I know this isn't the right Marie-Claire. But I just love Vanessa Paradis.

Are you an aspiring writer? Enter Marie-Claire magazine’s Inspire and Mentor competition and you may end up with me as your personal tutor. This will involve lots of chatting, some help and advice, and probably some talk about biscuits, as well as literary stuff. Anyway, give it a go. I can think of lots of writers who I would LOVE to talk to (and a few who would probably leave me mouthing dumbly like an awestruck  goldfish). Cath Bore, who won the competition last year, said it changed her life.

Here’s where you need to enter your details. And hopefully I’ll chatting to one of you soon…(be warned. I’m terribly stern).

Nicola Ridings sent me the decorations from her amazing birthday cake

So there have been a few unexpectedly good things that have come about as a result of Me Before You, and one of them has been the messages from readers. Not just those who have been weeping on public transport (as someone who once sobbed their way through the last chapter of My Sister’s Keeper on the Stansted Express, I sympathise), or the non-readers who found themselves reading; but the carers, the relatives of quadriplegics and the quadriplegics themselves. (I include only emails here; the tweets deserve a post of their own).
I admit I had been nervous about the reception this book would get; the last thing I wanted to suggest was that the life of someone severely disabled was not worth living. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to have been received this way.

Here, for example, is Sasha, from NZ: “I have been a tetraplegic carer for few years and its amazing how little people still know about how every day must be a strict, sickening routine. Or that the Able Bodies have no idea what it’s like not to have control, over anything. I really connected with this book and felt that I just had to thank you as soon as I read it.”

Or Sally, whose globe-trotting brother died of Multiple System Atrophy after a long struggle. Or Jean, the mother of an inspirational teenager who ended up in a wheelchair after a brain haemorrhage 4 years ago. “I identified with the problems encountered by wheelchair users and their carers…my son cannot speak so communication is difficult – but he went skiing at one of these indoor ski slopes-something I would never have envisaged him doing”

Kathryn: “I work on a ward in a hospital where a lot of our patients have the same or similar type of spinal injury. … It moved me on many pages and as a nurse I have dealt with all the emotions Will had, with my patients. Thanks for being brave enough to cover what people are scared of and for what, to some, is so very brave.”

And this is Nicola's amazing cake in totem

I loved those who suggested the book had made them think, or even want, like Lou, to live bigger lives. I felt a bit like that while I was writing. But one of my favourites came from Bill, a hospital chaplain, who wrote me a long email that included the following extract: “Me Before You … affected my views on ethical issues such as assisted suicide. Whilst it is never our role to tell patients what to do with their lives, I thought that I personally had pretty deep-seated moral values before I read this book. Now I’m aware that these issues are not at all clear cut, and very much depend on the patient and situation.”

And Tony, a Canon who sent me this: “… it helped me clarify my own position in relation to the vexed subject of assisted dying. Of course, it is also a powerful and beautifully told, serious love story. (I stress the word ‘serious’ because I strongly object to the cheap term,’chick-lit’ which I can see right now out of the corner of my eye on the screen. It is such a condescending and utterly inappropriate term for a book of this nature.) So,I am deeply grateful to you for a book which will continue to resonate in my heart and soul for some time.”

In ten years of publication, I don’t think I have ever received a message quite like that. Still, lest I sound too pleased with myself, I thought I should include this, sent to me from two different addresses, just to make sure I got it (this is the edited version): “I hated your recent book. I believe maybe there is a little sadist and depressed being in you. Why did you allow Will to take so much from Louisa and at the end she didn’t get anything back.?… JoJo, I think you are just sad and you wrote an extension of yourself. In other cultures, people live for each other and they live as much fulfilled lives as those in the culture on which the book is based. YOUR BOOK WAS BAD.”
… which just goes to show you can’t please everyone.

Most evenings I can be found on a sofa, with laptop on lap, cat/dog at feet and tweeting sarkily (BGT, The Voice) or overenthusiastically (Homeland, Mad Men) about the telly, in a facsimile of Having An Actual Life.
But as I’ve had a rare burst of Proper Reading, instead of my usual modus operandi of falling asleep after two paragraphs with the bedside light on and a faint string of drool acting as bookmark, I thought I should come Over Here and post instead.

