Bitter Sweet
Two words, and plenty more Big Feelings.
Hello! Thanks for coming back, and for all of the lovely messages about my love and grief piece. This week I’m writing about my debut novel, Bitter Sweet, and polarities, and how we all experience periods of great difficulty as well as joy, and how some of those moments led me to write this book. Bitter Sweet will be published worldwide this July 3rd UK and Commonwealth/July 8th USA and you can pre-order it now.
You’ll hear me talking a lot about pre-orders. The reason authors (especially debuts) are always going on about them is because a good pre-order number shows publishers and retailers that there is an appetite for the book, meaning they order more stock, and you get better visibility in store, more price promos and good slots etc. You can do it through Waterstones, B&N or your local indie, too – it doesn’t have to Amazon!
Pre-ordering is the single biggest way you can support an author. I will keep this Substack free for as long as I can, so if you enjoy reading, please support me by pre-ordering my book. I will be eternally grateful!
So, let’s go! If you are already in the know with the book, just skip down a couple of paragraphs to just below the picture of the two covers and you’ll be at the good stuff.
Bitter Sweet explores the affair between a young book publicist and a much older, celebrated author. My publishers call it ‘a thought-provoking exploration of a relationship founded in power, control and silence, as well as friendships in our twenties and the lasting presence of grief.’ If, like me you enjoy writers like Coco Mellors and Meg Mason and Sally Rooney, I hope you might like Bitter Sweet. Here’s the blurb.
Charlie is 23-years-old and the new publicity assistant at an independent publisher. Richard Aveling is fifty-six, married and the author that has defined his generation. Charlie has long idolised the charming, illustrious writer, who also represents a link to her late mother, who loved his work. But as they embark on an illicit and all-consuming affair, Charlie is forced to hide the relationship from everyone she cares about. And when the success of Richard’s latest book launches him to a new level of fame where all anonymity is lost, she realises she might just be in too deep...
I feel strongly that there is no correct way to write a novel. Much like parenting, everyone who has done it has an opinion, and it’s hard enough without everyone telling you conflicting stuff about there being a right, or wrong, way. If you want to write then just cherry-pick from the advice you read, and find your own process that works for you. I wrote my first draft in seven weeks – I did the same for my second book, Beginning. Middle. End. I know this is unusual, but I write first drafts in intense sprints. When I’m in that headspace, I can write (and write decent stuff) for between five and eight hours a day. Towards the end point, even longer. I suspect that this is totally unsustainable beyond two months but I’ve never tested it out. It isn’t ‘normal’ but I experience a polarity when I am in the early stages of writing a story that is all, or nothing. Most people write for two hours a day, tops, over many, many months, years even. I can’t do that. I have tried. So I do what works for me. So far it’s worked out OK.
Last week I wrote about some of the sadder things I have been through. I have also had extended periods of stability and happiness in my life, but I’d had a pretty bumpy ride leading up to the point that I started writing this book. Covid had been awful – as it had for everyone, obviously it was a fucking nightmare – and I hadn’t coped well. Weeks before the pandemic started, I’d got married and started in what I thought was my dream job as an Editorial Director at one of the Big Five publishers. Everyone in my life was well, and seemingly on track to stay alive for the foreseeable. All of this was sweet. Getting this job felt like a sort of miracle because my route into publishing was so fortuitous and unexpected: I’d left education at eighteen and lived a chaotic life as a musician, touring as a singer and bass player, but it hadn’t worked out. I’d ended up admin temping, which had amazingly become a job in publishing, thus bringing my dreams of being a musician to a natural close. As a kid, I’d wanted to be an actor and been devoted to this idea. I’ve always wanted to do something big and creative. But I just wasn’t good enough and never got the break. Bitter, yes, but I was happy with publishing as a second best.
At some of the publishers I worked at over the ten years I worked in-house, I had been made to feel like an outsider. Some of the behaviour and attitudes I have witnessed has been shocking, but you’ll have to buy me a Martini and a lawyer if you want those stories. Other places had been better and had a more supportive, professional culture. In December 2019, it seemed that I was finally in a good place in my life and doing what I should be doing. I was elated! But it wasn’t to be. The fall was brutal. Covid hit, I got really really sad, and ended up leaving my job (which is by no means comparable to what many people went through but it was, still, a very painful time). I felt totally lost. My life became very small. I scrabbled around for bits of freelance work, but my confidence was absolutely shot. A scheduled Zoom call could bring on a panic attack. I withdrew from the world. I wanted to up and leave London and move to the countryside where no one could see me. I decided that I would go forward living the smallest possible existence, convinced that any grand ideas I had had about doing anything big and clever had been far above my station, just as I had always known. Bitter.
