Jojo Moyes, writer

Hello, I'm Lauren the Vern and this is the Desert Island Disks podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the A-tracks, book and luxury that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For right reasons the music's shorter than on the original broadcast but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening. [Music] My cast away this week is the writer JoJo Moise. Her books have been translated into 46 languages, sold over 57 million copies and reached the number one spot in 12 countries. She grew up in East London. The daughter of two young hippies with a work ethic. Her own CV includes working in a minicab office and cutting her teeth as a journalist while writing fiction in her free time. Her breakthrough book Me Before You is the story of a young quadriplegic man who wants to end his life and the young woman who wants to persuade him not to. It was a global phenomenon and became a hit film, though she almost didn't write it. It was a fellow novelist who convinced her to keep going. She says the story of my life is launching into things because no one could give me a good reason why I shouldn't. JoJo Moise, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you for having me. I'm so ridiculously thrilled to be here. I cried when I was asked to come. I think if you're the daughter of two radio four listeners and have grown up listening to this it feels like the kind of pinnacle of my professional career. So thank you. Well we are so delighted to have you. So let's go back to those astonishing statistics. I enjoyed your 46 languages. Your work's been translated into I wonder which part of the world embracing you was most surprising. I think it was Brazil. I mean Brazil. I mean, bodyguards in Brazil. No. And at the time I was out there which I think was 2016, they told me I was bigger than JK Rowling at that point which is quite the thing but I remember being surrounded by these bodyguards in a shopping centre in Sao Paulo while I was doing an event in a bookshop and I felt like I'd been caught shoplifting. If you come from East London, being surrounded by four burly guys in kind of earpieces just makes you different resonance. So you say that it actually took quite a few years before you saw one of your books in the wild. Somebody reading it in the dentist I think. Yes, I've got it was about eight years I think and I have a I go to a tiny NHS dentist where I used to live in Essex and I was sitting down and I looked to my right and she was holding a copy of Still Me and I couldn't believe it off because I'd wanted to see all these years and people had sent me photographs of them seeing copies of my books and so on. And so I finally plucked up courage and I said excuse me that's my book and she went no it's not I got it from the library. I had to show her a copy of my face on the fly leaf and then she got it and we had a good laugh. Now we are about to turn to the music. What role does music play in your life? It's so huge. I use it for so many things. I use it to work too. I mostly though use it as a mood enhancer. I use it like some people use drugs to bring me up or bring me down and I think the piece that we're about to play is the ultimate bringer upper for me. You wouldn't want to use this too many times or else you become addicted and immune to it and actually I bring it out sparingly but when I use it it has the most amazing effect. It's Elvis Presley singing "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" but it's the version where he collapses into giggles. The entire country now absolutely lost it. Oh, I'm going to be there, I'll be there. Are you Lonesome tonight? The laughing version to kick us off Georgia Moise. So let's go back to the beginning then Georgia. You're born in 1969, the only child to a very young couple of art students, your parents Lizzie and Jim and you were very early as well 10 weeks premature which in those days was very early indeed. Well I think they initially told my mum I hadn't survived. She told me a story of being an assault bath because that's what they used to give mothers after they'd given birth. Sounds delightful doesn't it? And she said once they told her I was alive she sort of leapt out of the assault bath and ran to see me and I was in an incubator and in fact my parents I think got rid of a lot of the pictures because they were almost too awful to look at. I was such a. I look like one of those baby pigeons you know. But I survived. There was obviously some grit in there but that's where my name comes from because my mum had to christen me in a hurry because they thought I was close to death and so she named me after her three friends Pauline Sara and Joe and then once they've realised I was going to live they just thought there's no way we can call this little scrap Pauline so I became Joe Joe and it was because there was a Beatles song around at the time called Get Back and so I've always been Joe Joe even though Pauline is on my passport. What about your parents then how did they cope being in that situation at quite a young age I think? I think it was very difficult not just because my granny who I loved very much but my granny was a strict Catholic and my grandparents on that side of the family were very upper middle class my grandfather was a naval commander and so I don't think my arrival was greeted with you know great cries of horror however once I was there everybody was pretty happy although I did discover much later in life and I've talked to my dad about this that the were plans to have me adopted and I discovered this in my 20s and it's quite a weird thought because it depends who you speak to my family which version of this you get but apparently somebody told me there was a doctor's family in Gloucester who were primed to take me but both my mum and dad told me afterwards that once I'd arrived there was no way they were going to give me up and they both sort of fell in love with me and they got married and things became a lot more traditional. To a point I mean they were still creative they've been at art school but they still use their creativity to make a living your mom became an illustrator very successful one do we still see her painting on our packets of tea? She did the auction tea packets and it was her work on there for decades and my dad started off they both had to give up art school because of my arrival sorry parents and my dad set up a company called Momart which started off just ferrying around works of art for galleries and cork street in a little blue Renault van but then became bigger and bigger and more successful and by the time dad