If you like thrillers, I can’t recommend Alex Marwood’s The Wicked Girls highly enough. It’s a smart, tense story that takes a female Johnson and Venables and picks up their lives 20 years on. It’s very good on human psychology and almost unbearably tense. It’s also terrifically humane. It’s out on kindle now, but in paperback very soon. Do read it. She deserves to be huge.

There is almost nothing I can add to the plaudits for Jeannette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, so I’ll simply say read it, if you haven’t already. It’s beautiful and raw and makes you realise how little of what you read, fiction or otherwise, achieves any level of honesty at all. Astonishing.

Future releases to look out for: Jonathan Harvey’s All She Wants. This is a very original, very funny romp through the rise and fall of a northern soap star. It took me to a world I knew nothing about, and has the stamp of authenticity, given that Harvey is a writer for Coronation Street. This is his first novel. His next one, he says, is going to be darker in tone. I can’t wait to read it.

Later this year do order Lisa Jewell’s Before I Met You, which is (I think) her first dual timeframe book, and follows the life of a young girl on a mission in Soho, coming up against the foibles of the Primrose Hill set, and the linked life of a woman in the 1920s. I have expressed publicly before my admiration for Jewell’s way with character. In my opinion nobody in commercial fiction does original characters like she does. The delectable Sandy Beach (you have to read it) is a case in point here. Beautiful.

Other things I’ve read and enjoyed: Noah Hawley’s The Good Father, and the twin behemoths that are the Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series. In fact, the Hunger Games paperbacks are in official danger of falling apart, having been through every member of our family apart from the seven-year-old (and that’s only because we forbad him. He was DESPERATE. And keeps whispering ‘mockingjay” in a pleading manner as we walk past).

And talking of children, the seven year old and I have just read our way through David Walliams‘ entire oeuvre. I hadn’t honestly held out much hope for the first, Mr Stink, as there are few celebrity books that seem to stand out as actual books rather than extensions of the celebrity brand, but here I’ll make an exception. It was funny, quirky and made us both weep slightly embarrassed tears (“it’s, um, very dusty in here Mum, isn’t it?” “Yes, yes it is”). They also benefit from illustrations by the sublime Quentin Blake.

All I will say, is that if you have a young child who reads ‘older’, as Child#3 does, having to explain hospices (Gangsta Granny) to a tearful child over breakfast does slighty dim what was otherwise pure enjoyment. But that’s far from a criticism of Walliams.

I have a TON of new proofs (should that be prooves?) to read over the next few weeks, so if I don’t have a massive crisis of confidence over retaining my own voice in amidst everyone else’s quirky, compelling or unputdownable voices and throw them all in the garage singing lalala with my fingers in my ears, I will post again soon.

ps the only other thing I wanted to say (and I’m too overexcited to care if this sounds like a terrible swank) was that Marian Keyes told me yesterday that she loved Me Before You. Marian Keyes! When she tweeted me I was so star-struck I actually couldn’t type anything for 12 hours. I am 42.

I love broadsheets (I have to; one pays half my mortgage) but this weekend I read my way through the annual Best Books of 2011 features and found my jaw clenched so tight I feared for my tooth enamel.

Were they a smorgasbord of unheralded literary – and not so literary – delights? Did they enlighten me? Point me to places in Waterstones I might not otherwise have sought? Did they heck as like. The choices of of Margaret Drabble? Julian Barnes? Alan Hollinghurst? CHECK. Books by Julian Barnes? Alan Hollinghurst? Margaret Drabble? Ohhh yes. *pause for weary sigh *
Some lists were more imaginative, but the same names popped up with wearying regularity. Antonia Fraser and Andrew Motion, John Banville and Hilary Mantel… you get the picture. All of these people are amazing writers, yes. Their talent is indisputable; it’s no doubt why they make so many repeat appearances in these pages. But I can’t help feeling these features are a rather weary ring-round of the same old faces. They feel, to me at least, increasingly like an irrelevance, with no energy or surprises; a waste of an opportunity.
I thought of the books I’ve enjoyed this year; often books by people who don’t appear in the broadsheets. Where were the commercial novels, the funny books, the first novels, the graphic novels? Where was Caitlin Moran’s critically lauded feminist tract How To Be A Woman? Or Alan Partridge? Where were the phenomenally successful authors that we never see in these pages? Writers like Sophie Kinsella or Jodi Picoult? I’d LOVE to know what they are reading. I’d even like to know what Katie Price is reading. I’d actually be reassured to find that she actually reads books.
I’ve just read my way through 30-odd first novels for the Costa Book Awards, and many of them I have since pressed on people, delighted to have found amazing new voices, unheralded books I’d never have read otherwise. (I think I saw ONE of these in the books pages)
Taking all this into account, I thought I’d open the floor for some of my favourite writers – and readers – to submit their own. I’ve kicked off with some of my own (I’ll no doubt kick myself for those I’ve forgotten) Please do add to the list.

