Author Interview

Lisa Jewell tells Caroline Lindsay how her writing career began

If anyone knows that life’s path doesn’t always run to course, it’s best-selling author Lisa Jewell, whose latest thriller Watching You is garnering great reviews.

Although she was a “bookish child” who enjoyed writing poems, that was all to change when she hit her teens.

“I really wanted to be a music journalist but ironically that was when I stopped actually reading books,” says Lisa, who has published 14 best sellers from what she calls “curry and flatmates” novels to more serious theme novels and domestic thrillers .

“When that didn’t happen, life took me off on a different path and I found myself in fashion retail working for (upmarket shirt-maker) Thomas Pink and climbing the career ladder. Books didn’t really feature in my life at all.

“I was PA to the director at Thomas Pink when there was a very fortuitous kink in my storyline,” she recalls.

“I had married very young and although it was a controlling relationship, my husband did get me back into reading. After we broke up I wanted to reclaim my life so I moved back to London and one of the things I did was sign up for a creative writing course.

“I had also just been made redundant and it was about this time that I read Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity,” she continues. “It just blew me away, really spoke to me, and made me think that perhaps I could write a female equivalent.”

When a close friend asked Lisa “What is your dream?”, she replied: “To write a novel.”

“That was the first time I’d said those words out loud,” she says. She wrote three chapters and sent them to an agent who asked her to write the rest. “That became Ralph’s Party, my first novel,” says Lisa.

She reveals she had originally intended the book to be a thriller. “But because of my optimistic outlook at the time

I was very keen everyone had a nice time in the story so it became a romantic comedy,” she smiles.

“Then of course it was a huge bestseller and the publisher was keen for me to continue in the same genre, so I found myself on the tracks of romantic comedy. I don’t like the term ‘chick lit’ – it sounds very dismissive.

“But life moves on and you change and I found myself drawn to the thriller genre,” she says.

Lisa explains that the process of writing a thriller is very different from a romantic comedy. “There’s the same arc: boy meets girl, perhaps a mystery to solve, and then everyone lives happily ever after.

“But with a thriller, I’m continually carrying around a mental box of tools and thinking: ’No, that wouldn’t work because...’ It’s much more technical.”

“Writing itself is a strangely unsatisfactory process,” she reveals. “What’s in your head never quite lives up to what you end up putting on the page. I do enjoy editing though – gradually making it into a better book.

“And I love the social side of being a writer – they say writing is a solitary occupation and it can be but I adore book festivals, going to library events and meeting people who are passionate about reading.”

● Watching You by Lisa Jewell is out now. Arrow paperback £8.99.