Book Club Meets: I’m obsessed with romance scams! Gaslighting and misogyny, with Lisa Jewell

0:01I turn off the van's engine and sit. Welcome to the Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton. Through the window on the other side of the house, I see the shadows of movement. Today, Don't Let Him In by Lisa Jewell. I hear the muted murmur of chatter. There are four cars parked outside. Clearly the day is still going strong. I go to the side of the van and pull open the door. There it is. My last delivery of the day. An extra large bouquet of white hydrangeas and roses No expense spared In a pink bag On the envelope is the inscription Nina Swan and Family I walk towards the front door Peering in subtly as I pass the kitchen window A small group sits around the table A mix of younger and older people They all have wine Addressed somberly There is music playing.

1:01Candles are flickering. I see art and photography and graphics on the walls. I see a designer kitchen in midnight blue and pink, with flashes of brass and copper. Big globe light bulbs hanging at irregular intervals from golden chains. Plants on shelves. Through a door at the back of the kitchen I see huge velvet sofas A mixing desk A gorilla's poster It's the home of a Gen X man Who has made good decisions Made a success of his life Piled his building blocks one on top of the other with precision and care But also The home of a man who made one really bad mistake That his wife And his family are going to pay for over and over again.

1:56I keep moving past the window and then I put my finger to the doorbell. Oh my God, this book. Oh, crikey. This book is phenomenal. Oh, hello, by the way. This might already be sounding a bit different to the episode you normally listen to on a Monday, but hang tight, gang, because I think you're going to love this. This is a book club episode. We have a Happy Place book club, don't you know? We're all bookworms around here. If you love reading, if you want to get tipped off about great books that are out and about, if you want to go on a deep dive into books and authors themselves, you've got to be following our Happy Place book club.

2:38It's the place to be. We're on Instagram at Happy Place book club. So normally you get to listen to these on a Friday, but we recorded this chat live at the Happy Place Festival at Gunnersbury Park a few weeks ago and I wanted all of you to be part of that festival magic even if you're not normally part of the book club although you will be after me giving you the big sell. If you're not following us please come along and read with us as I said it's at happyplacebookclub on Instagram. We chat to the author here on the show and we hear from you lot and get into like deep chats about these books.

3:11Also you lot send in your voice notes which which is my favourite part, getting to hear your ideas about the books we're reading. So in July, we were reading Don't Let Him In by Lisa Jewell. She'll explain the plot. It's incredible, but she won't give you any spoilers in case you haven't read it yet. But suffice to say, if you're a fan of true crime scammer documentaries, you're going to absolutely love it. Lindsay definitely did. I have so many thoughts about the new Lisa Jewell Don't Let Him In book. I love Lisa Jewell as an author and oh my gosh, this had me gripped from the very start. I don't think I've ever, ever read a book where I've had such deep feelings of hatred towards a main character in it.

3:52Oh my goodness, the gaslighting, the misogyny, everything about it. He made me creep so much. There were so many different parts of him that reminded me of friends' experiences and my experiences. It was just absolutely gripping and I could not put it down. I loved every minute of it and what a twist at the end. Yet again, an absolutely magic book from Lisa Jo. And someone else who literally inhaled the book was Sarah Ann. Such an incredible author and just the style of writing. You can't put the book down. To the point that I went and bought two more books and have read all three in the space of one weekend.

4:37I loved it. Sarah-Anne, what? You read three Lisa Jewel books in one weekend? That's phenomenal. It sounds like you did very little but read, which sounds like my dream weekend. I've actually gone back to the start to read Ralph's Party. I'm going to work my way through all 23 books. She's got a huge back catalogue, so you can go and read any one of her books if you want. Anyway, Lisa is an absolute icon in the book world. This chat was a real privilege and I think You're going to love it.

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7:03Right, let's get to the Festival Talks tent. Here's the show.

