Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Bestselling writer whose breakthrough novel 'Me Before You' became a global phenomenon and hit film.
On the island
Eight records
Are You Lonesome Tonight? (laughing version)Favourite
I use it as a mood enhancer… the ultimate bringer-upper for me… I bring it out sparingly, but when I use it, it has the most amazing effect.
One of my most common memories is of driving in the south of France with my dad and he put on… I think I knew every Beatles lyric for a while and we would sing them… I picked Golden Slumbers because it's one of those that I never get tired of.
if you grew up in Hackney in the seventies and eighties, then reggae was just a massive part of your kind of audible history… friendship is so hugely important to me, especially female friendship… I have the same best friend, Kathy Runcerman, who I've had since I was 16… my party piece is that I can hit the high notes in silly games.
I have loved Rufus Wainwright for over 20 years… he often inspires books for me… I finally got to see him last year at the Albert Hall… I just remember sitting down in my seat and I started to smile and I didn't stop… it inspired a book I wrote called The Last Letter from Your Lover.
Edith Mathis, Leipzig Radio Choir, Dresden State Orchestra, conducted by Peter Schreier
I used to self-medicate with this piece of music… I would listen to this song again and again to try and calm myself enough to make myself go to work… I decided that I would reframe that piece of music… we had this as part of our wedding music.
In 2005, my husband and I had our third child, Lou, who was born profoundly deaf… I remember being on a rocking chair holding this tiny baby… I suddenly realized that, oh my gosh, this child can't hear… A few weeks later, Lou contracted an antibiotic-resistant bacteria… I found this amazing man, Patrick Axon… he said, You do realize he could have a cochlear implant… the youngest child in Essex ever to have it done… I said to them before I did this, do you remember the first piece of music you ever heard? And they said, they were in the car with their dad and Joni Mitchell's big yellow taxi came on and they remember thinking, yeah, this is quite cool. And that was it. And so even though it's not my favourite Joni Mitchell track, it feels important to say this was the first piece of music that Lou really enjoyed. And for that, it means everything to me.
I discovered in my Kentucky research time… I just love her voice… there was a period, you know, when my marriage was ending and when my mum was dying and I'd overworked myself, where I got very afraid at the edges… I actually couldn't listen to music for a while because it was too much emotion… This song makes me think of that time in a wistful way because it was a period of such great change in my life.
When my marriage ended, I was 50… I was really lonely for the first year… I went to a party… I bumped into an old friend, someone I'd known in Paris in my 20s, John… we've been together ever since… in the early months of our relationship he used to sing this song to me a lot… It's just a song that recognises, perhaps, some of the things women go through and loves them for it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:24How did your parents cope with having you at such a young age?
I think it was very difficult, not just because my granny, who I loved very much, but my granny was a strict Catholic, and my grandparents on that side of the family were very upper-middle class. My grandfather was a naval commander. And so I don't think my arrival was greeted with, you know, great cries of hurrah. However, once I was there everybody was pretty happy. Although I did discover much later in life, and I've talked to my dad about this, that there were plans to have me adopted. And I discovered this in my twenties, and it's quite a weird thought because… It depends who you speak to in my family, which version of this you get. But apparently, somebody told me there was a doctor's family in Gloucester who were primed to take me. But both my mum and dad told me afterwards that once I'd arrived, there was no way they were going to give me up.
Presenter asks
17:46What jobs did you do after school?