Mine: ( from the Costa Shortlist:)
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry: an extraordinary, rollicking and perfectly plotted swagger through a post-apocalyptic Irish turf war.
Tiny Sunbirds Far Away by Christie Watson: rich, gripping (and very funny) family saga told by a girl sent to live with her grandparents in Congo.
The Last 100 Days by Patrick McGuinness: If anyone had told me I would be gripped by a tale of Caucescu’s Romania I would have laughed. But this is a fascinating and wryly humorous tale of an innocent abroad.
Pao by Kerry Young, an epic tale of multicultural Jamaica and of a young man negotiating his way through its fledgling political system.

Excluding books by people I know (for obvious reasons), I also loved Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen, which made me laugh until my stomach hurt, Essie Fox’s The Somnambulist, and Charles Frazier’s Nightwoods, whose sentences I kept pulling apart just to study their brilliance.
I also really enjoyed the Alex Rider graphic novels, which I’ve been reading with my sons. Gripping and beautifully drawn.

Stella Duffy, author of Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore: “One of the novels I most enjoyed this year is Zoe Strachan’s novel “Ever Fallen in Love” (Sandstone Press) for many reasons, not least the smart pace and lovely writing, but also for its honesty about relationships (family and romantic), a welcome take on the university novel from a different class perspective (not about posh kids finding themselves at Oxbridge – woo hoo!) and for proving it is possible to set a ‘gay novel’ outside a major metropolis.”

Jenny Colgan, author of Meet Me At The Cupcake Café The book about the world economic crisis, Boomerang, by Michael Lewis, is gripping reading, and essential for anyone trying to get a grasp on where we are, financially speaking. The Big Short, his previous book, is even better. He’s an absolutely peerless journalist on the trail of the biggest story of his life.

The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs was funny, sad and compulsive, and SJ Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep was as clever and engrossing a thriller as I can think of. Like most of the rest of the world, I dived into A Game of Thrones for months on end and started muttering ‘winter is coming’ ominously in response to almost any question. But the book (although it was published in 2010) that most took my breath away, made me heartbroken, then overjoyed this year was completely unpredictable- it was Andre Agassi‘s staggeringly honest, sad, frank, fascinating autobiography, Open. Whether you’re a tennis fan is immaterial; if you’re a life fan, you have to read this book.

Chris Manby, author of Kate’s Wedding: I’ve just finished reading Jeanette Winterson’s memoir ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?‘ in which she talks about the childhood that inspired ‘Oranges are not the only fruit’ and her recent search for her birth family.  It’s a wonderful read.  Laugh out loud funny at times.  Twist of the guts sad at others.  Winterson writes about the importance of the written word as a means of escape.  She says, ‘I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues.  We are not silenced.  All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech… we get our language back through the language of others.  We can turn to the poem.  We can open the book.  Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.’

