Brought To Book
Fiction Editor Karen chats to bestseller Milly Johnson
THE PERFECTLY IMPERFECT WOMAN BY MILLY OHNSON Simon & Schuster HB, £14.99 Marnie Salt’s life is going pear-shaped – her adoptive family despise her, her best friend has abandoned her, and the man she loves is lying to her. No wonder Marnie feels worthless. Then an eccentric old lady invites her to live in a grace-and-favour cottage in the Yorkshire village of Wychwell, a hotbed of mystery and scandal. But maybe there Marnie can finally start to value herself and allow her broken heart to mend. A lovely romantic comedy with a cast of colourful characters – another masterpiece from Milly. I write about where I live because I was influenced by the best. I come from the same town as Barry Hines who wrote the iconic Kestrel foraKnave. He was a man bravely breaking barriers, writing about his home town when it wasn’t fashionable to do so. Twenty years ago I was sacked from a firm for having a “common accent” so I decided to stuff any book I eventually did write full of Yorkshire dialect. And I did. The great Barry Hines was my beacon – I’ve volunteered to be part of the project to help raise funds to finance a statue in his honour. I’m deliberately accessible to my readers because I’m grateful to them. Without them buying my books, I wouldn’t have a career. They write me the most amazing letters of support and their own stories – happy and sad. I know what sort of journey I’m in for when I start each new book. I know that I’ll stare at a blank screen and wonder how the heck I’m going to finish this book when I don’t even know where I’m going to start. But by the end I’ll have fallen in love with my characters and the little world I’ve built and I know I’ll miss it terribly.
It was my paternal grandparents that gave me the reading gene. They never had a book out of their hands (large print cowboy stories for my grandad, Mills and Boon for my nan). They bought me an Amelia Jane book by Enid Blyton when I was a little girl and I devoured it and wanted more. If I could gift that reading gene to my loved ones, I’d do it in an instant. I believe I came to this career at the right time. Though I would have loved to have been a novelist in my twenties, I write the sort of books that could only have come from years of a roller coaster life, from being kicked around the ring a few times. Nothing is ever wasted when you’re a writer – and I had a forty-year scrapbook to harvest when I started.