 Good evening and welcome to this online event from the British Library. Tonight we're absolutely delighted to be welcoming Joanna Cannon and Nina Stibby to talk about their books and their writing lives with Kathy Rensenbrink. It's in our classic British Library style, you can add your questions into the form below the screen later on, or at any time in fact during the conversation just below your video window. There's a screen where you can fill out your question and send in and we'll get to as many as we can. And also if you wanna buy the books by our authors today, there is a bookshop tab at the top of your screen. You can click and that'll take you through to the British Library bookshop and you'll be able to make an order if you want to. So as I said earlier, Kathy Rensenbrink is chairing tonight's conversation with Joanna and Nina. Kathy herself is an acclaimed memoirist and author of the Sunday Times bestseller, The Last Act of Love, as well as a manual for heartache, Dear reader, the comfort and joy of books and everyone is still alive. Kathy is also a regularly teaching creative writing to all newcomers, no matter what their experience of education, background or story, from Avon to a farm with the university and the festivals and even in prisons. And her book about memoir writing is called A Writer Talk Down and is out now, as is her first novel, Everyone Is Still Alive. It's gonna be a terrific conversation and I'll hand you over to Kathy. Thank you. Thank you very much, John. And it's such a pleasure to be here tonight. I feel very glad to be alive. I'm glad that everyone is still alive on this night because I feel very pleased to have the privilege of being here this evening with all of you with Joanna Cannon and Nina Stibby, novelists extraordinaire, I would say. They've also done other things as well. So we might even get on to some of that. So Joanna Cannon's first book was called The Trouble with Goats and Sheep. She's also written another novel about everything's about Elsie and a memoir breaking and mending about her life as a healthcare professional. Nina Stibby's first book was Love Nina and then she followed that collection of letters with a trilogy of novels about Lizzie Vogel, which we saw Lizzie go from a small girl and how she grew up and her latest book now is One Day I Shall Astonish the World. Joe's is a tidy ending. They're both extremely different novels, I think, but I think they are, I would say and maybe the novelists in question could disagree with me if they like. I think they're unified by both of them. They have an extremely strong voice. So from the first sentence, you feel that you are there with the character, the first person narrator. So I wonder Joe, could I start with you? Would you just tell us a bit about that voice, about how Linda arrived with you if that indeed is how it happened? Yeah, I completely agree with you on the voice thing. My novels always start with a voice at the risk of sounding vaguely psychotic. I always hear a voice and I think you need a strong voice, especially obviously character-led books as Nina and I both write. You need to have a strong voice and Linda, who's the main character in a tidy ending, actually started life as a short story. Used to go to stories allowed at Blackwells in Oxford and they had an evening where they would invite authors to write a short story and it would be narrated by an actor and you could either pay an entrance fee or you could bring cake. So I really enjoyed that event. And I heard an actor called Melissa Berry read various different authors' stories and she's Welsh and she has this kind of almost vaguely psychotic but just leaving a little lid on it, boiling over just about kind of voice. And I thought, oh, if I ever get asked to write a story I'm gonna ask Melissa to narrate it. And they asked me and I wrote this story about Linda which is called Captivating. And Linda's a kind of middle-aged woman living and a very hoarding as a estate. Married to a guy called Terry who she doesn't really love if she ever did, works part-time in a charity shop and really doesn't like her life. And they've moved into a new house and mail starts arriving for the woman who used to live in a house who's called Rebecca in a nod to Daphne in my favorite book of all time. And Linda starts comparing herself to Rebecca and who Rebecca might be. And she decides that if she can find Rebecca and make friends with her, some of Rebecca's magic will rub off on Linda. So she sets off to try and claim the life she believes she should have had. And in the meantime, a series of young women are going missing on the estate and her husband is keeping very odd hours at work but Linda's more interested in inviting the new Linda than she is in worrying about what her husband's up to. So hopefully Linda does have a strong voice and she's definitely got a Welsh voice. And I think she speaks perhaps for a lot of us who are a little bit dissatisfied with our lives. Yeah, she's certainly extremely powerful and I was very much, I was just involved from the first sentence in need that I didn't want to stop learning about her and her progress through this journey. I really liked the way you described it. I don't know if I'll get it right. I mean, please correct me if I don't. You said, she's married to a man called Terry and if she ever loved him, she doesn't anymore. Yeah, if she ever does. Yeah, if she ever did. Which is again, very poignant, isn't it? And full of promise. So that's the origins of Linda. And what about you Nina? How did Susan arrive? Susan arrived because I wanted to write a contemporary novel or written from the now and I wanted her to be older and I wanted her to be dissatisfied but very clever, but very ordinary. I think that's another thing these two women have in common. My narrator Susan and Joe's narrator Linda. They're really ordinary and they live in ordinary houses and have ordinary lives. And they feel that life could have been different. It could have been better. They've got a lot to offer, I think. They're both very bright. They're both philosophers, aren't they? They comment and they observe and Linda, Joe's narrator, although she's got a lot of particularly satisfying marriage with Terry, she doesn't really think much of marriage anyway, I don't think. Because she says at one point something like, oh, in fact, I've got it here. She says about, she sees a couple in the pub arguing and she says they hadn't, no. Yeah, she's a couple arguing. Linda says they hadn't been married long, I don't think. They're at the stage when you still have things you care about enough to argue about. They were at the early stage of marriage so they still bothered. And whereas I think my narrator is a bit more idealistic, I think she thinks there's perhaps more to be had out of that relationship. Whereas Linda's looking elsewhere. She's looking in herself, isn't she? Yeah. But yeah, the voice came from frustration from my narrator. She's frustrated, but she's very clever, I think. She's definitely clever. Very clever. And yeah, and so it went from there really. And we dig into this marriage thing a bit more because I did, you know, one of the things I've very much enjoyed about most novels is the, oh, I don't know. I mean, it's all right for people who like it, isn't it? But just novels where like the point is that someone gets married to