Before I Met You
What can you tell us about your new book Before I Met You?
Before I Met You is the story of Betty and Arlette. Betty first meets Arlette when she is ten and Arlette is eighty five. She is his stepfather’s mother and something of a misanthrope, but she finds young Betty very much to her liking and the two of them become incredibly close. After years of being cared for by Betty, Arlette dies at the great age of ninety seven and Betty finally gets to spread her wings and sets off on a mission to find the mysterious Clara Pickle, an unknown beneficiary in Arlette’s will. Clara’s last known address was in Soho, London, so Betty finds herself a small apartment and turns detective. The story splits then into two threads as Betty comes of age in 1990’s London and Arlette blossoms after arriving to stay with family friends in Kensington in 1919. Betty learns more and more about Arlette’s secret life in London as the story unfolds and learns of the tragic reasons for her return to her family home two years later.
Tell us about your research process into 1920's bohemian London.
Writing about the early 20’s in Before I Met You was a genuine fluke. I was a hundred and fifty pages into the book before I decided to look at Arlette's back story, by which point the story was firmly rooted in 1995 and Arlette was ninety-seven. Like a gift from the writing gods, it turned out that when she was twenty two, the same age as her granddaughter Betty, it would have been 1919. I got goosebumps when I realised I was going to be writing about this period. I had never written in a historical period before and what better, more electric and glamorous place to start than the 20’s!
The next magical moment came when I started to research jazz. I was a concerned that I was a bit early for the smoky nightclub scene I'd envisaged for Arlette in London, but the very first page I came across on a Google search was a BBC article about the Southern Syncopated Orchestra. The SSO was formed by the American composer Will Marion Cook and comprised 27 musicians and 19 singers. The musicians came from New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Guyana, Barbados, Antigua and Ghana among other places and in 1919 they were taking London society by storm, even playing for the King at Buckingham Palace! As I read the rest of the article I discovered a heartbreaking story worthy of its own Hollywood movie. I immediately saw a dazzling love story for Arlette and a tragic ending all rolled into one.
After that I barely did any research. I had all my characters and I just wanted to get on with it. But of course, I am no historian, FAR from it, and I did keep bumping into things I needed to check. Did they have buses in 1919? Was Spanish flu still an issue? What sort of people had telephones in their houses? It was also a lovely excuse to Google image 1920’s fashions. In 1919 hemlines were just starting to rise and lines starting soften and by the time we get to the end of Arlette’s story in 1921, it was all heavenly Marcel waves and bugle beads, super-long cigarette holders and androgyny.
I did all my research on Google. The quirkiest fact I uncovered was that hundreds of double-decker London buses had been requisitioned for troop transportation during the First World War and completely stripped back and rebuilt to look like tanks and battleships. After the war ended a lot of these peculiar bastardized buses were put back to use on London routes! Imagine this one hurtling down Regent Street!
What made you want to set the book in London?
The – very tenuous – inspiration for the romance was actually the story of Meg Mathews who left the island of Guernsey back in the early 90’s and by 1995 was married to Noel Gallagher and living it up with a phalanx of gossip-column celebrity mates in a huge house in Primrose Hill called Supernova Heights. I loved the arc of her life and the concept of leaving a tiny, compact island for the sprawling mess of London and finding yourself slap bang in the middle of the zeitgeist.
So I created Betty Dean, plonked her down on Guernsey and had her set off on the same journey. All I knew about her story was that she would rent a tiny flat in Soho and find herself living next door to a pop star. Dom Jones, my pop star, was a kind of hybrid of all those floppy-haired Primrose Hill characters from the 90’s; a little bit Gallagher, a fair amount of Damon Albarn and a smattering of Jude Law.
My husband and I spent most of the first two years of our relationship in various corners of Soho, drinking, eating in Chinatown, watching films in fleapit cinemas. And so it seemed only natural to me to use it as a setting for Betty’s adventure.
All of your books have been Sunday Times bestsellers, so what can you tell us about some of your previous publications?
