Jojo Moyes, writer

0:00Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:46My cast away this week is the writer Jojo Moyes. Her books have been translated into 46 languages, sold over 57 million copies and reached the number one spot in 12 countries. She grew up in East London, the daughter of two young hippies with a work ethic. Her own CV includes working in a minicab office and cutting her teeth as a journalist while writing fiction in her free time. Her breakthrough book, Me Before You, is the story of a young quadriplegic man who wants to end his life and the young woman who wants to persuade him not to. It was a global phenomenon and became a hit film, though she almost didn't write it.

1:23It was a fellow novelist who convinced her to keep going. She says, the story of my life is launching into things because no one could give me a good reason why I shouldn't. Jojo Moyes, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you for having me. I'm so ridiculously thrilled to be here. I cried when I was asked to come. I think if you're the daughter of two Radio 4 listeners and have grown up listening to this, it feels like the kind of pinnacle of my professional career. So thank you. Well, we are so delighted to have you. So let's go back to those astonishing statistics, shall we, Jojo? You're 46 languages your work's been translated into.

2:00I wonder which part of the world embracing you was most surprising. I think it was Brazil. I had to have bodyguards in Brazil. And at the time I was out there, which I think was 2016, they told me I was bigger than J.K. Rowling at that point, which is quite the thing. But I remember being surrounded by these bodyguards in a shopping centre in Sao Paulo while I was doing an event in a bookshop. And I felt like I'd been caught shoplifting. if you come from East London being surrounded by four burly guys in kind of earpieces just takes a different resonance yeah so you say that it actually took quite a few years before you saw one of your books in the wild somebody reading it in the dentist I think yes oh god it was about eight years I think and um I have a I go to a tiny NHS dentist where I used to live in Essex and I was sitting down and I looked to my right and she was holding a copy of still me and I couldn't believe it because I'd wanted to see it all these years and people had sent me photographs of them seeing copies of my books.

2:58And so I finally plucked up courage and I said, excuse me, that's my book. And she went, no, it's not. I got it from the library. I had to show her a copy of my face on the flyleaf and then she got it and we had a good laugh. Now we are about to turn to the music. What role does music play in your life, Jojo? It's so huge. I use it for so many things. I use it to work too. I mostly though use it as a mood enhancer I use it like some people use drugs to bring me up or bring me down and I think the piece that we're about to play is the ultimate bringer upper for me you wouldn't want to use this too many times or else you'd become addicted and immune to it and actually I bring it out sparingly but when I use it it has the most amazing effect it's Elvis Presley singing Are You Lonesome Tonight but it's the version where he collapses into giggles

4:08and I had no cause to die

4:19I saw you, baby.

4:24The entire country now absolutely lost it, along with Elvis Presley. Are you lonesome tonight? The laughing version to kick us off, Jojo Moyes. So let's go back to the beginning then, Jojo. You were born in 1969, the only child to a very young couple of art students, your parents, Lizzie and Jim. And you were very early as well, 10 weeks premature, which in those days was very early indeed. Well, I think they initially told my mum I hadn't survived. She told me a story of being in a salt bath because that's what they used to give mothers after they'd given birth. Sounds delightful, doesn't it?

4:56And she said once they told her I was alive, she sort of leapt out of the salt bath and ran to see me. And I was in an incubator. And in fact, my parents, I think, got rid of a lot of the pictures because they were almost too awful to look at. I was such a, I look like one of those baby pigeons, you know, but I survived. There was obviously some grit in there, but that's where my name comes from, because my mum had to christen me in a hurry because they thought I was close to death. And so she named me after her three friends, Pauline, Sarah and Jo. And then once they realised I was going to live, they just thought there's no way we can call this little scrap Pauline.

5:35So I became Jojo. And it was because there was a Beatles song around at the time called Get Back. And so I've always been Jojo, even though Pauline is on my passport. And what about your parents then? How did they cope being in that situation at quite a young age, I think? I think it was very difficult, not just because my granny, who I loved very much, but my granny was a strict Catholic and my grandparents on that side of the family were very upper middle class. My grandfather was a naval commander. And so I don't think my arrival was greeted with, you know, great cries of hurrah. However, once I was there, everybody was pretty happy.