7:27Welcome, welcome. Thank you for having me. Oh, we're so excited to have you here. This is, and that's not our book for July. No, that's another of your books. No, that's the wrong book. That's the wrong book. That's handy. The very good book. That's another of Lisa's excellent books. But the book that we've been focusing on for our book club for July is Don't Let Him In. Yes. Lisa, I can't cope. This book, I couldn't put it down. I think I read it in three days. Perfect. It's unputdownable. Yes. For anybody that hasn't read it, can you tell us a bit about it without giving too much away? Okay.

8:01Well, in a nutshell, it's kind of Tinder Swindler meets Dirty John in long form literary style with a guy who goes by the name of Nick Radcliffe, but he also might go by some other names. And he's had a lot of women in his life. He has a very complicated lifestyle. Let's put it that way. He's juggling a lot of things. Yes. I think you all know what I mean by that. And it's also, so it's told from his point of view in the first person. So you get really deep inside this very twisted guy's mind. And it's also told from the point of view of the daughter of a woman that he's targeting. And she's called Ash.

8:41She's 26 and she's got a really bad feeling about this guy who's just crashed into her mum's life. And it's told from the point of view of a lovely woman called Martha, who's married to a guy called Alistair Grey. I think you can see where this is going. And Alistair Grey has been the perfect husband for four years, but he's suddenly started behaving really strangely and disappearing for days on end with his phone switched off. So she's starting to get a really bad feeling about the state of her marriage and she isn't sure what's happening. So it's like a very, very slow motion car crash collision as Ash investigates this new man in her mother's life and Martha tries to work out what's going on with her lovely husband Alistair and all the while you're in his head seeing the world from his point of view and yeah, it's like an absolute collision course.

9:30Yeah, I found that so interesting, the parts... Oh, here it is. Oh, there it is. The correct book. We'll just stand that up there and hide that one there. It's so interesting when you get to the parts of the book that are seen from his point of view because you can see his thinking. Obviously, it sort of logically makes sense to him and you can understand that. Would you class him as a sociopath? I always try not to diagnose my characters, but I think this is the first time that I would give one of my characters an official diagnosis and I'm going to go psychopath. Wow. Because normally when I write bad characters, I try to find the light in them.

10:08I try to show the reader what makes them work, get some empathy going. and I tried with this guy for the duration of writing this book. I was like, okay, come on, show me. Show me your inner child. Show me your damage. Show me your hurt. Let me understand you. And there wasn't any. And I thought, no, you're a psychopath. So, yeah, he is. And that's fine. I've never done that before. I've never written such a one-shade bad character. Yeah, fun. It was so fun. So fun. It was really, really fun to spend all that time in his head. I bet. How did you get into that kind of psyche? Bizarrely easily. I really honestly it hadn't occurred to me before I started doing it that I was setting myself quite a big challenge because I'm the antithesis of that I can't lie I I'm a very simple grounded person and I don't like to make my life more complicated than it needs to be I like a simple life and so I hadn't really kind of thought wow I'm going to have to flip everything every single natural thought process I have on its head in order to be this guy um and I just did it and it just came really naturally to me and it was really strange and I still don't really understand why I found it so easy um but I think it was just fun and I think I don't know I think rather than me being a psychopath um and therefore being able to write a psychopath I think I just understood his psychopathy in a really weird way because it's not that deep in a way.

11:38As much as he's a clever guy, he's also an idiot. Yes. So in some ways it was quite easy. Yeah, I love it. And I like what you just said there a moment ago that you were waiting for him to show you some signs where you could feel empathy. So does it feel almost like they exist outside of you, these characters? Yes. They're writing through you. Totally. Wow. Which sounds a bit pretentious, but it doesn't feel pretentious when it's happening. I know other writers who will, so for example, Adele Parks will, before she starts writing a book, will interview one of her characters. So she'll put her character on the page and interview them before she even starts writing the book because she wants to know exactly who she's dealing with and have a really strong handle on them before she gets going.

12:24Whereas I want the fun of just not knowing what this person is going to be like until I'm writing them. And then they're just revealing themselves to me page by page. And that for me is I find that really exciting. And did the idea start with him? Was that the sort of the start point? Where did he come from? He came from, well, he came from my addiction to a certain type of Netflix documentary, which I cannot get enough of. And it's not necessarily just about romance scammers. It's also about any type of scammer, any type of human being who decides that they want to manipulate, lie and control another human being, be it in a cult, be it in some religious thing, be it a financial scam, whatever it is.