sold it back in the 90s it was responsible for the government art collection it stored all sorts of important pieces of art and it also had a royal warrant so dad basically built that from nothing and you were there every step of the way because I think you spent a lot of time with your dad growing up I did so there's a picture of me as a six year old sitting on a flatbed lorry reading a book right next to a Henry Moore sculpture but all my early memories are of either sitting under my mum's desk as she worked or going round with my dad or sitting in his warehouse and he in his warehouse were some extraordinary works of art and I got everything from Picasso to the Sergeant Pepper uniforms because dad stored a lot of Paul McCartney's stuff which was then MPL I don't know if it still is often I would be taken along to meet artists when he was moving big works of art I've got tiny little autographs in my bunty autograph books from David Hockney and Damon Elizabeth Frank he was very cany-dad he got them to do me little pictures it was a childhood that was suffused with creativity JoJo we should have some more music now it's your second choice today what's it going to be? one of my most common memories is of driving in the south of France with my dad and he put on I think it was either Sergeant Pepper or the way album or all of them we we would just listen to music nonstop and I think I knew every Beatles lyric for a while and we would sing them and it's really hard picking a Beatles song when you're here because you're so conscious that everybody has picked every Beatles song and when you're next to it will be a bit egotistical to do get back so I picked golden slumbers because it's one of those that I never get tired of and I will sing the song by the Beatles and golden slumbers JoJo Moys you've been horse obsessed from a very young age it began when you were a little girl and I think you had an unusual request for your eighth birthday yeah I don't know where this horse obsession came from from because my parents are completely unhorsey people. I mean they barely have had pets between them. My dad had a dog. That's it. But I caught this bug, age sort of seven. I went to the Lee Valley Riding School in Maldumstone, which was a council run equestrian centre set up in the 80s. I think to give under-privileged kids a taste of a different kind of sport. And I used to work 20 hours there, mucking out, you know, lifting hay bells, buckets of water in return for one hours riding. And I thought that was a great deal. I just thought that was fantastic. So yeah, that became my obsession. When I was a child, I asked my mum if she would fill my room with straw so that I could pretend to be a horse. And she did it. And I don't remember much about my childhood, but I do remember that. And I also don't remember being part of clearing it up. So it was pretty game of her to do that, I think. Well, this escalated and you were obsessed and eventually ended up buying a horse of your own. I did. There were lots of little stable yards in the 1980s dotted around East London in the most unlikely places, like in tiny, cobbled yards. And there was one behind Hackney Town Hall under the railway arches. And I knew where all these yards were. And I got friendly with lots of the people who ran them. And there was a horse there who'd been rescued from a lamppost. I don't know. He'd been chained up to a lamppost. And a guy had bought him who didn't know about horses, but a bought him to rescue him, but just didn't know what to do. And so he let me pay for bombardier in installments. And so I had a cleaning job at 14. And I paid off this horse. And then I told my parents, and how did you break the news? We were in the kitchen. And I said, by the way, they knew that I was helping look after this horse. And I said, oh, by the way, I bought bombardier. And there was this silence. And they said, what? And I said, I bought him. I bought bombardier. And they went, my mother said, well, you can jolly well go and I'm by him. Can't you? I mean, what are you going to do with a horse? And I said, I'm keeping him. You can't do anything. I'm keeping him. And they said to me afterwards that although they were kind of shocked and slightly appalled and also a bit like, what on earth is she going to do with a horse? They also thought if my worst rebellion was working to buy the thing that I really wanted and then giving up my lunch money to pay for hay and stuff like that, then I wasn't doing too badly. They admitted a long time afterwards that they were actually quite proud. And yeah. And since then my whole life on and off, depending on my life circumstances, I've had horses. I'm a very pragmatic and sensible person, but there's something about a horse that speaks to myself. I'm getting tearful. What the hell? Sorry. They've just been such an important part of my life. They're like any animal that you can pull unconditional love into them. And you get back something that is uncomplicated. I have to say with horses, it's slightly more complicated and that they could also kill you if they tried unlike a kind of cat or a dog. But I think for me, it was about independence. It was about courage. It was about feeling unafraid. And what happened to them? Well, this is the worst bit. And this is why I've never, ever got rid of an animal in the last 40 years. I sold him very cheaply to some people that I'd known for a long time because I had a level. And I suddenly found that I couldn't do all the things I couldn't muck out and earn money and do all the stuff if I was going to get my exams. And somebody bought him for their niece. And then they wouldn't tell me what happened to him after that. And I spent years trying to track him down. And I never found him. And I've always felt terrible about it. I always felt like I let him down. So yeah, it doesn't matter how old an animal gets. It's with me for life now. I want to be there and make sure that they have a good end. We're going to go back to the music now. I think your third choice today. What's next? This is Janet K. Silly Games. Now, I mean, if you grew up in Hackney in the 70s and 80s, then Reggae was just a massive part of your kind of audible history. But it's also because friendship is so hugely important to me, especially female friendship. And I have the same best friend, Kathy Ronsman, who I've had since I was 16. We met at Camden School for Girls and we were both slightly misfitting and truniting together. And we just got each other in that way that you sometimes find someone who's your tribe. And there is something very blissful about loving somebody who has known