"Writing is not a persona or a lifestyle, it’s something squeezed into everyday life..."—Lisa Jewell, author of 22 novels and counting
Shana and Andromeda chat about Will Brooker's "The Truth About Lisa Jewell"
Phenomenally productive UK author Lisa Jewell writes nearly entire suspense novels in a concentrated burst each year, getting most of her words down on paper in the fall. Her editors have enough faith to pre-announce her titles well before they are written and edited.
If that doesn’t make your jaw drop, you’re probably not a Lisa Jewell reader or any kind of writer. But if you are one of those things—or both—then you may appreciate the geeky conversation that follows, in which Shana Wilson and I suck as much insight and inspiration as we can out of Will Brooker’s idiosyncratic and delightful The Truth About Lisa Jewell.
Brooker’s tell-all includes financial details, insider publishing info, vulnerable moments, the inside scoop on how Jewell got her start, pop music references, debates about expensive socks, and plenty of wine. (Both Jewell and her interlocutor don’t mind getting tipsy together as they progress from cautious strangers to curiously intimate, if possibly temporary, friends.)
Shana, let’s start with something that struck both of us—that Lisa Jewell is extremely open to collaboration, editorial input, and even suggestions from Will Brooker, who at several points in this book seems intent on steering her plot!
SHANA: Yes! I was surprised by how open she is to outside input on her plots, and I think my surprise stems from the fact that when you read Lisa Jewell, you know you are reading Lisa Jewell. Her brand is distinct, so it struck me to consider that maybe what comprises her brand is not exclusive to what moves from her mind to the page. Obviously, she makes it come to life in a way that only she can, but she’s very candid about how much she trusts her editor, Selina, and what their working relationship is like. Even accepting that Selina is a huge part of shaping what eventually becomes a Lisa Jewell book, it was still initially a bit jarring to me how open she was to Will Brooker’s plot suggestions. Whether those were possibilities already stirring about in her mind, we may never know. But, I suppose, when you are a pantser and the story is forming as you write it, it makes sense that you might latch on to ideas that move the story forward – no matter where they come from.
On that note (pantsing), I want to call out one of my favorite parts of the book, where she compares how she writes to closing the menu as soon as you decide what you’re going to order. She read somewhere that if you do that, you’ll be more confident in your choice, and she realized that’s how she writes. She makes decisions quickly and instinctively and then metaphorically closes her menu. “There, I think, it is done. That is on the page and that is what it is. It saves a lot of angst.”
ANDROMEDA: I completely agree, and I love that decisiveness. (Almost as much as I love the fact that she has Saturday night dance parties at home, where she and her husband guzzle champagne while watching dance videos.)
Continuing our thoughts on her process…I’ve already mentioned she writes mostly in the fall. Her cycle begins in March, she seems to have short writing days in which she may get only a few hundred words down without stressing. She takes six weeks off to be with family each summer, and then, with a winter deadline ahead of her, she buckles down.
At one point in Brookner’s chronological saga (p.213), Jewell has “fifty days to finish the novel, and 50,000 words to write.” She is groggy and unmotivated, feeling like “A LUMP,” but she knows—as do we—that she will somehow finish writing this novel. In late November, when she is on the verge of hitting page 300 of an expected 400-page manuscript, she describes each book as “akin to swimming the channel. I know that I’ll get to France eventually if I just keep going but for most of the swim I can’t actually see it.”
What amazes me even more than her condensed late-in-the-year productivity is how she manages to fit all of her other editorial duties, such as revision, copy editing queries, and other final details into that January to March period, before she starts yet another new book. Never mind the fact that she’s publicizing all the time. (In interviews, she has said she spends up to four hours a day on promo tasks.)
And it’s not like Jewell doesn’t revise with her editors, because as you point out, Shana, she revises with them quite a bit. Brooker, who is on the academic side (I found it odd that he didn’t know that ARC stands for Advanced Reader Copy) doesn’t drill into that developmental nitty-gritty, and I wish he had. Do the big authors hand off some details that mid-listers don’t? How many times does she re-read her finished drafts or do multiple post-sub revisions? How does she brainstorm a new plot when she is still looking for ways to polish the last one, all the way up though pub day?