someone else. I just find them so tedious. Yeah. Did you intentionally, both of you, want to put marriage in the dark or say something about marriage? Or, and you get it, you may not have done. Like, was marriage intentionally a thing? Yes. For me, the book was going to be about marriage until I sent my first draft and my publisher said, I like the marriage, but I'm much more interested in the friendship between these two women that's a dysfunctional friendship. So why don't you push the marriage back a bit and bring this friendship between these two middle-aged women to the fore, which I did. So my marriage is a little bit more foggy than it was in the first draft. And in the first draft, the book was utterly grim. I mean, really grim. My editor must have a really good marriage because she said this is unrealistic. And I went, oh, is it? Oh, yikes. Can you let her guide you away from that as the primary reason? Yeah. What about you, Joe? I think it was a little bit of a retaliation from me putting a commentary about, I mean, I'm not married, so I can't really comment on people's marriages, but whenever I do an interview, not your kind of interview, Cassie, because you're brilliant, but when I do kind of magazine and newspaper interviews, the three questions I am guaranteed to be asked, usually in quick succession is, are you married? Do you have children? How old are you? And I find it so dull. I find it so dull. And I know some people like to read about people getting married and having relationships, and that was brilliant because I could never write those books. But I just wanted to have a little commentary that life isn't quite as idyllic as the media would have as believers, advertising would have as belief because a lot of this, the problem with Linda, she compares herself to everyone. And she's comparing herself to unrealistic things that actually don't exist, things in magazines and brochures and online. And when I worked as a doctor before I was an author, I used to have a lot of outpatient clinics as a psychiatrist. And I see a lot of people with anxiety and depression. And as part of the history, you would say, can you remember how it started? And so many of them would say it started with something I saw on Facebook. And it would be this comparison thing, this comparing your life to somebody's curated version to the show reel of somebody else's, this perfect marriage and perfect children and a beautiful holiday and a wonderful Christmas tree. And it is this comparison that got Linda into the state that she's in. So I think marriages are part of that because we're bombarded with images of happy marriages, especially at certain times of the year. When we think if we're not living our life, there must be something wrong with us. So yes, I deliberately had a little dig at marriage, even though I'm not really in a position to do it because I'm not married. Well, I am. What about you, Nina? You might feel you've said enough about marriage. I don't want to needle you too much. Well, yeah. I mean, what can I say? The marriage is really not much fun. It's not awful and the narrator isn't at risk or there's no aggression. But it is quite dull and loveless and ordinary. And the narrator is just looking around at every other part of her life to find fulfillment. So she's not in love with her boss, but he listens to her and they do the crossword together. And she starts feeling romantic about him, not because she genuinely feels attracted to him, just that it's much nicer than being at home. Susan's husband puts his fingers in his ears like this when she talks sneakily. Does that? Susan's husband, I'm saying, you notice. Because he doesn't want to have to hear her. He just doesn't want to hear her rambling on and she gets home and he's sort of putting a golf ball into a paper cup and she's bored with that. So it's a two-way thing. And yeah, so my narrator is married and has a child and it's not particularly happy making. I think that's my point. Now I am married and I do have two kids and they're grown up now, but it hasn't been awful, but it's fun to write about it. Across the board there's just such a difference, isn't there, between expectation and reality, I think. And that whole grass is always greener, seems to have this really horrible modern application. Because as you say, Joe, everybody's envious about what they're seeing on Facebook, but they're envying stuff that's not real. I think that's the thing. And all the people that have... Well, sometimes the people that have got the thing that seems enviable, they're just showing the two minutes of it that they can stand. Yeah, absolutely. It's a stew of unhappiness, isn't it? With social media, I've got to the stage now where when I see those perfect posts, I don't do Facebook, but I do look at Instagram and I do a bit of tweeting. When I see the perfect things, it's gone so far for me now that I feel, oh my God, you poor cow. You've had to set all that up. Mike, you absolutely go and live. I honestly think people are beginning to think that's just crikey. How long did it take you to do that? Oh yeah, when you get these flat lay things where there's all these beautiful things in. Yeah. I mean, I do Instagram and I do try and make it look nice. I'll say, okay, get that napkin out of the way. I want to put our lobster on. And so I make everyone make it and people go, hurry up then, hurry up then. So I know just doing one of my crappy posts is a lot of faff and it's not real. So for me, it's like Brechtian. I know what's gone on. I know the hard work and I'm not particularly impressed. I would rather see a bit of chewing gum on the street that's gone into a pretty shape. Yeah. No, I completely agree. I completely agree. And I think we are getting wise to it. I hope so, but I think with young people, there's a documentary actually on BBC iPlayer about Instagram and eating disorders, which if anyone is interested in that is very well worth a watch. Very disturbing because I think, you know, with younger people, they are, they haven't got our life experience. Yeah. And they do take it all as reality and they are comparing themselves constantly. And I remember JoJo Moyes once was talking about a girl that she was on the tube next to, a young girl. He was taking endless selfies and deleting him, taking selfie, because they weren't good enough and it's a form of self-harm almost. Yes, agreed. It's very sad. Very sad. Yeah. So we've got all these themes, whilst not necessarily on the nose in the novels are there, aren't they? This notion of how difficult it is to compare yourself to other, well, how bad it is for you to compare yourself to other people, but maybe also how natural, it's very natural human thing to do it, isn't it? Nina, would you tell me, tell us a bit about the, this central friendship, because one of the things Susan does is kind of compare herself to her friend Norma, isn't it? Yeah. Yes. Susan has a very good friend called Norma, who she met when they were both undergraduates. And Norma goes from strength to strength academically and professionally and does very, very well. She doesn't, she does have a marriage or two, but they're never brilliant, she doesn't want to have children and doesn't, she wouldn't dream of having children because she's busy and focused. And she, she's not terribly sympathetic to Susan and her problems. She's quite