13:13I'm just addicted to those shows and wanting to understand, number one, why people behave like that. And number two, how are people so gullible and vulnerable to that sort of behavior? And then I read a book called Psychopath by a writer called Mary Turner Thompson, which was actually a memoir about her experience of being married for, I think, about 10 to 15 years to a guy like the guy in this book. and it was brilliant and I couldn't get enough of it. But at the end of it, I just thought, oh, I want to talk to this guy. Why did he treat her like that? Why did he live such a complicated life?

13:47At one point, he tells her that he's in the SAS and he has to go off to Afghanistan and then he disappears and then he comes back and says he lost his platoon and he had to go trekking in the desert and he didn't have any shoes on and he shows her the soles of his feet, which are wrecked. he was actually about like 40 minutes up the road with his other family and had deliberately damaged his own feet so that he could perpetuate this lie to his other wife when he and and that sort of thing it's just like the the desire to live a life that complicated it just didn't make any sense to me so that was what I wanted to do I wanted to spend some time and try and work out the motivations for a person like that.

14:31And also I wanted my reader to be able to spend some time seeing the other side of the story and maybe getting some insight. But he was frustratingly, obtusely hard to get any insight into. I really thought he was going to give me some more than he did. But yeah, I think I felt just as flabbergasted at the end of writing this book as I felt at the end of reading Mary Turner Thompson's book. I thought it's still like, why? Yeah, because there's no linear logic to any of it. And that's the beauty of the story. It's so relentless that he just keeps going. You can't believe he's doing it again and there's another woman or there's another family.

15:08I mean, it is complicated and I can't imagine how complicated it was to write and to keep track of his whereabouts and what he was doing. And because you were having to write his lies for him and cover his tracks. Did you have some sort of like murder wall where you were pinning the dots of how it was all connected? No, it's just inside my weird head. It just lives in my head. And the thing is, the bits that when a reader reads something and they think that that looks really clever or that must have taken a lot of planning or, oh, there's a twist there. But because of the way I write, it just doesn't feel like that when it's happening for me.

15:43I don't know I've done it. It's only when a reader tells me I've done it afterwards that I can see what happened. And all I'm focused on in the process of writing a book is keeping the pacing going, feeling with my gut when something needs to happen. So there's a really dramatic moment halfway through the book where Nick, Al, Jonathan, whatever his name is, finally shows his true colours. And I think you know which bit I'm talking about. I didn't know he was going to do that. Oh, I hadn't got a handle on how far he would go. and I just got to a point halfway through the book and I thought, no, something really big needs to happen now.

16:20This is it. And I hadn't planned for it. It wasn't part of the design. I just felt it in my gut. So that whole dramatic thing that happens halfway through the book happened in the space of 30 seconds from my gut saying to my brain, something needs to happen. And my brain saying, well, what could it be? And then I started typing and that's what happened. Wow. I mean, so you have a loose plan, obviously, of like where you want to take the book, but you're not forensically writing down every bit before you've started. No, not at all. I literally come to the page every day. If I'm lucky, I've had a bit of a light bulb moment in the shower that morning so that when I open my laptop to start writing, I kind of got an idea of where I'm headed that day.

16:57But I'm going to say that's one in five writing days, four in five writing days. I open my laptop and I'm like, okay, I have no clue what's going to happen today, but I'm just going to start typing some words and hope for the best. That's very encouraging because I often think, I've only written one fiction, but even if I'm writing non-fiction, I don't have a clue what I'm doing. Often I think, this is deeply unprofessional. I should have a plan. But no, you just write. I felt exactly like that. I'm going to say, this is my 23rd novel. I'm going to say it took me about 15 novels to stop feeling like that.