I am proud of them all for differing reasons. The first because it was such a leap of faith. The second because it proved the first wasn't fluke. The third because I went a bit darker. The fourth because I wrote well about men. The fifth because it was the first book I wrote after becoming a mother when I’d been worried I might not be able to write with a baby in the house. The sixth because it all came together in the end. The seventh because it was quite taut and atmospheric. The eighth because … actually, scrap that, I hated the eighth. Anyway, you get my drift.
What attracts you towards writing in a contemporary setting?
Well, I chose the 90’s because I wanted to write a grimy Soho love story about a small town girl falling in love with a pop star and 1995 seemed for some reason to be quite the perfect setting for that.
It was much more challenging and interesting to write about Betty’s detective work without being able to fall back on technological shortcuts. I loved putting her on buses to visit people at home, flicking through Yellow Pages, queuing up for phone booths and having notes dropped through her letterbox, it all added to the drama and actually gave her story more parallels with Arlette’s.
What is a normal day like in your world?
I drop my girls at school at 9.00am then walk home via Waitrose and do a shop. When I get home I tidy up, put on a wash, make a coffee and am allowed until 11.45 to do what I like on the internet. So I reply to emails, buy stuff, chat on Twitter, read articles and plan holidays. Then I have a sandwich and head for the gym. I spend 45 minutes working out, before settling down in a café to write until 3.30. This might not sound like much writing time, but because I compartmentalize my day and don't use the internet while I’m working, I get as much done in that two or three hours as I would if I spent all day at home being distracted by things. On an average day I’ll write 1000 words. On a great day I’ll write 2000.
What advice can you give to aspiring novelists?
Well, the first thing I would say is GET OFF THE INTERNET! After that, do whatever it takes to make the time. As I have proved, if you can walk away from things you know distract you (the kettle, the biscuit tin, the telly, the garden, whatever) then you can achieve quite a lot in a couple of hours. I would also say feel the fear and do it anyway. Writing a novel is a huge undertaking and feeling terrified is quite normal. Pace yourself. If you write too much too quickly, you’ll go off at tangents and lose your way and if you write infrequently you’ll lose your momentum. A thousand words a day is a good ticking over amount. Try to keep your whole life reasonably dull and routine. This helps. As for the other stuff, whiteboards, and planning and notebooks and post-its, well, that’s personal to each individual.
What are your favourite reads?
I like books that do all the work for me, whatever genre they’re in. I read books that pull me in from page one and don't let me go. I am a particular fan of a good psychological thriller or books that are slightly creepy with menacing undertones. But I also like books where not much happens but they’re written so well that you can’t bear to put the book down because you want to stay in that world. I would never now read a book because I thought I should. I only read books that I desperately want to read, that talk to me and call me from the reading pile. Life’s too short to struggle with a book.
the book I have read most recently that I was most impressed by was Sleep With Me by Joanna Briscoe. I was consumed by it, sucked into it, gripped and awed. Oddly it has a low rating on Amazon, so clearly a book without universal appeal, but one that felt like it could have been written just for me.
What is next for you?
The novel after this was completed in November last year so it already feels like a distant memory. It’s about a mother called Lorelei and her husband and four children, who suffer a terrible tragedy and implode as a result. Lorelei becomes a compulsive hoarder and after her death the family has to reunite to clear out her house. It’s called The House We Grew Up In and it’s out on July 18th. The novel I’m writing now is about a lonely man who meets a mysterious woman and no sooner has he fallen n love with her than she disappears. It’s about him unpeeling the layers of a stranger’s bizarre life.
I've gone back to basics, taken out tons of back story and reworked the basic premise and what I am now working on is a novel about Ade, a lovely man with too many ex wives and children, who falls in love with a beautiful stranger and then rather immediately he loses her. As he tries to track her down using what very little he knows about her, he discovers a colourful, bizarre and rather chaotic life. And in doing so he sees how he can fix his own disjointed and messy life. It’s going to be quite magical and quirky, I think and I’m really looking forward to getting properly stuck into it and seeing where it goes.
Before I Met You by Lisa Jewell is out now (Arrow, £7.99)