hard on Susan, I think. She thinks she made a mistake having a child as early as she did, and she thinks you'll just dwindle intellectually and you'll never achieve anything. Anyway, she's proved right, because Susan does never achieve what she might pretty much. And so they have this rather difficult relationship, although they're best friends, they don't really get on terribly well and they're not actually that nice to each other. And that interested me, I mean, as I said earlier, interested my editor to the point that I made more of this friendship. But it was, what's interested me since the books come out is that some people think Norma is horrible to Susan and other people think Susan's just an idiot and that she, she's written a script and she, she's neurotic about Norma. That, you know, different people side with these two women, it's been quite interesting. And I sort of sided with Susan and thought Norma was mean, but more and more I think, actually, I think Norma is always honest and straightforward if a little abrupt, but she's, I think, perhaps Susan's misread her sometimes. And, yeah, which I think happens with friendships. I think these, again, it's a bit like a marriage. It's that thing where you see someone's got a really good pal and you think, oh God, you know, they're so great, these great pals. Well, great pals aren't always great. Yeah. They can be real bitches. Yeah. Sorry, but they can. It is the same, isn't it? I think that again, as well as envying people's pretend marriages, you can envy people's friendship groups, can't you? Or you need to think, like, gosh, that looks nice. I always envy. I've never had like a gang, you know, like all those TV programs assume that you've got some kind of gang around you. Yeah. The best days of our lives. That kind of, that sort of idea. And then you start thinking, like, was there something wrong with me that I'm not hanging around with five really photogenic people? I know. I actually wrote an opinion piece on this topic. And I was really nervous. I wrote a piece saying I've never had a best friend ever. And I was, I'm an only child of an only child. I was a kind of kid that hung around the edge of the playground and I had to join in. And I've never had a best, best friend. And like you said, the media will constantly pump the signatures that we need to have a best friend and female friendship is wonderful. And your female friend will stand your corner. And so I wrote this piece and my mum goes, do you really have to write that? People will think you're so strange. And I said, yes, I really do. And I was so nervous about this piece coming out, especially because it wasn't in a newspaper that I would choose to read myself, shall we say. And I had so much feedback from people saying that they were the same. They didn't have a best friend. The engagement on this piece is unbelievable. And it just shows, you know, it just takes one person to say, well, actually, I don't have a best friend. That makes me weird. But all these people feel, feel solidarity, which is great. Yeah. Well, my thing, my thinking was that even if you do have friends, they don't, we accept that sisters will argue and married couples will argue and neighbors will argue and colleagues will be competitive. But we think there's, female friends have to be these, either these sort of angels and, you know, saintly, patient, lovely, generous, giving, loyal, or they're in one of your novels, Joe, and they're a psycho. And they're going to, you know, sneak sugar in your tea or something like that. But I think that they're not necessary. I think they're like, just like one's siblings or one's mum or one's date with it. They're a mix. Yeah. But this is what people can't accept, I think, about female friendships. It's, it's odd. It's an odd thing. Yeah. Yeah. Another media controlled myth that we have to deal with. Yes. Just like to remind everyone that we would love to have your questions so you can ask questions about marriage, friendship, writing, whatever you like. I've got this, I've got this, I've got all poised for them to come through on my phone. So we'd love to hear from you. Nina, something else you said in the middle of that really interested me because you said about, you said the response, basically you kind of said that the response to the novel had made you rethink the novel and your characters in it. And I'm interested in that because I mean, I definitely do that. I mean, I'd almost say it's like, it's developed to the point where I almost think it's the point for me. I write a novel because I want to know what other people think about it or write a book because I want to know what other people think. And then that really enlarge and expand my mind whether I agree or not. But I'm not sure, I'm not sure that, I don't know, I don't know whether everybody else does that. So I was interested when you said it, that reader response did cause you to possibly change your mind about what was going on in the page. I think that Susan might have misread some things. Yes. More about that. Yeah. One critic who I would know what you call them reviewer said that, it might even have been you, Cathy, said that Susan and Norma could even be one person. They might, they could have been the two sides of one person. Now, if you hadn't said that or whoever it was, I'm, and I, some, if my neighbor had said it, I might pretend that that's what I was doing. Because somebody did it. Somebody, oh, it was Sorrow and Bliss. I don't know if you read it, Joe, the book by Meg Mason. Meg Mason, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She said that the two sisters in that book, the main character, Martha, had this sister, Ingrid. And she was going to have it that Ingrid was imaginary. And I think that's interesting that with a sister you could, you know, that would have worked. You didn't do it in the end. She decided not to. But equally, I could have done that. And so that you can play around with characters. But that's not really answering your question, Cathy. The answer to your question is, yes, I have changed my mind on who is the manipulative one out of my two main characters. And I think Susan's probably more guilty than I realized when I was writing her. Up until very recently, I have naturally been a people pleaser. I've just even sort of changed my opinion to agree with people. I don't want to upset them. But I'm trying to stop that because I realize that's a bad thing. I used to think it was a good thing. When I first started writing this novel, Susan's so giving and so thoughtful and so overly nurturing that I thought that made her good. I now think it makes her a bit of a twat. Sorry for using the t-word, but it does. She's an idiot. Very good. She's sweet, though, as well. No, but she's got to grow up. Has she? She has. How do you feel about when people say things about your novel? Does it ever make you think about it in a different way or add on? Or do you just think like, no, I knew what I was doing and you're reading it wrong? Well, I don't quite know how to follow that. I would say I always get really interested in which bits people pull out of a book that they enjoyed. That fascinates me. People will pull out sentences and paragraphs and scenes that they found particularly moving. And it's always something different for different people, which always fascinates me. Probably