17:30About 15 novels in, I thought, actually, just own it. This is fine. People like your books. Because every time you write like this and think that you should be doing more and being more, as you say, professional, it doesn't matter. You never got professional. You never did it properly. And it all ended up OK. Yeah, I feel like that about my whole career. I don't know what I'm doing ever. But it all ends up OK. Yeah. And I think that is such a lovely moment to land on. Because I guess we all look at other people, certainly when you're in the same profession as someone else, you think, oh, I bet they've got this really brilliant process.

18:03It's really methodical. And it's really well thought out. and I'm just winging my way through everything. But actually, there's no wrong or right. You just have to find your way of work. Yes. And you have to, it does involve a certain level of confidence and should spirit really does. You can't think about it for too long. You just have to just own it and accept it and actually be proud of it. Yeah, without a doubt. I guess that does take a certain amount of experience. The more hours you put in, the more confident you know that you can work that way without panicking. Yes. yes and that's the thing I don't panic anymore even when I should be panicking I'm not panicking because I just think no it's absolutely fine it will all work out everything will work out.

18:44Have you ever had it with this book or or any of your other books where you really don't know where it's going you think I might abandon this and just let go of it? Ah I know I've never abandoned a book I'm really stubborn about books I'm really really stubborn the minute I've invested a certain amount of my time I'm just like I am going to make this book work if it kills me um but I did have I so I'm talking about when I talk about my writing processes I'm talking about these books my comfort zone this is what I do I write these these um creepy psychological thrillers but I did write out of my comfort zone two years ago I wrote a full-length novel for Marvel and that made me realize that I'm really good at writing books like this but when it came to writing something completely different I'd never written before so this book took me nine months to write that book took me five months to write the Marvel book took me 14 months to write and nearly nearly drove me to my grave it was such a difficult experience and had I not been given a really really massive Marvel sized advance to write that book I would probably have abandoned it I would have just said you know what this isn't for me I can't do this yeah um but i i couldn't but a process that you got something out learn something from or totally yeah totally which is just stay in your lane no don't say that's not good advice don't stay in your lane it's fine everybody no um no but just accept what you're good at and embrace it and uh and the whole time i was writing the marvel novel i was desperate to write this i'd already had the idea for this oh really i was like just get this marvel thing done and then you can write your thriller about the romance scammer.

20:29Yeah, I mean, because that is actually, it's such an important moment when you've had the idea and you have that amazing urgency. Yes, urgency. I've got to get this out of me. Now, I've had it with, I started writing a fiction maybe six months ago and I was really into it. And then I had this burning idea for non-fiction. So I've pressed pause on the other one, which scares me because I think, what if I can't be asked? What if I can't find your way back to it? Yeah, I've lost my way. But the other one was so urgent. I thought I've got to start it now. It just, I don't know, there was no logical thinking about that at all.

20:59I just needed to start it. That's frustrating. Was that a good choice? Were you glad you did that? I think so. I think so. I mean, now I've just sort of got two unfinished books. So I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I'll get there. But I think that must have been extremely frustrating, knowing that you had to finish that one first. Totally. Totally. Yeah. And that urgency is the word. And that is why I don't do research. Yeah. because I find it really frustrating when I'm doing anything that isn't writing. So I would get really resentful of any time I spent having to travel up to visit some coastal town or spend time on the phone to somebody who works in a prison or read a book about something.

21:37I'd just be like, no, I just want to open up my laptop and start typing, get into this world and get into this story. Yeah. Did you ever read Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic? No. Well, that one, I love that book, but it freaked me out because she talks about any creative process and having that urgency and that burning idea and the thing you really, really want to get going with. And her thinking is that all these ideas, whatever it is, books, art, making, whatever, are floating around in the ether. And if you're open to them, they land in your head. And if you've had that idea and you're sat on it, but you don't action it, someone else will do the idea.

22:13And that's made me panic even more. So with both these ideas, I'm trying to juggle. It's like, but what if someone else does the idea before I publish the book? It's terrifying. So that's really rubbed up the urgency. That is a sickening thought, actually. I wish you hadn't told me that. I'm so sorry. She gives an example in the book where she had an idea for a novel and she didn't action it. And then someone else wrote an almost entirely similar book about three years later. There you go. Scared the shit out of me. It's a nightmare.

