Friday, December 31, 2021

Jojo Moyes has written a story on Lou Clark's quarantine

Jojo Moyes

Jojo Moyes has written a story on Lou Clark's quarantine

TIMESOFINDIA.COM
Created: Jun 2, 2020, 17:56 IST

The author of the popular 'Me Before You' has written an update on what the protagonist is doing during the lockdown we're all in.

'Me Before You' was the first book of a trilogy, following a girl, Louisa Clark as she becomes the carer of a quadriplegic man whom she slowly falls in love with.

The one lesson I've learned from life: Author JoJo Moyes says don’t forget to live in the moment

Former newspaper editor JoJo Moyes became a full-time author in her 30s
The writer's 15 books have sold more than 38 million copies worldwide
JoJo, 52, lives in Essex with husband Charles Arthur, and their children

By LIZ HOGGARD FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 00:20 GMT, 16 August 2021 | UPDATED: 00:24 GMT, 16 August 2021

Former newspaper editor JoJo Moyes became a full-time author in her 30s. Her 15 books have sold more than 38 million copies worldwide. The Last Letter From Your Lover is now a film starring Felicity Jones. JoJo, 52, lives in Essex with husband Charles Arthur, their daughter and two sons

AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR JOJO MOYES

We loved this shoot with author Jojo Moyes for magazine Kamille back in December. Jojo had great success with her book “Me Before You” (2012) which was turned into a Hollywood movie in 2016 starring Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin. We met Jojo in London for a photoshoot for the launch of her latest book in the trilogy about Louisa Clark (“Still Me” 2018).

‘The first time I was really impressed with the experience of reading was Little Women.
It went right into me’ …
Vivian Gornick. Photograph: Philippe Matsas

Books

that

made me

Vivian Gornick: 'I couldn’t finish Michelle Obama’s Becoming'

The journalist and memoirist on learning from Natalia Ginzburg, the genius of Geoff Dyer’s comedy, and why James Salter is overrated

Vivian Gornick
Fri 26 Mar 2021 10.00 GMT

The book I am currently reading

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee. I had actually never read anything by Lee before. I’ve only read 50 or 60 pages, but her style is immensely appealing. The sentences are very simple, there’s no fancy writing – she somehow puts things together in such a lively way that I feel as if I’m listening to her. She hits that marvellous conversational style. I like Fitzgerald’s work and it’s a pleasure seeing how she developed. I’m enjoying it very much.

Vivian Gornick

The book that changed my life

I was well into my 30s when I read The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg and as soon as I began I felt myself deeply connected. It isn’t that it’s the greatest book in the world, but for me it was vital. I felt she was showing me the type of writer I had it in me to be. One of the essays – “My Vocation” – really hit the nail on the head. I identified profoundly with the way in which Ginzburg traced her own development as a nonfiction writer. It made me realise that it was only through this kind of writing I could employ my own storytelling gifts. I reread it irregularly but quite a lot, and I’m always amazed by what she is able to accomplish with the small personal essay.

The book I think is most overrated

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter is immensely overrated. I could have picked 100 books like that, but this is the one that has been stuck in my craw for a long time.

The last book that made me laugh

Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer is a brilliant book. For me, the best thing he ever wrote. A little bit of genius, it made me laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

The last book that made me cry

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. It’s written by an Ivy League-educated, middle-class black lawyer who went to work for a non-profit organisation set up to defend the people on death row in the south. The story of what it means to be on death row in Georgia and Alabama is enough to break your heart 15 times over. His description makes it sound like South Africa before apartheid was ended. A nightmare. A wonderfully written book.

The book I couldn’t finish

Michelle Obama’s autobiography, Becoming. Yes, she’s a very nice woman but I found the book tedious, and it just didn’t hold my interest.

The book I’m ashamed not to have read

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I’ve started it 100 times over – I just can’t get into it. I always feel bad about that. I don’t think I’ll try again.

The book I give as a gift

This depends on who I’m giving the book to. It’s like giving any other kind of gift: you try to keep in mind what the recipient will like, not what you like. But it always has to be something I consider substantial. I would never give somebody the current fiction bestseller or anything like that. If I give a book, it’s one that I value, but most importantly one that the other person will value too.

My earliest reading memory

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Our house was full of books and my parents encouraged me to read, but I don’t remember any childhood stories like Winnie the Pooh. I remember fairytales like the Grimms’, but the first time I was really impressed with the experience of reading was Little Women. It went right into me.