the most intriguing thing that I ever had said to me. There was a book club. I can't remember. It was abroad somewhere. It was like Morocco or Marrakesh or somewhere. And it was ex-pats. So it was a British book club. And they all read The Trouble with Goats and Sheep. And the woman who was in charge of the book club wrote to my agent, emailed my agent with this massive, massive, long email, like a dissertation about her analysis of the book, which my agent very kindly passed on to me. And at the end she said, in the final scene of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, there are 13 people standing on the avenue, which is clearly the 12 disciples in Christ, but which one of them is Judas. And I thought, damn it, why did I not think of that? I didn't even know how many people were standing on the avenue at the end of it. You know, people will see things in a book that you never even crossed your mind. But it is interesting because writing a book is like standing on a giant stage and saying, this is how I see the world. Does anybody else feel the same way? Which is a very vulnerable thing to say. So I love, like you, Kathy, I love the feedback because my books really is just me ironing out my thoughts and trying to understand myself better. And every book I write, when I look back, I think I know why I wrote that now. I know what was going on in my life that made me think those things and question that stuff. And that's why I wrote that book. So it's always fascinating for me to listen to how other people see it, definitely. And is it, I think it is from the way you phrased it, because this is how I feel. Like I might not know at the time or at the time I might think I want to do this because of this. And then much later on I'll think, oh, that was because of... Yes. Oh yeah, absolutely. There's something, especially with three things about LC, I wrote something really random that didn't really have any particular meaning to me on, say, page 27. On page 263, it all made sense. There was like this subconscious thing in my mind. I thought, that's why I said that. And it all came together. And I've spoken to other authors, and Nina's nodding, who have the same experience. There's some kind of subliminal level. Yeah. You are knitting this together in your mind and making sense of it, which fascinates me, especially somebody who's studied to the human mind. It does fascinate me how we do that, definitely. And do you think that because of that, I'm really interested to know, I'd really love to know about your process, both of you. I used to think that you, I don't know, I needed to learn to be a better planner or whatever. I used to get cross with the fact that I couldn't really think in a linear way. But lately, mainly because I think I read something Hilary Montel said about this, which is that because the main job of it is just to sort of like make yourself available so that all this stuff that you don't understand that we're talking about can happen. You're not trying to be too kind of like whip-cracky about it. That might be me rather than her. I basically mind melded myself with Hilary Montel there. But what do you think about that, Jo? Do you try to leave some freedom in the work or do you kind of plan it? I don't plan it at all. I have no post-it note theme going on. I think if you write something that's like a police procedural or a thriller, you need to have it all planned out. You write yourself into a corner. But because Nina and I write character-driven things, you have a lot more freedom. And I always know the last line of every book I've written. I always know exactly the last line. And I have the voice of either Grace or Tilly or Linda. And off we go on a journey. And I know it's as if I was saying, well, I know I'm going to Glasgow and I'm going to arrive in Glasgow. I don't know what roads I'm taking. I don't know where I'll go and call for petrol. I'm going to end up in Glasgow. And I don't always. Sometimes I wake up in Torquay. I have to rearrange this slightly. I'm going the wrong way. But that is my method. And when I wrote Goats and Sheep, I didn't know the face of Christ would appear on a drain pipe. I had no idea. And I think if I planned it all in post-it notes, I wouldn't have ever gone there because I would have had this kind of corridor of thinking that I loved the freedom of not knowing where Linda is going to take me. I'm surprised that this latest book, A Tidy Ending, wasn't meticulously planned because it does read like a thriller that has been actually meticulously plotted out. No, no, I just... Wow, that's amazing. I just have a little time on my hands. Yeah, but I don't plan either, I don't think I'm going to be up with anything approaching that, you know, the story developing in that way and all the pieces and, you know... I think you do. I think you do. No. Gosh. So what do you start with? Do you start with a voice and then just let it take you? I start with a voice and I build around lovely details that I like. So the face in the drain pipe, Christ's face in the drain pipe, something like that, they already have copious notes with, you know, award-winning fruitcake or a cheese plant or a dog with three legs. I love that, yeah. You know, that's how I do it and I just build everything. The story has to build around the things I like and I have been slightly negatively reviewed because of that but then most of my readers seem to not mind so I'm not going to mind too much. Also, three of my four novels have been very autobiographical and it's been much easier because I sort of know where... I know I'd stop when we were living there and doing that and then I'll sort of stop it there but this last book was much harder but I still didn't plan it. Can you tell us a bit more, Nina, about those autobiographical novels and why you decided to... Given that you wanted to write autobiographically, I mean, why did you decide to write novels, not memoirs? I thought I wouldn't be able to say all the things I was saying. Simply this, if... I thought the people I was writing about would be furious and try and kill me if I wrote the truth but then I just did it and then I said I'll pretend it's a novel and then very quickly, somehow said it wasn't. I mean, it's not 100% autobiography, it's like 90% probably and I've got rid of a few family members because there were too many to handle but yeah, I thought people would be absolutely furious, especially my parents but yeah, they weren't. Well, they might have been and they're just lying but I think they seem alright with it. My dad died anyway, so it doesn't really matter anymore. Sorry, Cathy. Sorry, that sounded awful. What I mean is he was alive for three of them and seemed to enjoy everything. Yes. It didn't sound awful, we knew what you meant. We knew exactly what you meant. It was funny, which is what it was. You were funny and because life is funny even when it's difficult and people don't. It sounded as if I wrote a few novels and it killed him. I wrote a few memoirs disguised as novels and it killed the poor guy but no, he's fine. My mum was fine. I mean, the weird thing is Jo just said it's funny when readers tell her what parts of her novels they really find moving and they love and it's different every time. The thing I found oddest about people responding to my books particularly the first three is the things that my