6:13although I did discover much later in life and I've talked to my dad about this that there were plans to have me adopted and I discovered this in my 20s and it's quite a weird thought because it depends who you speak to in my family which version of this you get but apparently somebody told me there was a doctor's family in Gloucester who were primed to take me but both my mum and dad told me afterwards that once I'd arrived there was no way they were going to give me up and they both sort of fell in love with me and they got married and things became a lot more traditional to a point I mean they were still creative they'd been at art school but they still use their creativity to make a living your mum became an illustrator very successful one do we still see her painting on our packets of tea she did the Yorkshire tea packets and it was her work on there for decades and my dad started off they both had to give up art school because of my arrival sorry parents and my dad set up a company called Momart which started off just ferrying around works of art for galleries in Cork Street in a little blue Renault van but then became bigger and bigger and more successful and by the time dad sold it back in the 90s it was responsible for the government art collection it stored all sorts of important pieces of art and it also had a royal warrant.

7:35So dad basically built that from nothing. And you were there every step of the way because I think you spent a lot of time with your dad growing up. I did. So there's a picture of me as a six-year-old sitting on a flatbed lorry reading a book right next to a Henry Moore sculpture. But all my early memories are of either sitting under my mum's desk as she worked or going around with my dad or sitting in his warehouse. And he, in his warehouse were some extraordinary works of art. What kind of thing? Oh, I got everything from Picasso to the Sgt. Pepper uniforms because dad stored a lot of Paul McCartney's stuff, which was then MPL.

8:13I don't know if it still is. Often I would be taken along to meet artists when he was moving big works of art. I've got tiny little autographs in my Bunty autograph books from David Hockney and Dame Elizabeth Frink. He was very canny, dad. He got them to do me little pictures. It was a childhood that was suffused with creativity. Jojo, we should have some more music now. It's your second choice today. What's it going to be? One of my most common memories is of driving in the south of France with my dad. And he put on, I think it was either Sgt Pepper or the White Album or all of them. We would just listen to music nonstop.

8:50And I think I knew every Beatles lyric for a while and we would sing them. And it's really hard picking a Beatles song when you're here because you're so conscious that everybody has picked every Beatles song. I haven't been named after a Beatles song. I thought it would be a bit egotistical to do Get Back. So I picked Golden Slumbers because it's one of those that I never get tired of. One stool's away To get back homeward One stool's away To get back home Sleep pretty darling, do not cry And I will sing a lullaby The Beatles and Golden Slumbers. Jojo Moyes, you've been horse-obsessed from a very young age.

9:51It began when you were a little girl and I think you had an unusual request for your eighth birthday. Yeah, I don't know where this horse obsession came from because my parents are completely unhorsey people. I mean, they barely have had pets between them. My dad had a dog. That's it. But I caught this bug age of seven. I went to the Lee Valley Riding School in Walthamstow, which was a council run equestrian centre set up in the 80s. I think to give underprivileged kids a taste of a different kind of sport. And I used to work 20 hours there, mucking out, you know, lifting hay bales, buckets of water in return for one hour's riding.

10:29And I thought that was a great deal. I just thought that was fantastic. So yeah, that became my obsession. When I was a child, I asked my mum if she would fill my room with straw so that I could pretend to be a horse. And she did it. And I don't remember much about my childhood, but I do remember that. And I also don't remember being part of clearing it up. So it was pretty game of her to do that, I think. Well, this escalated and you were obsessed and eventually ended up buying a horse of your own. I did. There were lots of little stable yards in the 1980s dotted around East London in the most unlikely places, like in tiny cobbled yards.

11:12And there was one behind Hackney Town Hall under the railway arches. And I knew where all these yards were. And I got friendly with lots of the people who ran them. And there was a horse there who'd been rescued from a lamppost. I don't know. He'd been chained up to a lamppost. And a guy had bought him who didn't know about horses, but had bought him to rescue him, but just didn't know what to do. And so he let me pay for Bombardier in installments. And so I had a cleaning job at 14 and I paid off this horse. And then I told my parents. So you hadn't told them? No. How did you break the news? We were in the kitchen and I said, by the way, they knew that I was helping look after this horse.