Those are questions, not takeaways. But what I’m left with is this: if you have a steady cycle, a new book always in progress, and clear, firm deadlines, you probably waste less time fussing during the final production process or worrying about launch day or trying to read the tea leaves about sales down the road. Lisa Jewell seems to focus very quickly on the next book. All hail Lisa Jewell!
SHANA: I would have loved for Brooker to have dug a bit deeper there, as well. Speaking of things he left out, some insight into her big switch from family dramas to suspense would have been a welcome addition. He touches on her career trajectory, starting with rom-coms, moving into family dramas, but he doesn’t really linger on the subject of genre movement.
One thing he did point out is how The Family Remains turned out to be less of a suspense novel and more of a family drama, like her earlier work. I read The Family Remains not long after it came out, and didn’t remember noticing that. I was probably too wrapped up in the suspense of Henry and Phin. After finishing Brooker’s book, I went back and re-read The Family Remains, and he’s absolutely right. While there’s definite tension and Lisa’s signature pacing, SPOILER ALERT: the storylines all kind of tie up in a bow without any major trauma.
ANDROMEDA: I mentioned that Jewell keeps focused on the next book, but she does confess to noticing reader responses. I was surprised and heartened when she admitted to following the comments in a Facebook thread in which sixty of sixty-eight or so comments were by people who didn’t like The Family Upstairs. She had to buoy herself back up by remembering how many fans and great ratings she does have. (If you’re curious: 3.97 on Goodreads and nearly 2.4 million ratings overall.)
And still, Lisa Jewell was a bit baffled.
“It was the fourth-bestselling book in the country last year, and loads of people absolutely loved it, and I get all these messages from people saying it reignited their love for reading. … How can it be a good book and a bad book at the same time? How can it be gripping, and yet boring at the same time? It’s the same book. It was a bit of a headfuck, that.”
Her admission of both vulnerability and confidence made me feel better about my own vacillation between those two states. Maybe it’s okay to be disappointed when people trash you while at the very same time recognizing that your book, for the right reader, has immense value.
Let’s talk about two elements of Lisa Jewell’s popularity that Brooker did help draw attention to: her literary-level language and her deep empathy for characters. You want to take a swing at the first?
SHANA: Absolutely, because this particularly stood out to me. While Jewell’s stories have certain elements of thrillers, they have also always felt different to me as a reader – deeper than most thrillers. This is largely due to how fully she brings her characters to life. But I think it can also be attributed to the language she uses. Brooker calls out her instinctive feel for the right words and sounds as feeling organic and alive, “as if she is recording events as they happen.”
To illustrate the impact of both language and character development, Brooker points to an excerpt from The Family Remains that comes from Henry’s point of view, as he’s watching the sun set over Lake Michigan in Chicago.
I am incomplete. I have always felt incomplete…the sky is on fire and nobody loves me and I love nobody and I am alone, I am so, so alone and Jesus Fucking Christ I have to find Phin. I have to find Phin and if finding him doesn’t fix me I swear to God I will swim across this lake and throw myself into that acid orange sun and let myself burn to a smudge of ash.
Brooker’s takeaway from the excerpt: “The reason I chose Lisa was because of paragraphs like that one, where the intricate thriller plot is briefly forgotten in a moment of transcendence, and the writing strips away the character’s artifice, tapping into something truthful, profound and sometimes painful.”
Later in the book, Brooker touches on how important characters are in making the reader care about what happens next, even in a high-stakes thriller. He asserts that no matter how tense the plot, readers won’t care if they don’t connect with the character. Which brings me back to why Jewell’s thrillers feel different: her characters are fully-formed, well-rounded people and she reveals all their darkest corners through her choice of language. There’s nothing surface level about them.
