The best-selling author of 29 novels including Mad Honey, My Sister’s Keeper and her latest, By Any Other Name …
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ON HOME Home is New Hampshire. I’ve lived there for about 26 years now on about eleven acres of property in a very rural part of the state. The best time of the year is autumn when the leaves have the most beautiful jewel tones. What I love about living here is that it is everyone else’s vacation destination for about three quarters of the year. I consider myself really lucky to live there because it’s very private and very quiet. I like visiting cities but I wouldn’t want to live in one.
ON FAMILY I was born in New York City and grew up in Queens until I was five, then my parents moved to Long Island. Interestingly, I lived in a development called The Storybook. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy!
ON MY DESK I write in the attic of my house. I have a long desk that is built into the wall, so it runs along one end of the room. My computer is on it, but also all of my files of research and that’s really important to me. I can work anywhere, but I prefer to work at home because everything is literally at my fingertips. Whatever book I’m currently writing is usually in legal folders sorted by research. Th n there are boxes of previous research because those get sent off to an archive in the University of Massachusetts. There’s a shelf above my desk that has the letters W R I T E just in case I need to remember that I shouldn’t just be online shopping …
ON WRITING I do a good 80 to 85 per cent of the research I need to do for a book before I write a single word. If it’s a research day I might be at my desk, but I also might be in the state of Rhode Island with the head of emergency response control doing a mock-up of a tremendous disaster, so she can run all of the public safety systems through what they should be doing, which is something I did for research this year. If it’s a writing day, I swim a mile every morning and then I go up to my desk. My husband usually brings me a terrific cup of coffee because he’s an angel! I pull up what I was writing the day before and I edit my way through it. And when I run out of words, I just keep writing. I sit at my desk until about 4.30-5pm when I magically turn into a wife and mother. It’s nothing very sexy.
ON SUCCESS I remain in shock that I get to do what I love and that people want to read the things I write, and I really do mean that. Even 35 years into it, it never gets easier to write. I think when people define success, they usually say the bestseller list or the number of sales. That absolutely counts in this industry, all that stuff is incredibly important, but the way that I define success is a lot more personal. To me, it’s what people are saying about me behind my back when I’m not there to hear it! There are a lot of people who get to the top of the bestseller lists who don’t reach down and pull anyone up. That is not the person I want to be. I want to be able to use whatever success I have to help others reach the top of the mountain, rather than being the one at the top, knocking people off.
ON BOOKSHOPS One of my favourite bookstores is in Concord, New Hampshire called The Gibsons and another called the Norwich Book Store in Vermont, right across the border from where I live. The local bookstores are the ones that are special to me. @jodipicoult @edelcoffey
By Any Other Name (Michael Joseph, €16.99) is out now.
