(with one of my favourite interviewers, Anouk Schollaehn. Yes I am quite small)

So I am back from my first week promoting We All Live Here, prior to its release in the UK and US, and I have learned a number of things. 1. Take more tops than you think you need (signing books makes you weirdly sweaty?); 2. Always have a snack on your person, and 3: never, ever, write in your acknowledgments that this is your ‘least researched book’.

I had meant that unlike many of my novels We All Live Here does not cover a wide canvas, and did not require numerous research trips and reference texts. What most interviewers saw in that phrase was apparently: because this book is all based on my own life.

Dear reader, yes, this book is about a recently divorced single mother who is a writer and lives in London and is entering her middle years. Perhaps it was naïve of me to think that journalists wouldn’t draw parallels, but I have written seventeen? eighteen? novels about a myriad different women and a million different subjects, all from my imagination, so I just assumed this would be read in the same way. Hahaha yes I know now, obviously.

So, just to start, this book is not about me. I wrote previously here about how frequently this question is asked of female writers, and how little of male writers. Does David Nicholls (a friend fwiw) get asked whether his middle-aged male characters are based on him? Whether their longing is his longing, their struggle to communicate his struggle? Is Mike Gayle (also a friend) asked if he ever dated a woman from his long-distant past? Not in any interview I’ve seen. I’ve written one female writer character in twenty-five years, to the best of my memory, and she writes non-fiction. She’s divorced because it suited the dictates of my plot. She lives in London because ditto. But yes, maybe I was naïve. In future expect all my female characters to be my exact opposite in every possible way.

Ho hum! Apologies. I’m still slightly reeling from the interviewer last week who opened what I thought was going to be a discussion about writing with: “So, you got divorced after 22 years – how come you didn’t realise it was wrong after ten?” I’m almost laughing at his words as I type. How does one respond to that? Friends have told me I should have walked off, but I’m not built that way. He also asked me, among many other deeply personal questions, if I had “processed the trauma of your divorce by writing about it”. All with a friendly smile on his face. I have blanked a lot of that interview out now, and the publicist assured me afterwards that my responses were boundaried and polite but honestly – I’m still trying to work out how I should have handled it. And whether he would have said the same to a man.

But – and this is a huge but – that was a blip on an otherwise wonderful initial reception to the book. The thing that really hit me in Germany was the warmth of the readers. I hope German readers will not be offended if I say over the years, I have not thought of them as the most demonstrative of audiences. They do not tend to whoop or cheer – unlike, say, Americans - but individuals will happily tell you how much they enjoyed your book when you meet them. Well, something has clearly shifted in the last two years. It was not just the outgoing nature of the audiences (check out my Instagram if you want to see proof), but also the enormous smiles and energy that greeted me at every signing. Every single person who came up to my table was just a delight. It excised a huge lump of my touring anxiety and it filled me with energy, night after night. I have rarely felt as welcome anywhere in the world. So danke schon for that.

Back to the book. I hope you’ll excuse me talking about how this novel came about – it seems daft to have a newsletter about the business of writing and make no reference to it.

We All Live Here is about Lila, a newly single mother of two daughters. Lila is a nonfiction writer who wrote a bestseller about how to revive a stale marriage – published two weeks before her husband Dan ran off with another school mum. When we meet her, that same school mum has just revealed she is pregnant with Dan’s baby. Lila’s teenage daughter Celie is skipping school and struggling, and her eight-year-old daughter Violet knows the lyrics to every unsuitable rap song going. Her elderly stepfather Bill has moved in after Lila’s mother died unexpectedly, and they are all struggling to adjust to life together in a house that seems determined to fall apart (are you keeping up?). Into this mix arrives Lila’s biological father Gene – a failed Hollywood actor who achieved fame in a Star Trek rip off called Star Squadron Zero – and is basically a giant man-baby who has exhausted every last line of credit and every tolerant ex-girlfriend in Los Angeles.

What happens to this family as a result of his arrival is what makes up the bulk of the book along with some second-chance romance and a few significant twists. It’s about modern families, forgiveness, and whether we are doomed to repeat the patterns of our childhood. It’s about two old men who cannot let go of the past. It’s about how we never truly understand what goes on in someone else’s head. Also: it’s funny. (Or it’s meant to be).

I had always wanted to write a family drama – or at least write about a family that didn’t have a conventional shape. I looked around me a couple of years ago and realized that almost nobody I knew had a family that comprised the traditional Mum, Dad, two kids. But I did know families with step-parents, half-siblings, missing parents, gay parents, adopted children, live-in grandparents; basically every possible permutation. And those blends come with inherent tensions that are great for novelists, but also a lot of strengths of their own, which I also wanted to explore. And I wanted to make it funny as well as honest, because truthfully the world is a hard and bleak place right now and I do not believe that to make something comedic makes it shallow or of less value as a piece of art.

In fact I think the human brain is not designed to cope with the wealth of dark information bombarding us just now. A hundred years ago we might have scanned a newspaper once a day, received a letter from family or friends abroad, giving us a picture from afar. We might have occasionally heard a news bulletin on the radio reporting a distant war. Now we have 24-hour news beaming the worst possible images onto our retinas, social media amplifying that with personalized accounts of climate disaster or hideous cruelty. We hear radio bulletins, analysis podcasts, we keep up to date with people we may have met once in 1996, but know via Facebook about their sick child or their depressed spouse. We gaze at the images of suffering and feel both paralysed with fear and riddled with guilt that we are not doing more. I do not think it takes away from the awfulness to allow ourselves to also laugh and feel joy; I think the only way to survive it all is to be allowed to feel the happier things. To remove ourselves occasionally and disappear into a book. It’s what gives us the strength to take on the rest of it.

So that’s why I wrote a comedic novel, and why I will probably write another comedic story after it. That’s not to say I don’t hope you will get a bit teary at bits of it; it is an emotional work after all – but you can feel all the things and that’s okay. I loved writing it; I loved getting the chance to really drill down into character (my favourite thing) and motivation and family dynamics. It came so quickly and easily to me that at various points I panicked that it couldn’t be any good and had to give it to trusted readers for reassurance. It turns out some books just come more easily than others. If you end up reading it I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you leave it feeling a little better about human nature than you started it. God knows we need that right now.

And, oh, it’s not about me. Just in case you missed that part. Especially the sexy bits (that’s to anyone who knows me IRL).

I’m going to give away three copies of We All Live Here – dedicated to whoever you like – before I head off on the next part of the tour. Just tell me who is your favourite of my characters from any book - and why – in the comments and I’ll pick three at random by next Wednesday.

Jx