family have minded. So I'll say to my mum read this quickly, hurry up because I've got to hand it over. Is there anything you don't want me to put in there? Some of the things the mother does in the novel are really naughty and bad and not very good parenting but the things she's minded have been really odd. For instance, there's one part of a book where she sends the mother sends her 9 and 10 year old to London from the Midlands to get her drugs and it's a regular thing and off these girls go and they buy these drugs and then with a wad of money buying illegal drugs and of course my mum would remember that we did do that. So I thought, she'll probably say you can't have that, you going up to this doctor and getting these drugs so you'll have to take that out and I was fully expecting to do that. So at the end I said to her okay, what do you think? She went, oh God, there's one thing though it's just Danny. I just couldn't believe it. I said, so okay, well you don't like that. Anything else? And she went, no, I think everything's perfectly fine. And Colm to Bean has a story about when his mother, he'd written about his mother quite brutally and he said, is there anything you really can't bear and she, Colm to Bean's mum said, yes I hate it the way you have me collecting the cutlery and just plonking it down on the dinner table and not setting it all out should it make me look so slovenly and he couldn't believe it he thought, well hang on but what about all these cruel things that you do? But so you just never know. This is true, this is true. So it's not necessarily it's not necessarily a defence but it's done quite well for you hasn't it though writing the autobiographical novels. Would you recommend it if anybody's wondering if anybody thinks that their material is a bit too hot to handle your memoir? I would, I mean it's difficult because I don't want to be flippant about other people's difficult, the difficult things in people's lives and I remember being asked this question probably by you and Satnam Sangira was on stage and he said, I wouldn't recommend it it's really hard whereas I'd say, yeah do it God you get it all out without your dad revealing your mother was promiscuous and an alcoholic and we all have a good laugh but it's not, so yes it's been great for me but I'm not going to suggest everyone should do it Not necessarily for everyone Joe I would imagine probably being asked whether there's any autobiographical stuff in your novels is an annoying question for you isn't it which I'm not asking you even but it's a segue on from the previous thing I wonder if you want to talk a bit about I don't know just like how you find your subjects or where the inspiration comes from I mean do you if you're looking for something new like is it inactive I want to find a subject for my next novel or do you always have lots of ideas circling in the air? I think and you could never ask an annoying question I think my characters just arrive in my head I think I spend a lot of time on my own so I end up talking to imaginary people and they arrived quite fully formed and I think what they got to tell me what story is Linda going to tell me but as far as autobiographical I obviously wrote Breaking and Mending which was autobiographical about my time as a junior doctor and I was asked to write that I was invited to write that I welcome after I've done an event with them and when they said oh do you fancy writing a memoir about how stressful being a junior doctor is and I thought oh yes I've got lots to say about that and it was the hardest thing I have ever done it was so hard because I had to revisit things that I had put away in my head and not really dealt with and I can remember I did a reading from Breaking and Mending and I also did a reading all the time with Goats and Sheep and Elsie but this was Breaking and Mending and I had to stand on the stage in front of 200 strangers and talk about my life and it was really really awful I mean it was therapeutic in the end but oh my goodness and to not be able to hide behind characters because all of my books have got bits of me in I'm not saying I'm completely Linda but there are bits of me there are bits of Linda in me definitely but Breaking and Mending was the whole of the ball game and I can remember sitting at the kitchen table writing it and I write two very long chapters about some really awful things that happened and I wrote them and I knew they would never end up in the book and when I finished writing them I got up on the kitchen table, walked across the kitchen and threw them into the auger because I knew they wouldn't end up in the book but I had to get them out I had to kind of exercise myself but I found it really tough it was brilliant in the end it was definitely well worth doing but it was very very hard a lot harder than I thought it would be The most moving bit of your novel Joe for me was Linda's wisdom on life was her just commentating on it just looking around and saying you know the thing that I've mentioned earlier about the couple arguing this is my favourite first of all I think it's a hilarious book thank you I shouldn't say is it meant to be but is it billed as a hilarious book? I think it's billed as a dark comedy but I think you have to have joy and laughter as we were saying earlier even in bad situations and I like Linda she's a good commentator she's very funny she says this she says she's talking about being at the pub so again we get that whole thing about what it's really like being a married couple going out on a Friday evening to the pub it ain't that great she says Terry always gets himself two pints at last orders and I have to sit there and watch him drink them and that's marriage I don't mean literally it's an element of marriage they've got it set up they know they can't get another pint so they're going to get two and that means you're not going home yet you've just got to wait while they swig them down and I'm not married but I can heavily relate to Linda's experience I grew up watching Talking Heads and I think it's that kind of narrator and that voice that I really love because I could remember watching those when I was very young and thinking oh my god I know who these people are they've only said two sentences and I know who they are and I think it's affected me so much that it made me listen to voice a lot more I could see Julie Walters as Linda she'd be fab wouldn't she she would be good we need more older female characters well yes absolutely I was wondering also if we could talk about dogs because is it fair to say there's quite a lot of dogs going on in both of your novels quite dogs quite a lot of dogs there will always be dogs in our novels we were saying earlier always dogs I mean so much so that I hadn't put much of a dog I didn't want my narrator to have a dog because I didn't want her life to be that nice I wanted it to be I didn't want her to have anything really perfect so she's only really allowed to she fosters a dog with this I think I call it the blueberry trust it's a cinnamon trust cinnamon trust yeah I've adopted and fostered on cinnamon so she has this dog and it causes a row because she's agreed to look after a dog while somebody goes on a bereavement cruise and her husband's crossed not because he doesn't like the dog just because Susan had agreed to do it without checking with him though the dog