To the Saffron Walden library last night, to hear Jojo Moyes, who is an ex-Independent colleague married to my friend Charles Arthur, who’s still there. I was the lone male bobbing in a sea of oestrogen. There were two other men but both are employed by the library. Otherwise it appears that only women read novels in Saffron Walden.
Jojo wrote three novels while working as a journalist without selling any of them. She wrote the fourth while pregnant with her second child, and moving house; it has so far sold 100,000 copies in this country and been translated into thirteen languages. Need I add that she’s smart, pretty, and genuinely nice?
So one memory of the evening is a vast green-scaled jealousy rising on scaly wings from the Great Western Swamp of Self Pity and flapping around my head, breathing fire and farting all through the proceedings. On the other hand, she read out a chunk of the next novel, and the dialogue was really funny and clearly imagined. She deserves all this success, and that’s really gratifying.
She was very funny about the American market. Her second book, Foreign Fields has had to be retitled there. Apparently books with “Foreign” in the title are not attractive. And, of course, the Borders reps have to vet the cover before it is published. Something similar happened ot my worm cover over there. As I walked off, I noticed that part of me is still rather bewildered that the great American public should be more interested in tales of Irish family life than in the biology of nematode worms. Perhaps it’s best not to attempt to write about humans after all.
I note that the remaining miasma of your self-igniting methane monster is still suffocating your generosity of spirit to the point that you can’t bring yourself to name the book.
Mind you, having gone onto the Web to find this out with the express intent of putting it here, I was so appalled by the good reviews I found there that my own spirit has also taken flight, leaving only a foul-smelling fug of bad grace.
But then, I’m only a fifth of the way through my own first and palpably immature novel. The thought that I may have to do another two before learning how to make it all hang together is remarkably unpleasant.
R
Yes, but I didn’t even put in a plug for my own book. I’ve fixed hers, though, now.
All that said, Andrew, at least you’re not married to Charles Arthur (who owes me five quid…)
OK, Oliver – write me a feature and you’ll get a lot more than five quid… and I’ll add it on if you like.