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24:44That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX. Were there any particular female characters in the book that you particularly connected with that you felt deep empathy for? Yes, actually, and I'm glad you asked me that. So there are three main characters. there's Martha, there's Ash and there's Ash's mother Nina but there's also a fourth subsidiary female character well there's also loads and loads of other part of his huge spider's web of women and lies but Ash contacts so her father has just died which is why her mother is single unfortunately and Ash contacts her father's first girlfriend because she wants to talk about her father with someone who knew him when he was young and find out things that she maybe didn't know about her father um and the woman is called jane or as ash's family referred to her mad jane trevelli um because she was the the father's mad first girlfriend who was a bit stalky and followed him everywhere and was over passionate and and insane um and so she brings her into her life at this point and it turns out that jane is quite a good little amateur a detective so Ash and Jane kind of team up in order to find out more about this this dodgy Nick character and I loved Jane yeah I loved Jane so much she's 50 something she's had two marriages she's got tons of stepchildren she's got four dogs she lives in a tumble down house in Dorset and she's just super cool and every time I was writing about her I just felt like I was writing about a friend or someone I wanted to be friends with.

26:29And I liked her so much that my next novel that I've already finished writing is about her. No way. She's the main character in my next book. And I never normally do stuff like that. I normally like to kick off a book with a whole fresh, clean slate and a whole cast of new characters. But it's like, no, I want more Jane. Yeah, more Jane. I love that. I love it when books are connected in that way. Yes, I don't normally do it. I sort of already know her. That's so cool. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I mean, there's so many brilliant women in this book. And like you said earlier, you know, you need those characters to be, whether it's a little bit gullible at the start or that, you know, they're believing all of these lies.

27:07And you could be frustrated with some of those women for their choices to stay with him and to believe his next set of lies. But actually, you pity them. And you also can understand how they've ended up in that trap to some extent. That must have been quite a difficult fine line to get. So you weren't sat there reading the book going, oh, my God, what an idiot. Why is she? It is all very believable. I'm glad you think so. And it was very much because I needed him to not. He was not going to be pursuing elderly millionaires in the south of France. No. He wasn't that kind of guy. He was pursuing middle class women with middle class ambitions and just women who wanted the best for themselves and their families and intelligent women.

27:52he was pursuing women who had potential to bring him the lifestyle because that's what he was actually pursuing was a lifestyle um as opposed to conning people out of millions of pounds and in pursuing that lifestyle he just keeps asking the women he's with for a thousand here a thousand there oh can you take out another loan he's that sort of very low level grifter um which i think made it even harder for the women that he was targeting to realize they were being targeted because he wasn't doing anything really audacious or outrageous in terms of asking for money or stealing money from them and it was really important to me that I kept the reader on side with the women and actually I did meet a reader at a book event in America who said she just read it and I thought oh okay this is when pre-publication she'd read a pre-publication review copy expecting her to say that she'd loved it and she said I threw it across the room and I said oh and who are these people that have the guts to say who are these people to the author's face when the book's not even been published yet that's insane and she said it's because she was so frustrated by the women in the book for believing his lies but what you have to remember when you're reading this book is they're seeing only part of of the male character in the book we're seeing all of him so there's a scene early on in the book when very early on in the book when we first meet him and he's going by the name of Jonathan Truscott and it's four years before the story begins and he's married to a woman called Tara and every morning they wake up in bed and they have this sort of ritual embrace in bed and he opens up his arms she comes into his arms and they lie in bed like that for a while before they wake up and so you see that from her point of view and then they tell each other they love each other and from her point of view that's lovely but because we're inside his head he's saying I don't like the way her scalp smells while she's enjoying this beautiful moment with her perfect husband.

29:47But we're the only ones who know that he doesn't like the way her... So you have to remember that that's another aspect of the book, is you're seeing sides of this man that they are not seeing. And he knows how to be a good guy. That's what's so frustrating about him. Yeah, he's an expert at it. He's seen a gap in the market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He has seen that all of these women... And he's a handsome guy. Yeah, well-dressed. I get it. I mean, I like to see the good in people. So I was like, yeah, I totally get it. And also that woman that complained. There's always one. There's always one. There's always one.