Things improved with time. I was thrilled to fall pregnant. I had a rough pregnancy; I was mostly housebound with acute PGP and you can’t really take pain meds when you are pregnant. But physical pain was far preferable to psychic and it had a scheduled end date, so I numbed myself by watching all of Downton Abbey and everything else on Netflix, and then attempted to do a writing course online – the brilliant Write Like A Grrrl courses are so accessible and run by legend Kerry Ryan. After the second of the five scheduled sessions, my dad became extremely unwell and was hospitalised and I had to stop. It was a challenging time. But. . . The two sessions of that course that I made it to kindled a new fire in me. Sweet. I figured out what was stopping me from writing and I formed the habit of writing a little bit every single day. I realised that I had enough experience of the world in me to write a novel. This was the moment my characters Charlie and Richard started to form in my mind.
When my baby arrived in July 2022, she was transformative. Sweet – the sweetest. A bit woo-woo, but there is real science to say that certain fetal cells actual heal the mother during pregnancy, and I’m certain that baby Astrid fixed a faulty part of me that I thought I would be living with forever. I started writing Bitter Sweet in Iceland in March 2023. We were in an extremely privileged and unusual position: My husband (who took all of the beautiful film photos in this piece) designs book covers at Penguin, and they offer equal parental leave, and because I had just received some inheritance money from my beloved aunt who passed away unexpectedly (bitter) he was able to take the full year available to him. We spent three months of his leave in Reykjavik. I love Iceland, a place of extremes, long hours of light and then dark.
On a trip to Iceland’s tear-inducingly gorgeous Westfjords, one of the remotest places I have ever been, I decided on a whim to start writing about the two characters that has been floating around in my head since the course. The wonderful house we were staying in – you can see it in this advert featuring my clever, funny friend Yrsa Sigurðardóttir – had no TV. It is an extraordinary house in a wild and very isolated place, owned by our kind friends who let us stay for a while. It was so cold that March that the spring that fed the house had frozen, and we (who am I kidding, my husband) had to collect and boil water from a nearby stream. He was in his absolute element. We bathed baby Astrid in the kitchen sink. We explored and hiked and walked on the rare white sand beach (most beaches in Iceland have black sand). It was absolutely perfect. The first scene I wrote, which is still the first chapter in the book, just kind of fell out of me that first night.
Over the coming weeks the story crystallised in my mind. A complicated love story about belonging and grief. I wrote with more and more urgency, terrified that the creativity I had tapped into out of the blue would disappear as fast as it had appeared. I wrote my second book almost immediately, just in case. Creativity is mysterious and inconsistent, for most. Look at Paul McCartney.
I didn’t tell a soul I was writing a novel except my husband. I have a very close network of friends and I tell them absolutely everything. They might even say too much. But I was so broken by my professional collapse that I was still a bit embarrassed by my very existence, let alone my ambitions. When I finished the book, I told my beloved friend Chloe. She read it that summer’s night in the midst of her own maternity leave and she loved it, and that gave me everything I needed. Sweet. She started to help me figure out my next moves. I am so grateful to her. I showed it to a couple of author friends, SJ Watson and AJ Finn. They were also very encouraging and supportive and generous with notes and advice.
So, under the hilariously wafty book title Where You’ll Find Me Now (I really, really like Neutral Milk Hotel) I sent it to a handful of agents and after one fast rejection (bitter) I landed the one I most wanted, Juliet Mushens (sweet). Juliet is a huge part of my life now. I trust her implicitly and I also absolutely adore her as a person. She is always in my corner, and calls me out on my nonsense when I need it. Which is obviously hardly ever because I am an extremely low-maintenance, low-anxiety, level-headed person.
Juliet is also brilliant editorially and had a few notes and suggested we change the title to something less shit. That September, we went out on submission with the book – which was by then called I Hope This Finds You Well – sadly we were not first with this title and so it couldn’t stick, but Bitter Sweet, which my super smart UK editor Charlotte came up with, is a much better fit and I love it on every level. I realised, then, that the book was chock-full of opposites and polarities. Like my life. Maybe like all of our lives.
Getting a publishing deal was – and still is – like a dream. My whole life feels like a dream. My world has opened up again. Now, I can’t imagine ever leaving city life, be it London or elsewhere. I’m really looking forward to doing events, and meeting readers. I had failed, first as a musician and then as a publisher, but I have built something out of those failures and it is, quite literally, Bitter Sweet. Personally, being a writer is far, far preferential to being an editorial director and had that break from publishing not happened, I wouldn’t have written the book. Maybe everything, good and bad, bitter and sweet, has been leading me here. The novel is so full of my experiences, the things I have felt in the best and worst moments of my life. The excitement of new love, the heartbreak when it ends, the grief that follows love, the pain and beauty that comes with intimacy in both friendships and romantic relationships. Summer and winter. Light and dark. The most difficult, agonising and awful things, alongside the very best, are the most compelling, and have now become something I hope people will find to be beautiful.
If you enjoyed reading this, then please consider pre-ordering Bitter Sweet which is out in July.
BIG FEELINGS/BIG RECOMMENDATIONS
This week I am having BIG FEELINGS watching HACKS and crushing equally on both Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart, using these gorgeous and weirdly cheep retro SAUVINA LIP BALMS ‘cos I really really love a lip balm, reading LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I MEAN by Joan Didion whilst mulling the ethics of publishing her private journals, and listening almost exclusively to XO by ELLIOTT SMITH. . . For the ten millionth time.
