Lee Child

You talked about running into emotional brick walls with your parents and have said that as a writer, you are receiving the love and approval that they weren't able to give you. What was your relationship with them like?

They wanted the boys to grow up to become something notable, not so much for our own sake, but for their sake, as if they were merit badges on a Boy Scout uniform or something. There were three of us in the beginning, and then a fourth one much, much later. And so it was really the three of us as the classic nuclear family. And the other two were, especially my elder brother, really smart guy. … He really was a success, you know what I mean? … He became a nuclear engineer. … And he did a PhD at Cambridge that for a time was, you know, groundbreaking work about the fluid mechanics of turbine blades and so on. … Well, not really. You know, it wasn't quite identifiable enough. They wanted him to be Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And so that whatever we did, we would have been disappointments.

As well as becoming senior in a technical role, you put yourself forward to become shop steward. What made you do that?

That was just my personality and again a sort of proto-Jack Reacher moment where we were going through major, major industry upheaval. It was when there was BBC, BBC2, Channel 4 and ITV and then it was all getting broken up again because of satellite coming in and so on and so forth and the first thing they had to do was bust the union basically and there was an old shop steward who'd been there for years and he was going to retire anyway due to age and they put the word out the whisper that nobody should stand for the vacancy because if you do you'll be fired in a week and never work in the industry again and something in me just thought wait a minute that's not right so I put myself forward for election and I was elected unopposed and sure enough you know a manager bumps into me the next day and says you're crazy you know you'll be gone in a week … I said we'll see about that.

By 1995 you were married with a daughter and a mortgage, forty and jobless, but you had started writing the first Jack Reacher book, Killing Floor, and you were determined it would be a success. Where did your confidence come from?

I do not know. I think it was a ludicrous position to take. But I I conned myself basically. In order to give myself the energy and the confidence to do it, I just said, Yeah, of course this is going to work. Like night follows day. It's going to be a success. … I didn't tell them. I didn't tell them I'd lost my job because I just knew that would be like back to the nineteen thirties for them. So I didn't tell them. And then next time they were passing by, they dropped in. And I said, Oh, by the way, I lost my job. And my father said, Well, what are you going to do now? I said I'm writing a novel. And he said, I'll bet you ten thousand to one it's a failure. And objectively, he was quite correct, you know. But this is what I'm saying: there was so little feeling and emotion there. He would say something that was [actuarially] correct without thinking how it would land on the person listening to it. But by then, of course, I was fireproof. I was you know, I'd had that all my life. I was used to lack of encouragement, which actually turned out to be a pretty good preparation for being a writer because, you know, it's the stumbling blocks at every corner and difficulties at every step along the way. So if you're not used to constant praise and encouragement, you're better equipped for it, I think.

Do you always need something to kick against? And how does that work when you become successful? How do you maintain that?

It it is vital, not just for the writer, but for the reader. Because you know what what is the purpose of fiction really? It's to get what you don't get in real life. And people rage about things. Everybody's got you know, a lousy boss here or there somewhere in the chain of command. Everybody is annoyed or frustrated about something, and they need a sense of revenge as well. And of course, they can't get it in real life. But you can read a book where Reacher shoots the bad guy in the head. And even though you know it's wrong, at a gut level, at some kind of elemental level of your brain, you just love it. You thrill to it. It's consolation for all the frustration you have to put up with in your regular week. What would you like to do if you could get away with it? And read Reacher books. You know what I would like to do if I could get away with it.