The Making of Us
Page 37
4. The Making of Us is your ninth novel. Have you found that your writing has changed since Ralph’s Party (1999)?
I hope so. It’s hard for me to be objective. My readers would probably be better placed to comment on that. I definitely have to try harder and harder with each book to avoid repeating myself, which results in new ways of using language and describing things. I have also discovered the joy of a proper story line. My first few books were very much jumping in at the deep end and seeing where I ended up. These days I’d rather have a structure in place and a solid concept behind the characters.
5. Do you have a particular routine you follow when you write?
It does tend to change a lot, but at the moment I am enjoying having both my children in school and having the run of the house again. Before I used to have to rush to the gym to get my youngest in the crèche and then rush to the café to meet the child minder then cloister myself away in my room at the top of the house. Now I’m free as a bird, currently writing this in the kitchen. Such joy! But I do most of my writing in the café next to my gym. I like the white noise and people watching and not having any access to the internet. They also make much better coffee than me.
6. Which character in The Making of Us did you enjoy writing most?
All of them. Genuinely. In fact, when I delivered the manuscript to my editor I said to her that it was the first book I’d written where I was equally excited about writing from each character’s perspective. Every time I got to a Maggie chapter I’d think, “Ooh, goodie, it’s Maggie.” And the same with all the others. That was the joy of writing the book for me.
7. Your fans often comment on how much they love your characters and how relatable they are. How do you make them so “real?” Do you base them on people you know, or are they purely fictional?
All my characters are entirely fictional. But also entirely real. They do just tend to arrive in my head fully formed, and I just have to find a good name for them (I’m anal about names) and then decide what to do with them. There’s no trick to it. At the risk of sounding a bit airy-fairy, it just sort of happens.
8. What is your next novel about?
Well, once again it’s nothing like the book I thought I was going to write. It was going to be a 1990s Britpop rock chick fluffy love story. But it had no intrinsic structure, and, like I say above, I do need that structure these days. (Must be getting old!) It is about a young girl named Betty who arrives in London in 1995 to try and trace the mysterious beneficiary in her grandmother’s will, a woman called Clara Pickle whose last known address was in Soho. The story is threaded through with flashbacks to her grandmother’s secret life in London in the early 1920s. So it’s part coming-of-age, part romance and part mystery. It’s called Before I Met Her, and it will be published in the U.S. summer 2013.
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The House We Grew Up In
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph © JASCHA GORDON
LISA JEWELL was born and raised in north London, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. She is the internationally bestselling author of twelve novels, including Before I Met You and The House We Grew Up In. One of the UK’s most talented contemporary novelists, she has sold more than 2 million books in the UK and is published in more than twenty countries. To find out more about Lisa, visit Facebook.com/LisaJewellOfficial, or follow her on Twitter @LisaJewellUK.
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Also by Lisa Jewell
The House We Grew Up In
Before I Met You
The Making of Us
After the Party
The Truth About Melody Browne
Roommates Wanted
Vince & Joy
A Friend of the Family
One-Hit Wonder
Thirtynothing
Ralph’s Party
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Lisa Jewell
Originally published in Great Britain in 2011 by Century
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Atria Paperback edition August 2012
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Cover design by Laywan Kwan
Cover photograph by Melica/Getty Images; girl in red coat by iStockphoto; man by Howard Kingsnorth/Getty Images; girl crossing street © Onoky-Photononstop/Alamy
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jewell, Lisa.
The making of us : a novel / by Lisa Jewell.
p. cm.
1. Sperm banks—Fiction. 2. Artificial insemination, Human—Fiction. 3. Life change events—Fiction. 4. Family secrets—Fiction. 5. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 6. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PR6060.E9
5M35 2012
823'.914—dc23
2012009042
ISBN 978-1-4516-0911-0
ISBN 978-1-4516-0913-4 (ebook)