, you know, I'll read like Alyssa Jewell, a psychological thriller, or I'll read I just is it The Wedding People? Mhmm. I loved that. I thought that was really good. And I just finished The Correspondent. And I I don't know about you, but I cried and cried and cried. And I I stayed up till one in the morning. And then when I woke up the next day, my eyes because I'd been, like, cry I don't wanna give a spoiler. I'd been crying, and I just looked like I'd done, like, three rounds with someone. But that was that was the last book that I've read that I just thought was amazing. And then last question, advice for aspiring authors? Do it. Absolutely do it. I I come from a a very working class family. I didn't know any writers. I didn't know anyone that had ever published a book. I thought that it could I thought it happened to somebody else, and I wasn't I I kind of I didn't have a clue, really. And I just happened to read one day a magazine about six writers that had published their first novel, and their advice was, just start writing. Just start writing. And that's what I did. I just started writing. I found names of some agents. I managed to get myself an agent. But I think the thing is, I think it's just a lot of it is determination, hard work, and just sitting in that chair and writing and not giving up. It's so easy to sort of have an idea and then you kind of lose confidence and you get halfway through and life takes over and you get busy. If you just keep going and get to the end and you have a book, you've got as good a chance of selling it as anybody else. Love it. Alex, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

[31:08]Zibby Owens: Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Sibby books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.