becomes part of her general yeah yeah yeah my book is dedicated to my last dog oh I saw that there is definitely a dog in my book he died during lockdown during the first lockdown and he was there for every page that I wrote so I thought this is logical to then dedicate the book to him so there he sits yeah always be dogs always dogs make the world go round do you like reading about dogs in other people's novels yes yeah definitely I always judge people by if they like dogs or not or if they're like animals or not I think it's a good barometer of somebody's character but sometimes they get it wrong don't they they do get it wrong they'll have a dog lover who clearly doesn't actually love dogs because they just leave the dog at home all day on its own and you think hmm I don't know whether I like you that much now because poor old cookie's been on her own all day yeah we judge put you off then if somebody's not treating their dog very well there's a recent novel by a great author that has a dog that's not very well looked after and it did I love the author and I love the book because it's funny but I did slightly think yikes you should have had it sensitivity read yeah we could have done that couldn't we yeah we could have done it put ourselves forward for sensitivity reading to animals totally if ever our writing dries up we can offer that up to publishers I think we'd be excellent because people would say to me why don't you become a vet doctor because you love animals so much it's because I've been taking people's dogs off them all the time because I didn't think they deserved them I've been confiscating people's animals yeah you know when sometimes people write a story from the perspective of the dog would I consider doing that hmm no I don't think I think it's weird on people speaking cat and dog voices on the internet I mean good for them and everything they like doing that that's lovely well you mean you mean where the where the dog you could have Lewis the dog yeah yeah because people say to me why doesn't Lewis have his own twitter account and he can talk to us and I thought if I ever do that please kill me I just couldn't if people want to do that that's lovely and I'm not I'm not throwing shade at anyone in particular but it always freaks me out very slightly when people start speaking in cat voices I just I just think it's a little bit a little bit strange hmm so I can't imagine writing a whole book from Lewis's perspective I think that would be a little bit bit limited and a bit weird I think I don't know I think there's been a couple of good ones there was one do you remember I cheetah was the chin no I cheetah I remember it Kathy yeah it was written from the perspective of cheetah the chimpanzee yeah I went to the book launch for that at London too yeah oh wow that must have been amazing it was amazing yeah but it was a comedy it wasn't you know that's the I think that's what made it work that it was it was absurd and he was mischievous he had all sorts of comments but you know the great and the good have done it I mean Virginia Woolf's written has she read this book's voice or has she did she write in the dog's voice didn't she which was about Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog was it in flash it was flash was it I don't know I don't think I've ever read it when she and Vita Satwell West had their love affair their correspondence with each other is full of like chat about their dogs Virginia says something like I'm going to get this a bit wrong but it's something like her dog was called Grizzle and something like I came back feeling ashamed not that Leonard would notice I'd been seduced but that Grizzle has that kind of all this kind of like flirty dog chat which is quite funny I wonder about it not that I ever do want to do it but I spend an awful lot of time in my house about my daily work wondering what the cats are thinking of me or all of us wondering if the cat and I definitely think all the cat I think really likes it when I go away and I'm sure when I come back she sort of looks at looks obviously is becoming the dog and she's oh she's back again when when I'm away she gets to sleep on my side of the bed likes it that way so I definitely feel like when I when I come back I feel she's a bit like oh that one but again I have no idea whether what's going on in her cat mind and whether that is in any way because it could be objectively true I think her life probably is a little bit less nice when I'm here taking up space in the bed and you know that so she doesn't get to sleep on my side of the bed anymore but I don't know whether she don't know what it says about me that I think even the cat doesn't know I do like I do like stuff about dogs and cats I love the Mary Oliver poems about dogs I think she's amazing which is amazing anyway but it's called dog songs I think or something like that that's beautiful I love stuff like that really really nice there's a recent dog that I love in a book which is in Bonnie Garmes' lessons in chemistry she has this adorable dog who's called 630 and it's from his point of view for a couple of key moments in the novel and it's rather good I liked it I've got that my chibi red piles it's really great and I did when I was a kid my sister was a horse lover and at a young age got a lovely horse and my mum decided that I had to have one to make it even to be fair and I kept saying I don't want a horse I'm 6 years old I just don't want one but she made me have one and I had him for I got him when I was 7 and I had him till I was 14 and I adored him for the first couple of years I really was terrified of him and I kept weeing myself and making his saddle go mouldy but I adored him once I got used to him but he was really naughty and charismatic and just mischievous and I did say in my first autobiographical novel that I had my character who is me say I am going to write a book all about this pony and people constantly say when are you going to write the book about Maxwell and I think there wouldn't be enough to say it would be a tiny it would be a merry Oliver poem but we'd all read it so definitely definitely I find horses quite terrifying anyway I find they're beautiful I love them but I do remember when I first went riding you don't realise how big a horse is until you're standing next to it I thought oh my god but I do love them I do and I love the therapy I've seen footage of horses as therapy like equine therapy it's quite incredible how the horse can do yeah they are they're amazing can I ask you both about your process in the sense of obviously we've talked about not planning but can I ask about like do you write a particular time of day do you have all that sort of thing what you've got going on with that I'll let Nina go first because I'm not normal and I'm sure Nina is I'll let Nina answer your question first I don't know if I'm normal I know when the best time is and I know what I should do and when I do it I get great results and that is if I started writing very early in the morning before I do anything else before I put the radio on or look at my phone or anything like that or speak to anybody I did it yesterday morning actually and I thought oh god I've got to start doing this again because I was just going great guns but I for some reason I don't do it I know I should but I get to sort of 11 o'clock and I think ok now I've