My comfort read

The Odd Women by George Gissing. There was a time when I read that book every six months – usually in the winter – for quite a number of years. It’s a book that I treasure to this day.

Books that made me / Emma Cline / ‘Reading anything because you “should” doesn’t make sense to me’

Emma Cline

Books

that

made me

Emma Cline: ‘Reading anything because you “should” doesn’t make sense to me’

The author on books that inspire a ‘slight hallucinatory vibe’ in her own writing, the wonders of Richard Scarry, and rereading Jeffrey Eugenides

Emma Cline
Fri 9 Apr 2021 10.00 BST

The book I am currently reading

I’m halfway through A Way of Life, Like Any Other by Darcy O’Brien, a demented and perfect novel from the late 70s about the mythology of Hollywood intersecting with the mythology of family. It’s insanely good, and the tone is so sparky and bizarre and deadpan. I just finished a Beach Boys biography – a book about fathers as the great villains, which paired in interesting ways with the documentary Crumb [about underground cartoonist Robert Crumb]. In both cases, brothers are psychologically destroyed by their fathers in an era when fathers were held up as the ultimate god/daddy figures. And then the brothers go on, in their art, to pervert these seemingly innocent forms of the culture: comics and pop music.

‘I wish Problems by Jade Sharma was more widely known’ ... Emma Cline.
Photograph: Brad Torchia

The book I wish I’d written

Maybe Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy. Sometimes a heightened world can be hard to keep up for the length of a novel, but this is slim and totally successful at sustaining a surreal atmosphere. Or Sylvia by Leonard Michaels, which has always felt like the perfect book. Oh wait, actually Norman Rush’s Mating.

The books that had the greatest influence on my writing

Probably the stories of Mary Gaitskill, Joy Williams and Deborah Eisenberg. I’m looking for that slight hallucinatory vibe in my own writing, a sense that the world has ever so slightly been knocked off its axis.

The book I think is most underrated

Problems by Jade Sharma is so great, and I wish it was more widely known and read. I also loved The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan.

The last book that made me cry

My friend remembered a line from a Jack Gilbert poem as “it’s dark in the major nation”. Which seemed to fit this current moment when so-called American exceptionalism is exposed as the fiction it always was. I looked it up in Gilbert’s The Great Fires and the actual line is, “this dark is a major nation”. And then I reread his poem “Alone”, about his wife, Michiko – it always makes me cry.

The last book that made me laugh

This psychedelic and totally hilarious nonfiction book by Bett Williams called The Wild Kindness. There’s a killer scene where the narrator is on mushrooms and having a conversation with their dog and the dog is very calmly recounting that he’s part of MKUltra [the CIA psychological warfare programme involving human experiments]. And I have been rereading Percival Everett’s Erasure: I forgot how funny that book is.

The book I couldn’t finish

I got a little ways into The Golden Bowl by Henry James. I’ll probably try again, but I’m not too worried about it.

The book I’m ashamed not to have read

I don’t feel shame about reading habits. Reading anything because you think you “should” doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It seems more pleasurable and more useful to follow whatever bizarre interests and tastes are peculiar to you.

The book I give as a gift

Leonard Koren’s Undesigning the Bath, The Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, and Bento’s Sketchbook by John Berger.

My earliest reading memory

Probably the Busy Town books, which delighted me with their illustrations of what I assumed adult life would look like: animals wearing vests and running bookstores. I also obsessed over Sherlock Holmes.

My comfort read

Some people really like the transporting nature of experimental prose or spare autofiction, but when I want to fully peace out of reality, I like being dropped into another life entirely, one that feels as rich and detailed as possible. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides was a comforting reread lately, because the scenes have the quality of life. Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson is comforting for the same reason, a fictional world that is so tightly woven that it blots out the actual world.

THE GUARDIAN

THE BOOKS THAT MADE ME
2017

22 September 2017
Books that made me / Franzen / 'I defy anyone to finish it without wetting the pages with tears'
29 September 2017
Philip Pullman / ‘The book I wish I’d written? My next one’

6 October 2017
Anne Enright / ‘I threw The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann into the Liffey in 1983’

13 October 2017

Eimear McBride / ‘I can never finish Dickens – it’s sacrilege’
20 October 2017
Shami Chakrabarti / ‘Harry Potter offers a great metaphor for the war on terror’

1 December 2017
Penelope Lively / My debt to roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce

2018

20 January 2018
Kamila Shamsie: ‘It took me 17 years to get round to War and Peace’

10 March 2018

Elizabeth Strout / ‘My guilty pleasure? War and Peace. I read it furtively’

25 May 2018