30:20They have to say their little bit. I know. Have a little moan. I know. So just think that in your head. Yes. And say you love the book and leave. It was really, I was in the middle of a signing line. I hate it. And being in a signing line, your energy has to be so positive. Yes. Because you're engaging with reader after reader. Your face hurts from smiling. And you just want to give every reader your best. Of course. for that moment. And then along she comes. And then she walks off and I'm like, I don't know what to do with that. I have no idea now what I'm supposed to do with that. Thank you.

30:49It's the absolute pits. People say stuff to me all the time like that. I'm not saying you have to come and just be nice to me and say whatever you want. It's a safe space. I'll take it. But it is funny how people feel like they need to say the truth. Yes. It's very bizarre that. It is very bizarre. It's very, although I do often say that the people who say rude things online would never come up to your face and say it in the real world. At least she did. Well, she broke the mould. She did, yeah. She broke the mould. Well, I mean, we've had nothing but amazing feedback from this book with our Happy Place Book Club.

31:17I know loads of you have already read it and lots of people commenting about it and loving reading along. And if you want a bloody good beach read, if you're going on a holiday, we've got our bookstool there, so you must go read it and you're going to be doing a book signing in a bit. I am, and a book reading. And just don't say that you've thrown the book across the room. Just say, this is a brilliant book or I'm very excited to read it. That's the etiquette that we're working with. Precisely, thank you. It's a happy place. It's a happy place, correct. What's your writing process? Do you like to write at a certain time of day?

31:43For how long do you write? So I started writing in 1997. Before I had any children, I'd just finished working in an office. I went straight from being a secretary to writing my first novel. I'm reading it at the moment. Oh, you're reading Rouse Party. Are you? Yeah, loving it. Oh, there's a blast. A little bit of retro 90s. I wanted to go right back to the start. Yeah. Book number one. It's a really 90s read. And it's not thriller at all. Oh, no, it's a romantic comedy. It was based kind of on my existence at the time, living in London in the 1990s, having the best. So fun. Good, I love it. I'm so glad.

32:19I love it. I'm so glad. So because I'd been working in office, I thought writing a book I'd need to write from nine to five. So for the first few years, I would write from nine to five and of course spend most of that time not writing at all. And then I had a baby in the year 2003 and suddenly I had an hour a day and bizarrely found I managed to write a novel that previously I'd taken a whole day to produce my work. Now I could do it in one hour a day. And ever since then, my working day has just shifted around my children and their stage in life. So, you know, school pickups. And then I've gone full circle now.

32:58I have an 18-year-old and a 22-year-old and I'm back to having the entire day to myself. So I can basically write whenever I like with no restrictions. So I found a really nice place for me, which is and it's quite unusual for writers because most writers like to write first thing in the morning. Yeah. But I can't focus on writing until I've done my to do list. Yeah. So I'll spend the morning doing all my admin, all my domestic stuff, all my housework, all my emails, all my social media. I'm really big on social media at Reader Interactions. so at this time of year particularly in publication time because this only came out a week ago I could be spending two or three hours a day just interacting with readers on my social media platforms and then I'll take the dog for a really long walk and then I'll get back to my desk which is actually the kitchen table at about two o 'clock and write a thousand words and that usually takes me about three hours sometimes four hours and then I'm done.

33:54And you're quite disciplined with that Or if you're having a day where you think, oh, just feeling flat and you just push through. Yeah. I mean, obviously, I'm not doing that every day of the week or every week of the year, because otherwise I'd be writing three or four novels a year if I could do that every day. But in the chunks of time in my schedule, my calendar, my yearly cycle, that I know that I can just get into a writing routine, nothing would stop me. I would be so resentful of anything that stopped me sitting at my desk after the dog walk. and getting on with the writing. I can't. Yeah.

