Thread by @steveparks

I’ve made it to @Damian_Barr’s always brilliant (always packed out) Literary Salon. Tonight @jojomoyes is talking about her new book, The Giver of Stars...

She says she knew she had to write this book when she found out that Eleanor Roosevelt, after the Great Depression, had brought together a group of women to travel by horseback across the states taking books and literacy to the wider population...

... this was because her husband, the president (of course), feared that because of low literacy rates the masses were falling prey to those who were peddling the equivalent of ‘fake news’ - so JoJo felt a strong resonance with our current times...

Jojo reads a couple of excerpts from the book.
She says the character Marjorie was one of those that dropped into her head fully formed. She’d been reading about those times, be very patriarchal, very oppressive - and so she’d wanted a female character that gave no shits...

...she’s quite tough, so that makes people disapproving of her, but she also reads a lot and has books which makes people suspicions of her. Especially as she has a book about sex, by Marie Stopes. It was banned in Kentucky at the time...

Another character, Alice, is English who meets a boy, the local sports star and marries in haste. It’s only when she arrives in Kentucky with him that she realises what she’s getting into. It’s a very harsh and exploitative way of living, and her father in law is a bad man...

Damian says he’s expected this to be a period piece, but actually it feels very current - the sexism, racism, poor working conditions, fake news.
He asks about Eleanor Roosevelt’s library programme.
She says it went on for about seven years, funded by the government...

She says the women were paid something like $30 a month, which was a good sum then, and rented horses from local landowners. They then rode into remote communities, and managed libraries in small cabins. They were known as ‘the book ladies’...

...she now talks about her research... when she first realised she was going to Beattyville, Kentucky, she researched it and found a guardian article that said it was the opiate capital of the US with terrible crime and social problems...

...she looked and couldn’t find any safe hotels within quite a distance. So she contacted the tourism board who arranged for her to stay with a woman, Barbara, in a cabin in the mountains that she rents out...

...Barbara showed her to cabin, and Jojo suddenly realised she was in the middle of nowhere with no phone or WiFi signal, everyone had guns and a cabin on her own - with no lock on the door. She panicked a little and decided she’d stay awake all night and write, then sleep in day

...then she heard Barbara calling “you come out now!” A few times. She plucked up the courage and then went out, and saw the entire mountainside covered in fireflies. It was stunning

Damian says the book has a lot of nature writing, it really brings the natural landscape to life. Jojo says she spent her days exploring, riding horses, driving around, soaking it all in.
And she spent mornings at Barbara’s communal breakfast table and met so many characters...

One time, a farmer told her story of finding a large deer dead by side of the road. He had a brainwave so rushed home. There, he got out his Santa suit, ran back to the road and lay down next to the deer - just in time for the school bus to go by. It made all the kids scream(!)

Othertimes farmers would compete with stories of ‘the meanest cockerel I ever saw”
It made her realise how much of our travel experience has been corporatised. For example, Barbara would let musicians stay for free as long as they played in the evening so there was often music.

She says there’s going to be a film of the book, and it felt very cinematic to write. She saw it vividly in her head first, and then wrote that down.

Jojo says writing most books is like pulling teeth, but this just flowed. She couldn’t stop writing it, and loved the research

There’s a question from the audience that obviously there’s a lot about horses and writing - does Jojo ride herself? She says yes - she grew up in Hackney, but they had a back yard (now flats) and she got a pony anyway and rode. She still rides, but badly she says...

Another question on how she picks character names - she browses the names of authors on books in her library until she finds one that’s right

Is there much of her in the book? Yes, there’s always something of the author in any book. In Me Before You she took experiences of family members not being able to end their lives in the way they would like, to be in control

How did she come up with title ‘The Giver Of Stars’?
She says it was most painful titling of any book. One working title was ‘The Knowledge’ but everyone in English publishing said it sounded like it was about taxi drivers. In the end it comes from a poetic moment in the story

At this point, a librarian from the London Library (where this event is), brings over some editions that they have in the collection of the Marie Stopes book that Jojo mentioned earlier - one of which is a first edition!

Here is that first edition...

And here’s Felicty, the librarian! 😀

That book is from 1918, and Damian delights in reading out some of the chapter titles - the final one is “the glorious unfolding”!
Jojo says one piece of advice in the book is that if a woman is not allowed to complete the full journey of her enjoyment, she may die(!)

The event is wrapping up now, and moving on to book signing and drinking... but here’s one last anecdote about Barbara who Jojo stayed with in the remote Kentucky mountains while researching the book...

... Barbara had moved to that mountainside after her husband had left her for her best friend... she had two small children, was needing to look after them, draw water from the well, and look after the farm. At first she’d tried to grow marijuana but the first two crops failed...

... so one day she had just had enough. She’d ‘cried every day for 8 years’, and just lay down in the garden, feeling like all she could do was give up.
After a while she opened her eyes to find a mountain lion ‘the size of a table’ standing over her...

... She’d watched the mountain lion through binoculars and knew she had young to feed.

So she lay there thinking ‘my children are inside, my gun is inside, there ain’t nothing I can do’

So all she did was sit up, look the mountain lion in the eyes, and said “Fuck Off!”...

... Jojo asked her “and what did the mountain lion do?”
Barbara replies “she fucked off. I never saw her again!”

Jojo says that’s the character of the people there. Living in tough conditions, being strong and not giving a fuck.

So this is the book - The Giver Of Stars - it’s published in October, and from the buzz I’m hearing about it already, it’s going to be big.

I’m looking forward to getting stuck into this over the summer.

Thanks to @Damian_Barr for another tremendous #litsalon !

It turns out that Jojo has an esteemed fan club of Davids... David Gilmour was there, along with David Nicholls...

https://twitter.com/davidnwriter/status/1147206140624867330?s=21