The first job I applied for was NatWest Bank working in their visual impairment section, typing Braille bank statements. And we had these little iron typewriters with six keys. And we were given two weeks to learn how to type Braille. And I did it in two days. There's a code with Braille and I just cracked it. And it was brilliant because I got to work with some blind people and got to see a different way of being. And I loved the staff there, and we had a good laugh. And the other one that I did, which was profoundly useful, was I worked in a mini-cab office on the Bethnal Green Road. I did nights. And you say, wow. I was too young to know to be afraid. So I went in there at 17. I asked for a job. I got paid £15 for working a four and a half hour shift. I think it was something like 9 till 1:30 in the morning. And I won't name him because I later found out that it was actually a criminal enterprise. And the boxes that I'd been resting my feet on didn't just contain dodgy tapes. They also, in one case, contained a large gun. But my introduction to the job involved this chap. He brought me in and he said, here's the drivers. They'll tell you when they're POB, passenger on board. And then he pulls out a baseball bat and he says, Anybody gives you any trouble, you give them a tap with that.
The keepsakes
The book
The Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Well, one of my great mortifications is that I've never read the Russians and it feels like a massive gap in my literary education. And I always think I must start with Dostoevsky, and then there's always a good reason why, you know, someone sends me another book and I have to blurb for it and I never get round to it. So this will be the perfect opportunity to sit down. So can I have the complete Dostoevsky to work my way through?
The luxury
I would like a life-size mechanical horse so that I can spend my hours perfecting my classical dressage seat and hands and legs. That would complete my triumvirate of brain, physicality and community, because I would have somebody to talk to. I would give it a name and we would have conversations.
Presenter asks
22:04What was your first story at the local paper?
It was actually about a publican who had managed to make his vine grow to an enormous size through giving it a pint of beer every day. Oh, brilliant! And it was my first byline, and I was so proud. I sent a copy to both my mum and my dad, and strangely, they were much less excited than I was. Underwhelmed. But I loved working in that newspaper office. It was that thing of going in and going, Oh, there you are, there's my people.
Presenter asks
23:58What happened when you were reporting in China and put under house arrest?
So, it was a story about an American barefoot doctor who had gone to a place near Chengdu, which then was a very isolated part of central China, a tiny town called Yibin nearby, where the local government had welcomed this man and his team of barefoot doctors, which were quite a common thing in those days. They would go out and use their vacation time to do good in different countries. And the problem was this guy was a fraud, and he basically accepted all the gifts and all the welcome and a statue in his name, and the banquets. And what he'd brought out was out-of-date medicines, just crates of rubbish, basically. And the way that the Chinese government operated then, I don't know about now because I've never been back, was that even though that was not their fault, they wouldn't have wanted the loss of face. And I'd gone in on a tourist visa, and the night that I arrived in this in Chengdu, I got a call saying the local police know that you're here and you do not leave the hotel. We know that you're here under a tourist visa and that you're here to cover this thing, and you do not leave the hotel. … Well, I got advice from my foreign editor who, for a start, when I was on the phone, said he said, By the way, we will talk for 20 minutes and then the phone's going to go dead. And that enables them to turn the tape over. And so he said, I just want you to talk about pandas or, you know, something you've seen at the zoo, and that's what we did. And he gave me all these tricks, like I would carry my passport and my notebook in my bra strap when I was going out to meet these people to try and get in contact and get the story. I made friends with a woman in a cafe who was able to change my air ticket for me. I made friends with an American woman from Boeing who'd come out to do some work out there. And when things got very uncomfortable for me in my room, which was being searched every time I left it, she let me stay in her room and park important things in her room. But I remember crying on the plane as I left when I got out.
Presenter asks
33:51Why did you almost not write Me Before You?