34:29And do you find it hard to switch off? Because, as I said, I've only written one fiction, but I would write and I'd go to bed and I'd be obsessing about all the different tangents the book could go off on. It's quite hard to switch off when you're in that world. Yeah. I try to compartmentalise that sort of thing. So my only time that I allow myself to do that, because otherwise you would drive yourself mad, Yeah, I did. is in the shower, on my dog walk. And if I ever, and I very rarely wake up in the middle of the night or suffer with sleep problems, but if I ever do wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, I'll say, okay, go for it.

35:05Let's just go, let's just do the book. Let's use this awake time and do the book. And I can sometimes have some really, really helpful and beneficial times inside my head in the middle of the night rather than lying there going, I must go back to sleep. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm a terrible sleeper, and as soon as you tried to fight it, you're absolutely screwed. Yes, so I think, okay, I'm getting a bonus hour or two to think about my book here, so let's just use it. I love that. I was reading an article about you in The Times last week, and your daughters haven't read your books, any of them? This is so, right, so this is, yes, so this is, neither of them had.

35:42Actually, that article came out the same weekend that my eldest daughter, Amelie, who's just turning 22, flew to Thailand. So long haul flight, she said, I'm going to download one of your books onto my Kindle. She finished it by the time she got to Thailand. Yes. But the frustrating thing is the article came out the day before saying I've never read one of my mum's books. And then literally 36 hours later, she'd read one of her mum's books. I love it. And now the world thinks that she doesn't want to read my books, but she very much enjoyed it. And she said she would read another one. That's kind.

36:15Yes, I know. That's sweet of her. I mean, it's funny, isn't it? Because obviously she knows what you do. She's seen you do it for years, but just it hadn't crossed her mind or just resisted it? Neither of my girls, they were both like childhood bookworms readers. And then like myself, I stopped reading when I was 13 and didn't pick up a book again until I was 21. And they've kind of followed the same pattern. So I'm hoping that this is now her entryway back into reading for fun. But yeah, I didn't take it personally. It's not like they were reading, you know, Colleen Hoover and not reading it.

36:47No, no, no. Yeah. I love it. And also it is kind of a rite of passage that you have to sort of, I don't know, reject slightly what your parents are doing. It's a very, very healthy thing for a child to do. My son just thinks I'm an idiot. I'm the cringiest person he's ever met. And I get told that about eight times a day. It's called individuation, I believe. Correct. Yes. And it's a really important thing for a child to do. And you should be very happy if your kid thinks you're a moron. That is the takeaway of this episode. Have you got an all-time favourite book? It's almost impossible to answer that question, I know.

37:22I'm going to say I've got lots of all-time favourite books and we could break them down into types of books. But the book, I think, that really blew me away, and it wasn't that, it was only about eight years ago that I read it, so it's not something from my formative years. And let's call it my favourite spooky psychological thriller. It's called The Stopped Heart by Julie Myerson. Does anybody know Julie Myerson? She's a very wide-ranging writer. She writes incredibly beautifully well-crafted thrillers, but she also writes non-fiction. Oh, she was the writer who had the Living With Teenagers column in the Guardian that was quite controversial because it was anonymous, and then her kids found out that it was her, and it all blew up.

38:06And it's called The Stopped Heart, and it's about a couple who've experienced a devastating loss in London. and they move to this cottage in the middle of Suffolk. So there's all sorts of scene setting with these slightly peculiar neighbours. I love peculiar neighbours. But there's also this subplot, which is the same cottage 100 years earlier and this rambling family who lived there has about 12 children. And this stranger arrives in the middle of the night one night and it absolutely tears the family apart in the most dark, bizarre way. and so the couple in the contemporary timeline are feeling, it's not a ghost story, but there are like echoes of what happened 100 years earlier and the woman keeps feeling them and you slowly find out what their trauma was that they were running away from in London and it's just, oh, you're just on edge the whole time and goosebumps and yeah, it's a really, really beautiful book.

