Tag Archives: jojo moyes

The Mystery Of Marian Keyes

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I’m amazed how long Marian Keyes’s books have been lumped into that derogatory catch-all “chicklit”. I can only assume most of the commentators who do so haven’t actually read her.

Because as her legions of loyal readers know, Keyes  consistently embraces dark themes decidedly at odds with her perky covers: domestic violence, rape, rehab. They are funny, yes. They frequently contain the kind of wordplay that makes you snort with laughter at its silliness. Yet there is always a serious layer of grit beneath.

Mercy Close, Marian Keyes

Proof copy. Nice ribbons, but they do create problems in the bath.

With her latest, The Mystery Of Mercy Close, she tackles depression, but weaves it into a mystery that is reminiscent of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels – and is just as unpredictable and compelling. The book’s heroine, Helen Walsh, is a private investigator – one who loves a designer handbag, can identify the paint colours of a twisted Farrow and Ball style colour chart in a subject’s home (Quiet Desperation or Local Warlord, anyone?) and who has pleasingly filthy sex with a modern-day viking called Artie. So far, so chicklit, perhaps.
But Walsh is an anti-heroine. She ‘doesn’t believe’ in hot drinks, approaches emotions with suspicion, dislikes children (a brave move in a ‘women’s’ book) and expresses herself mostly through sarcasm. She also struggles daily with depression, and her battle with it is shot through the book like Blackpool through a stick of rock.
I don’t know much about depression. I’m talking about the serious, debilitating, Black Dog kind – not the kind where you feel down in the doldrums for a bit and fight your way back up with the aid of chocolate and brisk walks. I know a bit more now.

Keyes vividly describes the relentless isolation of true depression, the dizzying, terrifying awareness that it is returning, the fear that this time the drugs won’t work, the siren call of the blackest kind of release. And mostly, the incomprehension of a world around you that can’t understand why you won’t just pull yourself together.
Walsh starts the book at a low point – her home repossessed and her career teetering (Keyes does not shy away from the financial realities of living in today’s Ireland). She accepts a job from a toxic ex-boyfriend to find a member of a boy band who has gone missing just before a lucrative comeback concert.
Walsh’s battle to find him is intertwined with the approaching juggernaut of her own depression, and her faltering belief in her fledgling relationship. If I’ve made this sound dark, it’s not semi-tonal. It zips along, with the familiar Keyes mix of endearing characters and screwball exchanges and at first the forays into depression seem almost as if they belong to another book. But gradually you realise that this is Keyes’s genius: the revelation that the severely depressed are probably around you, living apparently functioning lives, going to work daily, making hot drinks, having hot sex. And still quite able to contemplate buying a Stanley knife to top themselves the following day.


Keyes has been open about her own battle with depression. Perhaps I was so moved by this book because I believed there must be a bit of Walsh in Keyes and vice versa. I sat in bed for two hours this morning to finish it (I never do this; we are a house of lie-in Nazis) and the penultimate chapters had me weeping for its spiky, funny anti-heroine as she faced her bleakest moment. Her struggle is all the more poignant for the humour and wit that precedes it. I finished it marvelling at its originality and its honesty, and pondering how Keyes always rewards her readers in a way that many more ‘serious’ writers don’t. I concluded that the real mystery here is why she isn’t taken more seriously by the literary establishment.
I won’t say any more. But it is a brilliant, unusual, brave, sexy, book and one which I hope will confirm Keyes’s place as one of our finest writers.

Writers, I stress. Not chick-lit writers.

The Mystery of Mercy Close is out on 13th September. Do read it.

Richard and Judy. And Me. Warning: may not contain impartial journalism

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I promised my publicist I wouldn't actually sit on their laps

I have a friend who says being an author is basically being paid to be disappointed once a year. There have been years when, I have to admit, I have almost agreed with him.
This is not one of those years.
Perhaps it should have been. I began my ninth novel – Six Month Contract – out of contract. It is fair to say that even when starting it I knew the book would not be an “easy sell”. Books about quadriplegics tend not to be, especially when you throw in the words ‘carer’ and ‘Dignitas’. When I tried to describe the plot, people gave me the same look you give the woman who sings songs on the bus and tries to show you her socks.
Even when I finished it and Penguin – that iconic publisher – bought it, I still felt anxious. There were brow-furrowed discussions about how best to pitch it. “This may be the book that kills my career!” I would joke to friends. And a little muscle would tick in my jaw and my voice would go a little bit too high.

Can you feel my nerves from there? You can?

 

Today, eighteen months after I finished it, I sat on a sofa under studio lights discussing it with Richard and Judy. Yup, the Richard and Judy. Because Me Before You, as 6MC is now titled, has made it onto the R&J book list for Spring 2012 and I’m having one of those rare moments where you feel so nauseatingly delighted and grateful you could do an actual free-form Dance Of Joy*.

As any author will tell you, the R&J list is, even without the television show, the biggest possible boost to a novel. But more importantly – it’s RICHARD AND JUDY. I watched them when I was a student, when I worked nights, pinned to a sofa as a nursing mother. These days I follow Richard on Twitter (he tested me on Binky’s epic scaling of unopened letters) and I tried very hard not to make a complete gushing arse of myself.
I failed.