done Pilates I've listened to the news I've done all the other things I need to do now I'll get some writing done but my brain's already gone a bit funny by then so I know what I should do but I don't do it what about you Joe I do what you just described I get up I go to bed quite early depending on what's happening I get up about two half two I walk Lewis clear my head and then I write and I write when there's no one else around I write when there's no emails when Twitter's at a standstill and Instagram's at a standstill there's no disruption my head isn't cluttered with anything I've not spoken to anyone I've done anything and I just sit and write and I've always done that since I wrote Goats and Sheep when I was at medical school because it was the only time I could have myself so I've always written very very early in the morning and then by kind of two o'clock in the afternoon I'm done that's my evening kind of time but I'm much more productive first thing in the morning before anybody or anything has entered my brain because I need complete silence and peace peace of mind to write so how early did you say that was I get up about two half two that is very, so I think of that as the middle of the night I know most people when I go online, if I do go online people haven't gone to bed yet but to me that because I did an interview recently and the guy I was talking to said have you ever tried being normal and getting up and going to bed normal doesn't work for me, I've tried it it doesn't work, I can't write when the day's going on around me I have to have that silence and I love the peace and quiet it's the dawn breaking I write into the dawn it's lovely and I think it just doesn't work for me any other way I need that peace and quiet so it's a bit of a bug I'm trying to go to bed early especially this time of year when it's like bright sunshine and 20 degrees but it does work for me and I think that's the thing with if there are any aspiring writers or writers listening I used to read what other people did I've got to do that they get up at this time and do this and they write notes there are no rules I know Kit DeVal writes very late Lionel Shriver is working on the opposite body clock to me because we shared a publicist at one point and it's what works for you and what you feel good doing and that's the most important thing not what everyone else does in my opinion I'm always tempted to try out other people's I know for me it's the first thing no distractions not really much more than a couple of hours if I do a couple of hours that's a good day but when I I love asking other people what they do and then I really would like to I'd like to spend a whole book do a chapter by chapter like chapter one, the Joanna Cameron method and see if I could do it without going that would be great that would be good that would be really fun not just time you could do it like because Patrick Gale writes his novels in long hand so whenever I'm with him I always think like oh I could write my novel in long hand and then I'll talk to someone who's basically like done it on the you know the notes app on their iPhone and think like oh I could try it like that so maybe I could do the same for every chapter I could have someone else's bit of process and just give it a whirl and see what happens I can remember reading about somebody that wrote and it ended up being a best-selling novel and they wrote it on the tube on their phone they were commuting and it just blows my mind because I can't have any about you Nina but I can't have anything round me noise and I need silence and I would love to be able to go to coffee shops and write like all these fashionable people do but I just can't because I'd be too busy eavesdropping and I need silence do you write in silence or do you No I like something going on it can't be my own family okay no I can't so ideally for me it would be a really nice but not too noisy but sort of a cafe outside with no wind and stuff going on but quite quietly so one of my books I wrote a lot of it in this hotel garden in Mallorca on a family holiday and I just I went to this really nice little shady place and I thought oh god I'm just going to get this table every day and just write my book and I did and I thought that's what I want but I can't afford to go and do that so I'd go in cafes here in Truro where I live or London where I am a lot I'm quite good on a train but I'm not good in my own house yeah that's problematic I know when Kathy and I did our event with Elizabeth today and she normally writes in a coffee shop and she said to Kathy that when lockdown was on she downloaded some app that gave you coffee shop noise so that she could drive to a coffee shop noise because she was so used to it so it's weird how you get and I think it's a kind of mental relaxation thing when you're on holiday sitting in that lovely shady shady seat your mind relaxed and allowed it I didn't have in that setting I didn't have to do any washing or shopping or cooking not even for me, for nobody I had no responsibility so I think that's the thing that it's horrible when you've got to run your life as well as you're on the book I think that's tough because everything encroaches on and I found in lockdown I couldn't write at all for a long time I couldn't even read I was too busy being frightened to death and anxious and scrolling the Guardian live blog every day about what was going on and I just I couldn't even read a book, I couldn't watch film couldn't do anything and my concentration was just screwed, awful so it really affects you your kind of landscape really affects you I do think getting away from the domestic front is the ideal theme but when I come the thing that cheers me up when I read that Agatha Christie used to think out her plots whilst doing the washing up so when I have to do domestic stuff which of course I hate I just keep trying to remind myself of that and see if I could rather than just boil with resentment see if I could put any of that mental space to good use I used to have really bad panic attacks when I was a teenager really really awful panic attacks and washing up was the thing that calmed me down I found it really, I think the warm water and the kind of repetitive and you didn't have to think and that used to really so I can relate to Agatha on that level I think it works a different part of your brain and allows your mind to relax a little bit weird times tell me both of you do you like the process of your book jackets being decided upon do you have input into it is that an enjoyable thing does it matter to you I've got the finished copy of yours here Nina and Joe I've got your proof I don't know if you've got one to hand so this is I just have to disappear off the screen for a minute but give me a second and I will get the finished copy I love this bit from the back the daffodils shall I start talking about that while Joe is looking for her book I love the covers coming in because they come in so early that it gives you a real sense of it's happening and it gives me a spur so I quite like it with that particular cover Cathy I showed it to my daughter and she said the woman's nose is too small why do women always have to have tiny little button noses and you know why does she look so pretty when so we uglyed her up bluntly not that it's meant to look like me I know that sounds an odd thing