39:03Loving psychological thrillers, whether it's you writing them or you watching Netflix docs or reading books like that, do you need something to counter it or you're naturally quite upbeat, so it's fine? I think generally speaking, the people who write in my genre, particularly the women, are very, very, I describe them as having clean psyches. I think we all do. When people meet us, they're like, oh my God, you're the one who writes those really dark books. That doesn't make any sense. Why are you not in a witch's hat and black makeup or whatever? Why aren't you all moody and weird and edgy? And I think you kind of, if you're occupying that space, creatively for three four five six hours a day for most of your year you have to be have a clean psyche yeah you can't be holding on to anything you can't be having dark sides to your personality um and so most of the writer no I'm going to say all of the writers I know in my genre are like me just grounded normal you know positive healthy healthy people and so no that means I I don't need to decompress because the world that I'm inhabiting when I'm writing is completely separate from me.

40:16It's completely separate from me. There's none of me in it. So, yeah, I can just completely, fully immerse myself in all the darkness. I want to read the dark books. I want to watch the dark documentaries. I want to listen to the dark music. I want everything to be dark. And that, for me, is just distracting and it's happy. is happy for me. I find it fascinating because I can read thrillers, I can read psychological thrillers, but I can't watch documentaries of that nature. Absolutely no way. I think there's an element of control when you're reading where you can imagine it to whatever extent you desire and there's a sort of safety.

40:55But with documentaries, and that stuff lives in my head, I'm like, I can't go near it. And you get to the end of those documentaries and it's kind of still hanging out there. There's often not a conclusion and I think that's what you're talking about. you get to the end of a book like this and particularly this book has a really good conclusion um but with those documentaries you turn it off and you're like that person's still out there yeah and there's another victim coming and that never got solved and what about that poor kid and like that yeah and you're left feeling but i love that feeling so extraordinary so good um i'd love to end by asking you where your happy place is where would you say that oh I'm gonna say I'm I am a super happy person um I and I kind of refuse to ever be unhappy I make a conscious choice that I'm never going to allow anything to make me feel unhappy there are big bad things that might happen to me one day and when they do I'll feel unhappy but I can't be made to feel unhappy by small things um but if we're talking about a physical place it can be or it can be metaphorical metaphorical is wherever I am is a happy place because I make it my that's me I want to be happy I'm not talking ecstatic I'm just talking that feeling in your gut that all is well with the world and that you're in the best place possible with the best people possible but there's a hotel in Tenerife

42:26genuinely I don't normally like going back to the same place twice when I'm going on holiday I like to try different places. But there is this hotel in Tenerife that we've been going to since the girls were small. And we still go there every single year. The same hotel. And the girls don't want to go on holiday with us anywhere else. But when it's that Tenerife hotel, they want to come with us. What's so special about it? Can't explain it. Just the thing. It's just something about it. The minute I walk in that hotel and they give me my glass of Prosecco or Cava because it's Spain. So that's it.

42:58I'm here. I know that I'm going to be just happy for the next week. And the girls will be happy and my husband will be happy. And Hotel in Tenerife, I can't explain it. Love it. I love it. It's niche and I'm here for it. Lisa, what a joy it is to have you at the Happy Place Festival. As I said, this book, I just devoured it. I loved every minute. It's the perfect summer read. And we're all loving reading along with the Happy Place Book Club. So thank you for being here. Enjoy your book signing. I will, I will. I hope some of you will come and have a chat. Of course. Go buy the book. Everybody, give it up.

43:31For Lisa George. Thank you. God, thanks, Lisa. I so enjoyed that. It was one of those conversations that seemed to go in a heartbeat. It felt like it was five minutes of chat. It was just so brilliant. And I loved hearing about Lisa's method and how she hates doing research, because I do too. I just want to get to the fun writing bit. I'm just in awe of her talent, because Don't Let Him In. It's one of the best books I've ever read. So a new month and a new book to read in the Happy Place Book Club. August book is quite frankly the best title ever. It's called Namaste Motherfuckers, a modern manifesto for keeping cool when you're a hot mess.

44:07And it's by the brilliant comedian Callie Beaton. And cool news, Callie will be joining me live on stage at our Tatton Park Festival in just a few weeks time. So if you're coming along, make sure you've got front row seats for that one and I'll see you there. All right, until next time, a massive thanks again to Lisa, to the producers of this episode, Anushka Tate and Basil Oxterby, and to you, you bloody bookworms.

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