I never imagined I had much in common with Jeanette Winterson but it turns out that I do.  We’re both adoptees, unlikely Oxford graduates and novelists. On the subject of adoption and the long shadow it casts over the lives of everyone involved, I found that Ms. Winterson had certainly ‘deep-dived’ the words for me.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS
1. No purchase necessary to enter the competition.
2. This competition is open to UK residents aged 18 years or over, with the exception of employees of the Promoter, their families, agents and anyone else connected with this promotion.
3. Entries must be received by midnight on Friday 11th November 2011. The Promoter accepts no responsibility for any entries that are incomplete, illegible, corrupted or fail to reach the Promoter by the relevant closing date for any reason. Proof of posting or sending is not proof of receipt. Entries via agents or third parties are invalid. Entries become the property of the Promoter and are not returned.
4. Only one entry per person. No entrant may win more than one prize.
5. To enter write 50 words about what makes you a Jojo Moyes fan. Email your entry to marketing@penguin.co.uk , giving your message the title “Trailer Entry”
6. All correctly completed entries will be forwarded to a judging panel made up of the marketing director, publicity director and managing director of Michael Joseph at Penguin books. They will select 10 successful entrants. The winning entries will be the entries that in the opinion of the judges show a clear passion for Jojo Moye’s books and an interest in women’s fiction.
7. The winners’ prize is the opportunity to take part in our book trailer shoot on Saturday 10th December at Penguin Books offices in central London. Promoter will reimburse each winner for any reasonable travel expenses that they incur in attending the trailer shoot but no additional expenses will be covered. In the event that you cannot make these dates, no alternative dates will be possible and the Promoter reserves the right to offer the prize to a substitute winner.
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Me Before You, out Jan 5 2012

Yes, it's feminist drama, but still entertaining! (picture courtesy of The Guardian)

I’m not a huge theatregoer. I struggle to dispel the suspicion that a lot of it is more fun for those taking part than those paying to watch. I loved War Horse enough to watch it twice; but then it’s hard to believe that life-sized wooden horse puppets are getting anything from being ogled by me and 600 blubbing middle-aged provincial women.
Despite all this, yesterday me and my prejudices headed for London with a friend to see one of the last performances of Caryl Churchill’s resurrected Top Girls. Challenging, modernist drama! Feminist drama! I know. I can feel your waves of envy from here.
And it’s fair to say I was a bit trepidatious. Olivia Poulet, who stars as three different characters, and who, for reasons too complicated to detail here, I was about to meet, had warned me that the first act was “a bit trippy”. She wasn’t wrong.
A 14th century Viking woman sits at a dining table with, amongst others, a female pope (the wonderful Lucy Briers), a geisha, a Scottish philanthropist (Stella Gonet), and a 1980s Joan-Collins lookalike played by the exquisite Suranne Jones.
The talk overlaps, the timing stagey and unnatural, so that it takes about ten minutes for the brain to adjust to both the surreal setting and the choppy bursts of dialogue. Uh-oh, I thought. This is going to be a long evening. And then, suddenly, I, and the rest of the audience were sucked in.
In fact, I was gripped by this production, which has been critically well reviewed by both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph (not a publication known for its love of surreal 30-year-old feminist stage productions).
The shoulder pads and “we-must-act-like-men-to-succeed” schtick may feel a little dated, but it hasn’t lost its power to shock. The second act features two young girls in a Norfolk garden. At one point one apparently licks menstrual blood from the other’s finger; a moment which prompted the whole of one side of the audience to shriek with revulsion. (Um, guys, it’s not, you know, real)
But it is also moving in its examination of the price women pay for success, and what they are prepared to tolerate. It is especially poignant in its treatment of Poulet’s character, a young woman who is plainly doomed to fail in the new, cold, go-getting climate of the 1980s. What seemed most extraordinary to me was the way Poulet seemed to physically alter with each character; here solid, plump and plain, here as a secretary ten years older, desperately trying to fit a higher social bracket. “It’s what good character actors do,” my companion, who is familiar with the ways of thesps, told me.

It's not real blood, people. You're quite safe.

I had arranged to meet Olivia in the pub afterwards. And that was the biggest surprise. I turned from my drink as the door opened, waiting to see the woman I had witnessed on stage, and looked away. That slightly lumpen creature couldn’t be this slight, pretty girl standing in the Clarence? But it was. This wasn’t a matter of make-up, or prosthetics; just that weird alchemistic way of seeming, temporarily, to inhabit somebody else’s skin.
I had a great night, for lots of reasons. In part because it is fun, when you spend much of your working life alone, to hang out with other writers, and especially with actors, who are a different tribe entirely. In part because of the ‘rock’n’roll’ taxi me and my companion got home. But for that brief, mildly bewildering experience of human morphing alone, the evening would have been worth it.
It’s on until the end of the month. Do catch it, if you get the chance.