to say it's not meant to look like a Jewish woman it's meant to just look like somebody who isn't you know a woman on the front cover of a book so that was interesting I'm back with a negative comment and they did give her a bigger nose and they did sort of scruff her hair up a bit but I like it I like all the cover business what about you Joe well I've got a finished copy here and it's Claire Ward and her team of Collins who do the most amazing covers and I knew I loved it the minute I saw it because I love the Magpie because we were originally when we were looking at titles we were looking at various garden birds but then there was a huge outpouring of garden bird title books and I thought no no no we can't have garden birds there's a lot of garden birds so some of the Harbour Collins came up with the title but the Magpie survived the garden bird coal and the upside down daffodils and the same as you it feels real you start getting a cover and titles I like to have a title you have the best titles Nina your books mint titles yeah I love this title oh thank you because and the thing is it's absolutely true it's such a tight it really is but it's tidy in Welsh there's a slightly different connotation when something's tidy so yeah it all worked together it worked well we struggled with titles with this one Goats and Sheep I already had it ready a few things about Elsie my editor came up with and this one's not Harbour Collins had the genius idea when you're writing do you not know the title I didn't with this one no I didn't with this one which I don't like I like to have a title because I to quote Julie Curran author who does a lot of creative writing teaching she said you should be able to sum your book up and what it's about in one word and you need to put that word in a post-it note you need to put it above your laptop wherever you write and keep focusing on that word and it's such a good thing to do it really focuses your attention and I find that with titles as well I find that it helps me focus on what I'm trying to say if I think about the title did you have yours at the beginning or did it no I didn't I was going to I was going to call it oh god I can't remember I was going to call it something to do with driving and and then I decided I'd have it the motto of the university and then I looked for a motto and in fact my son's girlfriend came up with it it's a real motto isn't it really? there's a tiny little college in Durham that is called that's the motto of the college it's a tiny part of Durham University it's an old education college I think you need to get your marketing people to bring out some merch because I totally buy some merch with that I think it's a brilliant title fabulous thank you but it's funny I didn't like one of my titles I thought was really clever but I didn't think it would work and when I told my editor I said oh so and so said it should be called Paradise Lodge and she went oh that's brilliant yes we'll do that and I thought oh I'll go with it but actually now I think probably not what about you Kathy you've got a great title for your current novel yeah but I'm just interested in what was it before Paradise Lodge I hadn't got a title it was called Lizzie 16 I've got a title my friend said that there was a television program setting an old people's home that wasn't called this but the old people's home not the TV program was called Paradise Lodge and he said it was something like it was about old people it was Stephanie Beecham yeah it was called Waiting for God and they were in Paradise Lodge and it just seemed quite funny it seemed quite literary and funny but then I thought the word Paradise isn't good and Lodge isn't a good word so I didn't like it but then Mary my editor went oh my god that's perfect so I went oh yeah hooray but really I shouldn't have called it that that's me being a people pleaser you see I should have said no Paradise is a really bad word and Lodge is boring how are you addressing this people pleasing thing because I need tips because I'm like a Labrador puppy with people how are you you said you're addressing it are you doing that anymore I'm just trying to be more honest so the main thing is to say oh no thank you no I don't want to do that and just being less eager to make everybody love me because I think there's authors you feel no matter where you are in your career you feel as though you've got to go the extra mile with people and you've got to say yes to everything because you're so lucky that you're who you are and you've got the best selling book and you need to just accept that you need to do stuff and it's hard to say no it is and of course I've become an author quite late in life and I was already I became a people pleaser when I had kids because I remember my mum being terribly disapproved of and hated and nobody liked her and they were just you know they were fed up with her and I thought I am not that woman so I became this perfect parent endlessly making fucking cakes and you know just doing all the stuff and it I just overdid it you know going for mother of the year the whole time and then I became an author and I yeah this feeling that I should be grateful all the time so it's a perfect storm so I'm you know I'm a bit trying to be amusing about it but actually I am trying to be better and I am saying look I'm really glad you've invited me but I just don't want to go to that place on that day and I'll do you know do ask me again but no yeah it's tough call though I can't think why I would have thought you were much stronger than that oh no I'm hopeless yeah and I think it's a I was analysing this the day and I think it comes from a feeling a lack of self-worth that you need external approval to feel good about yourself and in order to get this is me personally not everyone and in order to get that external approval you have to please people and then you get you get this approval the sense of self-worth doesn't come from inside it's an external thing which is very dangerous has to go down but I think that's where mine comes from it's wanting to please people so therefore I get approved and I feel validated and also as women I don't know if male authors feel obliged to say yes to everything but as women you know very often when people will say oh you've done so well you've written these books and you I'll say yes I've been very lucky actually no I might there might have been fortune in there but I've worked bloody hard for this but you never acknowledged that you say yes I've been very lucky and that's your standard answer and people promise you something and this is all the narrative the narrative is screwed you know it's a wonder it's no wonder we walk around trying to please everybody because our internal narrator is constantly nagging at us that we've just been very lucky we should be very grateful for what we've got which we are but you know it's still I don't know that's my that's my psychology hat on well you have both very much pleased me tonight not that that was your job and not that you had to it's just happened as a very delicious product of having you both here to talk with such generosity and openness about your books and your writing and your lives so thank you very much indeed Joanna Cannon and Nina Stibbeat for a really excuse me thank you Kathy for being such a brilliant interview as always as always thank you Kathy