11:49And I said, oh, by the way, I bought Bombardier. And there was this silence. And they said, what? And I said, I bought him. I bought Bombardier. And they went, my mother said, well, you can jolly well go and unbuy him, can't you? I mean, what are you going to do with a horse? And I said, I'm keeping him. You can't do anything. I'm keeping him. And they said to me afterwards that although they were kind of shocked and slightly appalled and also a bit like, what on earth is she going to do with a horse? they also thought if my worst rebellion was working to buy the thing that I really wanted and then giving up my lunch money to pay for hay and stuff like that then I wasn't doing too badly they they admitted a long time afterwards that they were actually quite proud and yeah and since then my whole life on and off depending on my life circumstances I've had horses I'm a very pragmatic and sensible person but there's something about a horse that speaks to my soul I'm getting tearful what the hell sorry um they've just been such an important part of my life they're I they're like any animal in that you can pour unconditional love into them and you get back something that is uncomplicated I have to say with horses it's slightly more complicated in that they could also kill you if they tried and like a kind of cat or a dog but I think for me it was about independence it was about courage it was about feeling unafraid and what happened to him well this is the worst bit and this is why I've never ever got rid of an animal in the last 40 years I sold him very cheaply to some people that I'd known for a long time because I had a levels and I suddenly found that I couldn't do all the things I couldn't muck out and earn money and do all the stuff if I was going to get my exams.

13:40And somebody bought him for their niece. And then they wouldn't tell me what happened to him after that. And I spent years trying to track him down and I never found him. And I've always felt terrible about it. I always felt like I let him down. So yeah, it doesn't matter how old an animal gets. It's with me for life now. I want to be there and make sure that they have a good end. We're going to go back to the music now. I think your third choice today. What's next? This is Janet Kaye's Silly Games. Now, I mean, if you grew up in Hackney in the 70s and 80s then reggae was just a massive part of your kind of audible history but it's also because friendship is so hugely important to me especially female friendship and I have the same best friend Kathy Runciman who I've had since I was 16 we met at Camden School for Girls and we were both slightly misfitting and truanting together and we just got each other in that way that you sometimes find someone who's your tribe and there is something very blissful about loving somebody who has known every iteration of you, every terrible version of your teenage and 20-something self, and who will call you on your nonsense and also turn up at 4am when you're at your saddest.

14:52And I didn't grow up with sisters. I acquired my sisters when I was 19 and 20. But I had Kathy and I don't know who I would be if I didn't have her. I don't drink anymore or very very rarely but my party piece is that I can hit the high notes you can in silly games and I tried it the other day just to see if I still could but I'm not going to do it for you you do it on the island though oh I can practice all day long yeah yeah but I can hit those high notes preferably if I've had a drink No, I've got no time to play your silly game.

15:39Silly game.

15:54Janet Kaye and Silly Games. And I can confirm for the listener that Jojo Moyes did indeed hit the high note there. With gusto and only on a cup of tea. Absolutely incredible. Jojo, you know, you described yourself as a kind of under the radar rebel. as a teenager. What else was going on? You mentioned acquiring siblings when you were 19. Your parents divorced when you were a teenager. About 14, I think. How did that impact you? How was it? I think pretty much like every teenager whose parents get divorced, I think I probably didn't handle it brilliantly. And I think they were so young that maybe in later life, they would have handled it differently too.

16:35But they did both go on to have other families. And I love my siblings. I don't call them my half siblings. They're just siblings to me. So my mum went on to have my brother Guy who, when I was about 20, I think, and my dad had my two sisters with his second wife, and that's Bea and Clemmie. And I think we're all pretty close. I wasn't sure how I would feel when I first met them because it had been quite a difficult time. I'd had to move out of my family home and I was living in lodgings on the Bulls Pond Road with a family that I knew. So you moved out when things fractured, you left home? Yeah, well I lived with my mum and her partner first but then they moved out to Essex, North West Essex and I didn't want to leave London so I moved in with my dad and things didn't go well with his wife.