Well, I'd written eight books by then and none of them, as I said, ever troubled the bestseller charts. And my then publishers were very game, but they were losing faith in me and what to do with me. And I get it, because I write a very different book every time. And this was at a point when the supermarkets dominated bookselling. And they wanted something that it was obvious what it said on the front of the tin. And none of my books are like that. And I knew I was in the last chance saloon when it came to my publishing career. And I came up with this idea and I mentioned it to my publishers. And they were lukewarm, to say the least. And I had had some overtures, shall we say, from Penguin Michael Joseph, and they loved the idea. And this was a story that was based on a new story that I'd heard. It was about a young rugby player who'd been left quadriplegic after an accident and a few years later had persuaded his parents to take him to Dignitas, the Centre for Assisted Suicide. And I was so shocked by this story. I couldn't understand how a parent could agree to do that with their child. And I felt very judgmental, if I'm honest. I couldn't believe that they would do that. And then the journalist in me kicked in and I started to read up more about what had happened in this particular case. And I realised that, like most things in life, it wasn't black or white. It was many shades of grey. And it fascinated me. So I decided to write a story based on a similar premise. And I wrote 20,000 words. And often when I write 20,000 words, I lose confidence in the story. It's my crisis point, if you like, between 20 and 30,000 words. I've got so many books that I've stopped at. … And there was a lovely novelist called Penny Vincenzi, who was a sort of doyenne of the women's magazine scene. And it was her memorial. And I met up with my friend Sophie Kinsella and had lunch with her beforehand. And I was broke at the time, and I was feeling quite depressed because I thought my writing career was coming to an end. And I've never forgotten it. She very gracefully, I thought we were going to Starbucks, and she said, Oh, no, no, no, we're going to go to the Gabrosche. And I was like, what? And I panicked because I thought it was a restaurant. And she said very sweetly, oh no, I had some Bulgarian royalties come in today, and I've got no idea what to do with them, so this will be a lovely thing to do with them. And I remember thinking, gosh, that was gracefully done. And then I told her the story of my 20,000 words over lunch. And she just looked at me and she said, you have to write this book. You do know that. You have to write this book.
Presenter asks
40:50How did you learn to slow down from being a workaholic?
I think it was the last time I realized I'd started to fray at the edges again. It's really hard to get out of the pattern if you're a workaholic because. If you're privileged enough to do the thing that you love, it's much harder to place boundaries around it. And it's only when, for me, my body just starts to go, nope, I start to stay awake, or I get an anxiety knot in my stomach that I can't get rid of, or I can't eat properly. And then I'm like, okay, my body is saying something to me now. I've learned to listen to it rather than take an anti-anxiety med or take a sleeping pill or push through. I don't push through anymore because I've learned that. I come from revoltingly hardy stock. There's no mental health issues in my family that I'm aware of. And so when I started to fray, it came as a real shock to me. I didn't understand the signals. I didn't understand what was happening. And because I love work and because I probably, being a girl of the 80s, you know, learned that hard work is the answer to everything, I just kept pushing through. And then twice now, I've pushed myself to a point where suddenly I started to get ill. And this time, my best friend stepped in, my partner stepped in, and they basically told me enough is enough. So now I've got hobbies. I've got hobbies. Hobbies. What kind of hobbies? Oh, God, I'm a North London cliché. I took up Pilates, which I love, which I do about three or four times a week.
“It depends who you speak to in my family, which version of this you get. But apparently, somebody told me there was a doctor's family in Gloucester who were primed to take me. But both my mum and dad told me afterwards that once I'd arrived, there was no way they were going to give me up.”
“I'm a very pragmatic and sensible person, but there's something about a horse that speaks to my soul.”
“A few weeks later, Lou contracted an antibiotic-resistant bacteria in his ear, and we think it may have been on the back of these hearing tests. And the weird thing is, when I went to the doctor, they tested it, and she rang me up and she said, This is very odd. It's called Acinobacter baumannii, and it's only found on the battlefields of Iraq.”
“I remember there's a letter at the end of this book that Will has written to Lou, and I remember writing it and sobbing so hard that the man in the next office, I used to rent an office when I lived in the countryside, the man in the next office came next door to see if I was okay. And I had to sort of say snottedly, I was going really well, thanks for asking.”
“I come from revoltingly hardy stock. There's no mental health issues in my family that I'm aware of. And so when I started to fray, it came as a real shock to me. I didn't understand the signals. I didn't understand what was happening. And because I love work and because I probably, being a girl of the 80s, you know, learned that hard work is the answer to everything, I just kept pushing through.”