This book was a huge palate cleanser for my writing life. Starting my year with it felt like a bit of a reset – if only because it portrays one of my idol authors as super relatable. Yes, we see the evidence of her astronomical success – private clubs, champagne lunches, and seaside mansions – but we also get to see the sausage being made: the daily commitment to getting words on a page, the weeks that pass with no new words, the questioning of whether she’s written herself into a corner. There are many things Jewell does exceptionally well. But, she’s not perfect and isn’t afraid to show it. She’s unapologetic about her terrible spelling. She sometimes forgets the details of her own stories. What writer can’t relate to that?
ANDROMEDA: I can. And I love your “New Year’s reset” comment, Shana. You are nailing why I enjoyed The Truth About Lisa Jewell. It made me think about why I enjoy her books so much—especially the deep empathy she feels for her characters, even if they are stalkers or incels, for example. It also touched me as a writer and a woman, making me want to write more fearlessly and trust myself that I can revise under deadline pressure. Her work ethic, productivity, openness to collaboration, gratitude to her publishing team (see, “Cupcake Karma”) and general attitude about life were all hugely motivational. Like one of my other role models, Agatha Christie, she doesn’t seem to be suffering as a writer. She challenges herself, appreciates her readers, and enjoys the rewards she has earned. Of the many quotes I should pin over my desk is this one:
“You have to write the book for your most enthusiastic reader.”
SHANA: I also love that Jewell refuses to be put in a box. She pushes back time and time again when Brooker tries to draw a straight line from a to b. For instance, there’s a point early in the book when he thinks he’s made a significant discovery, and he presents his findings to her like a lawyer making a case, evidence and all. He attributes the attention Jewell pays to fashion and interior design – her use of them to reveal bits of character – to her early-career training as a fashion illustrator. But Jewell brushes him off, insisting she pays no more attention to these details than any other female. I take some issue with her response, simply because I’ve read plenty of thrillers, and books in general, where no heed at all is paid to a character’s accessories or how their home is styled. Still, I appreciate her dismissal. It's just one of several examples of Jewell’s resistance to Brooker’s analysis, and to me, it feels almost like a defiant refusal to be simplified. She even turns the tables on him at one point later in the book, comparing him to some of her characters in an email exchange that unnerves him.
In the afterword, by Jewell, she actually addresses this dynamic, writing: “It was odd, also, to see myself being caricatured in the early chapters of the book as Will tried to make me into his idea of what a successful author is meant to be, squeezing and manhandling me into some sort of glamorous, aloof shape that neither I, nor any of my author friends, fit into.”
Jewell uses the afterword to explain her justification for agreeing to be part of the book, noting that she wanted people to see the real life of an author –especially a female one – not just the glamorous moments, which she says are few and far between.
“Writing’ is not a persona or a lifestyle, it’s something squeezed into everyday life, sometimes even relegated to the sidelines of that life. I was glad that through the process of being privy to the rhythms of my year, Will was able to see through the illusion and into the reality of a writer’s life.”
ICYMI: Want to learn more about Lisa Jewell? Shana Wilson wrote a guest post for us last year about the Hampton Whodunit Book Festival, where Lisa Jewell was a featured author, providing her thoughts on pantsing as well as writing about houses and families.
Shana Wilson is a senior communications executive, having spent most of her career in the sports industry. After growing up in the San Diego suburbs, she graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in English and from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a master’s degree in journalism. When she’s not writing adult suspense or watching true crime documentaries to inspire her writing, she can be found reading, baking, sipping wine with friends, or walking her dog at the beach. She lives in San Diego with her Cockapoo, Ollie. Find her on Instagram @shanawilsonauthor.
Andromeda Romano-Lax is co-creator of this newsletter and author of The Deepest Lake (Soho Crime, May 2024), about a mother’s search for the truth about the disappearance of her daughter, set at a luxury writing retreat in Guatemala. Prior to writing suspense fiction, she authored four novels, including The Spanish Bow, a New York Times Editors’ Choice published in eleven languages.
This book sounds fascinating. And I also love the idea of a New Year's reset.
I swear I'm going to go back to writing this morning but first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrBUZNvYlEM an hour-long interview of Jewell by Brooker, for true fans who made it to the comment section!! (Definitely taking a long lunch break and watching this later.)