17:30And so I had to leave. And I went to live with this amazing family, the Barrys, who he was a dustman, and there were seven of them. And it was like suddenly being kind of adopted by a really rough and ready version of the Waltons. I had a cooked meal on the table every night, and someone had to know where I was. And so I had independence at 17 in that I could go off and work and do my own thing but someone knew where I was I wasn't kind of out by myself and I did love that family they were they were good to me. So after school you didn't go to university as you mentioned you were working so you spent a few years doing quite a wide variety of jobs I mean give me a flavour you were typing bank statements in braille?

18:16Yeah the first job I applied for was NatWest Bank working in their visual impairment section typing braille bank statements and we had these little iron typewriters with six keys and we were given two weeks to learn how to type braille and I did it in two days I just there's a code with braille and I just cracked it and it was brilliant because I got to work with some blind people and I got to see a different way of being and I loved the staff there and we had a good laugh and the other one that I did which was profoundly useful was I worked in a minicab office on the Bethnal Green Road. I did nights.

18:51And you say, wow, I was too young to know to be afraid. So I went in there at 17. I asked for a job. I got paid 15 pounds for working a four and a half hour shift. I think it was something like nine till 1.30 in the morning. And I won't name him because I later found out that it was actually a criminal enterprise. And the boxes that I'd been resting my feet on didn't just contain dodgy tapes. They also in one case contained a large gun. But my introduction to the job involved this chap. He brought me in and he said, here's the drivers. They tell you when they're P.O.B., passenger on board. And then he pulls out a baseball bat and he says, anybody gives you any trouble, you give them a tap with that.

19:33I was 17. A tap? A tap. Did you ever have to give anyone No, I didn't. This is the thing. There was no scream. I was there with all the drunkards and the ne 'er-do-wells. But there was this strange thing where the drivers looked after me. Nothing bad ever happened to me there. And in fact, this East End character used to take Cathy and I to a gambling club in the Whitechapel Road, a late night gambling club. And we would see so many things, but we always felt protected. We never felt at risk. So it was a sort of extraordinary set of life lessons. Well, I think you've got to write that book at some point, Jojo.

20:10Let's have some music. Disc number four, what's next? OK, so this is Rufus Wainwright, the art teacher. I have loved Rufus Wainwright for over 20 years, not just because of his musical ability, but because he often inspires books for me. He's a great storyteller. He's a great storyteller. And I finally got to see him last year at the Albert Hall after sort of 20 years of waiting to do it. And I just remember sitting down in my seat and I started to smile and I didn't stop for the whole thing. It was just one of those truly joyful experiences. But the thing I love about The Art Teacher is it's kind of nuts.

20:50It's a song about a schoolgirl sung by Rufus Wainwright in the first person and then she becomes this corporate wife and there's a twist in the tale which I don't want to kind of reveal but it's just one of those songs that I never get tired of and yeah it inspired a book I wrote called The Last Letter From Your Lover which doesn't have a huge amount to do with it but it's about forbidden love and the thing that you can't have There I was in uniform

21:24Looking at the art teacher I was just a girl then Never have I loved since then He was not that much older Rufus Wainwright and the art teacher Jojo Moyes, eventually you decided to try out for university. You managed to get into Royal Holloway University of London, studying sociology and social policy. And while you were there, being a grafter, you decided to get a job on the side. You were writing for the local paper, the Eggerman Staines News. Yes, the sadly now defunct Eggerman Staines News. What was your first story? It was actually about a publican who had managed to make his vine grow to an enormous size through giving it a pint of beer every day.

22:22Oh, brilliant. And it was my first byline and I was so proud and I sent a copy to both my mum and my dad. And strangely, they were much less excited than I was. Underwhelmed. But I loved working in that newspaper office. It was that thing of going in and going, oh, there you are. There's my people. And I remember sitting there with my typewriter and my three sheets of carbon paper, which is how we used to produce a story. And just feeling like, OK, this is where I'm meant to be. And that was when, you know, you set your sights on writing because you secured a bursary to study journalism. at City University.