Because this is the thing about Richard and Judy: if you are of a certain age, you think you know them. You’ve read about Judy’s womanly ops, and you’ve winced at Richard’s cheesy jokes and you’ve scorched your eyeballs with his Ali G impression and it’s like meeting members of your family. Iconic members of your family. Members of your family that make you sweat with nerves. (‘Why are you so nervous?’ My husband had asked that morning. ‘You’ve met far more famous people.’ Me (incredulous face): ‘It’s RICHARD AND JUDY’)
I told myself this was stupid. I asked myself: What would Sebastian Faulks do? (answer: not say the word ‘arse’ within thirty seconds and get mildly hysterical when the microphone dropped down his top).
But, like the absolute professionals they were, they warmed me up with five minutes of friendly chat and then, on camera, talked knowledgeably and with enthusiasm about the book. They used the word ‘quadriplegic’ without fear. Judy (who has enviable hair, btw) said it made her both laugh and cry. They wrote nice things in my copy and joked about finishing their own books (they are both writing novels). They were, frankly, exactly as you would expect from their screen personas. I came out beaming, and without once involuntarily blurting out OHGODILOVEYOUBOTH.
I can’t really say anything else about today that won’t make me sound like even more of an idiot than I already do. My gushing adoration of Jilly Cooper during an interview last year showed me that when faced with one of my idols I will never be a ‘cool’ person (and I have to face the fact that this will now be evident on film).
But discussing the book that should have killed my career with Richard and Judy (RICHARD AND JUDY!) showed me that yes, publishing can often mean being paid to be quietly disappointed. And that every now and then, if you’re lucky, you have a moment that makes you feel like anything is possible.

The book is out now. I hope you enjoy it.

...other good books are available

*I may have done such a dance. So shoot me.

Meeting your heroes (part 2)

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Jilly Cooper, Jojo Moyes, dogs

Why, yes, I *do* like dogs. (pics by the very wonderful Andrew Crowley)

It’s dangerous meeting your heroes, especially literary ones. At a party, I once spied one of my favourite writers; someone whose writing had inspired me to do it myself, whose work I could quote paragraphs from, like an embarrassing student. “Go and say hello,” my agent urged, when I told her what this woman meant to me.
I said hello.
Reader, she could not have brushed me off more effectively if she had been holding a dustpan and brush and been called Basil. Twenty seconds later, I walked back to my agent, mortified. “She’s probably shy,” my agent said, firmly. I have never been able to read this woman since without the faint metallic taste of mortification in my mouth.
So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to interview Jilly Cooper and her husband for the Daily Telegraph. I have loved Cooper since I was twelve (even though her description of Rupert Campbell Black “batting a bread roll with his cock” destined me for years of disappointment). Unusually for someone of her fame, I have never met a single person with a bad word to say about her.
It was only driving to their house that I really thought about the fact that I there not just to interview my hero, but to dissect her marriage. In one day. Yup – that’s always a good way to endear yourself. I started to imagine some hack turning up on my doorstep and analysing my marriage based on one day’s experience, and it made me go cold.

Jojo and Jilly

I am not pleased to be here at all. Oh no.

Anyway, having said all that (and at the risk of drawing down the wrath of the blog-reading gods) I don’t want to talk too much about the day itself. There’s a sort of account of it here. They tolerated my intrusive questions with astonishing grace. But I will say that it started with an embrace of the kind that you don’t normally get from a global literary superstar and only ended when I realised, lolling outside in the unseasonal Cotswold sun, that I should have been on the road hours ago and that as Jilly would plainly never be impolite enough to suggest one should leave, it was going to be up to me to extricate myself from the Cooper household.
I left like a limpet being prised from a rock. I’m guessing it’s a fairly common response among their guests.
I wrote the piece, then spent another week in a state of mild anxiety. She would hate it. My shorthand would be inaccurate. The subs would change my words. Either way, she would hate it.
Today the postman delivered an envelope addressed in looping handwriting to DARLING JOJO. Cooper is, of course, the kind of person who would greet a familiar roadsweeper with that regardless. But it is going with my prized things, my love letters and finger paint pictures and unidentified children’s teeth.
Sometimes meeting your heroes exceeds every expectation.

Letter from Jilly

Best. Post. Ever.

My Jolly Sooper Day

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How to be utterly upstaged by a dog.

Too flat out to write the account I want tonight, but I just wanted to post this lovely picture by Daily Telegraph photographer Andrew Crowley, who took the shots for my interview with Jilly and Leo Cooper last week.

I especially love William the Dog on the sofa, who had to be restrained by no fewer than three people to prevent him from hogging the shots of Leo and Jilly together. His look of guilty pleasure when he was finally allowed in front of the camera was quite something.

The piece – the first interview Jilly and Leo have apparently given together in their 50 year marriage – will run in this weekend’s Daily Telegraph. It was one of the best – and most moving – days of my working life. I hope that comes across.

Gone fishing. Or something.

Link

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I call this picture: superannuated Page Three Girl. "Sally used to model lingerie in 1911, you know. She now advertises Stannah Stair Lifts and is married to a pilot called Graham."

Hello! Just wanted to apologise for the brief hiatus – I have been dragging the offspring around various bits of Europe. Blog to follow. But I just wanted to do a brief and slightly un-modest English air punch at the news that Barnes and Noble have made Last Letter one of their two top Long List entries. – http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com.  And I just wanted to say a quick thank you to Barnes and Noble readers. Thank you too to all the lovely readers who have contacted me while I’ve been away – I’ll get back to you all individually asap, I promise.
In the meantime, here’s me outside Barcelona’s Picasso Museum, as Picasso might have seen me. Or as Picasso’s fridge magnet might have seen me.