22:54And then you got this apprenticeship at the Independent. What kind of stories were you covering there? Lots of court stories. You learn a lot about process and you learn a lot about the really important things to do with getting people's names right. So, for example, one of the reasons I got the bursary to go to the Independent was because I had studied on the Egham and Staines and he was doing golden weddings and anniversaries. And it is so important to get people's names right and the details right because for those people, That's such a big thing to have your name in the paper. Your contract did end at the Independent, though.

23:27That's a generous way of putting it. My contract ended and I was one of the very many people to be made redundant from them after six months. And I had a boyfriend at the time who'd moved out to Hong Kong. And so I went out to visit him and I had an interview at the South China Morning Post. And I decided rather than stay at home and scrabble around trying to find freelance work, I'd go and work for a paper in a different country. And how did the working culture compare? I think chalk and cheese would be a generous way of describing it. It was a Murdoch paper and it was a very tough culture. And some of it I enjoyed and I made some good friends there.

24:05You did spend some time there reporting on a story in China and you were actually put under house arrest at one stage. What happened? So it was a story about an American barefoot doctor who had gone to a place near Chengdu, which then was a very isolated part of central China. a tiny town called Yibin nearby, where the local government had welcomed this man and his team of barefoot doctors, which were quite a common thing in those days. They would go out and they would use their vacation time to do good in different countries. And the problem was this guy was a fraud and he basically accepted all the gifts and all the welcome and a statue in his name and the banquets.

24:44And what he'd brought out was out-of-date medicines, just crates of rubbish, basically. and the way that the Chinese government operated then, I don't know about now because I've never been back, was that even though that was not their fault, they wouldn't have wanted the loss of face. And I'd gone in on a tourist visa and the night that I arrived in Chengdu, I got a call saying the local police know that you're here and you do not leave the hotel. We know that you're here under a tourist visa and that you're here to cover this thing and you do not leave the hotel. How did you get home? How long were you stuck?

25:18Well, I got advice from my foreign editor who, for a start, when I was on the phone, said, he said, by the way, we will talk for 20 minutes and then the phone's going to go dead. And that enables them to turn the tape over. And so he said, I just want you to talk about pandas or, you know, something you've seen at the zoo. And that's what we did. And he gave me all these tricks like I would carry my passport and my notebook in my bra strap when I was going out to meet these people to try and get in contact and get the story. I made friends with a woman in a cafe who was able to change my air ticket for me.

25:52I made friends with an American woman from Boeing who'd come out to do some work out there. and when things got very uncomfortable for me in my room, which was being searched every time I left it, she let me stay in her room and park important things in her room. But I remember crying on the plane as I left when I got out. Jojo, let's take a break and go to the music. It's your fifth choice. Why are you taking it to the island? So this is Mozart's Laudate Dominum. I told you about how tough I found Hong Kong and I used to self-medicate with this piece of music. I used to get a bus from my apartment, my shared apartment in mid-levels, to the place where the South China Morning Post was, and I would listen to this song again and again to try and calm myself enough to make myself go to work.

26:40And then I decided that I would reframe that piece of music, and so I got married in 1998 to my then-husband Charles, and we had this as part of our wedding music. I think it's just a beautiful piece of music.

27:02Vorsch impactfulłem, to my queen, I saw my sciences 화장 racier Though I Copenhagen

27:39Mozart's setting of Laudate Dominum, K339, sung by Edith Mathis with the Leipzig Radio Choir and the Dresden State Orchestra, conducted by Peter Schreier. So, Georgia Moyes, when did you start to think that you wanted to write fiction as opposed to journalism? It was shortly after I came back from Hong Kong. I had kept in touch with my old editor at The Independent, my news editor, David Felton. And he'd always said to me, look, we really like you. If we ever get another space, just stay in touch and we'll try and get you back in. And he called me up and he said the only space available is as a night reporter.