every iteration of you, every terrible version of your teenage and 20 something self. And who will call you on your nonsense and also turn up at 4am when you're saddest. And I didn't grow up with sisters. I acquired my sisters when I was 19 and 20. But I had Kathy and I don't know who I would be if I didn't have her. I don't drink anymore or very, very rarely. But my party piece is that I can hit the high notes in Silly Games. And I tried it the other day just to see if I still could. But I'm not going to do it for you. You do it on the island though. Oh, I can practice all day long. Yeah. But I can hit those high notes preferably if I've had a drink. In my mind I say. Janet Kay and Silly Games. And I can confirm for the listener that Jojo Moise did indeed hit the high note there with Gostor and only on a cup of tea. Absolutely incredible. Jojo, you know, you described yourself as a kind of under the radar rebel as a teenager. What else was going on? You mentioned acquiring siblings when you were 19. Your parents divorced when you were 14. How did that impact you? I think pretty much like every teenager whose parents get divorced, I think I probably didn't handle it brilliantly. And I think they were so young that maybe in later life they would have handled it differently too. But they did both go on to have other families. And I love my siblings. I don't call them my half siblings. They're just siblings to me. So my mum went on to have my brother guy who when I was about 20, I think and my dad had my two sisters with his second wife and that's being clemmy. And I think we're all pretty close. I wasn't sure how I would feel when I first met them because it had been quite a difficult time. I'd had to move out of my family home and I was living in lodgings on the Bulls Pond Road with a family that I knew. So you moved out when things fractured, you left home? Yeah, well I lived with my mum and her partner first but then they moved out to Essex, North West Essex and I didn't want to leave London so I moved in with my dad and things didn't go well with his wife and so I had to leave. And I went to live with this amazing family, the Barys, who he was a dustman and there were seven of them and it was like suddenly being kind of adopted by a really rough and ready version of the Walten's. I had a cooked meal on the table every night and someone had to know where I was and so I had independence at 17 in that I could go off and work and do my end thing but someone knew where I was. I wasn't kind of out by myself and I did love that family. They were good to me. So after school you didn't go to university as you mentioned you were working so you spent a few years doing quite a wide variety of jobs. I mean give me a flavvy. Okay. Okay, typing bank statements. So I did the first job I applied for was Nat West Bank working in their visual impairment section, typing braille bank statements and we had these little iron type writers with six keys and we were given two weeks to learn how to type braille and I did it in two days. I just there's a coat with braille and I just cracked it and it was brilliant because I got to work with some blind people and I got to see a different way of being and I loved the staff there and we had a good laugh and the other one that I did which was profoundly useful was I worked in a mini cab office on the Bethanyl Green Road. I did nights and you say wow I was too young to know to be afraid. So I went in there at 17 I asked for a job. I got paid 15 pounds for working a four and a half hour shift. I think it was something like nine till one 30 in the morning and I won't name him because I later found out that it was actually a criminal enterprise and the boxes that I'd been resting my feet on didn't just contain dodgy tapes. They also in one case contained a large gun but my introduction to the job involved this chap. He brought me in and he said is the drivers they tell you when their P.O.B. passenger on board and then he pulls out a baseball bat and he says anybody gives you any trouble you give him a tap with that. I was 17. A tap. Did you ever have to give anyone a tap? No I didn't. This is the thing. There was no screen. I was there with all the drunkards and the near-do wells but there was this strange thing where the drivers looked after me. Nothing bad ever happened to me there. In fact this East End character used to take Kathy and I to a gambling club in the White Chapel Road, a late night gambling club and we would see so many things but we always felt protected, we never felt at risk. So it was a sort of extraordinary set of life lessons. Well I think you've got to write that book at some point JoJo, let's have some music. Disc number four, what's next? Okay so this is Rufus Wenwright, the art teacher. I have loved Rufus Wenwright for over 20 years, not just because of his musical ability but because he often inspires books for me. He's a great storyteller and I finally got to see him last year at the Albert Hall after sort of 20 years of waiting to do it and I just remember sitting down in my seat and I started to smile and I didn't stop for the whole thing. It was just one of those truly joyful experiences but the thing I love about the art teacher is it's kind of nuts, it's a song about a school girl sung by Rufus Wenwright in the first person and then she becomes this corporate wife and there's a twist in the tail which I don't want to kind of reveal but it's just one of those songs that I never get tired of and yeah it inspired a book I wrote called The Last Letter from your lover which doesn't have a huge amount to do with it but it's about forbidden love and the thing that you can't have. Rufus Wenwright and the art teacher. Children, Moeys, eventually you decided to try out for university. You managed to get into Royal Holloway University of London, studying sociology and social policy and while you were there, being a graft you decided to get a job on the side. You were writing for the local paper, the Eggman Steens News. Yes, the saddly now defunct egg on a third story. It was actually about a publican who had managed to make his vine grow and enormous size through giving it a pint of beer every day and it was my first byline and I was so proud and I sent a copy to both my mum and my dad and strangely they were much less excited than I was. I loved working in that newspaper office, it was that thing of going in and going, "Oh there you are, there's my people" and I remember sitting there with my typewriter and my three sheets of carbon paper which is how we used to produce a story and just feeling like, "Okay, this is where I meant to be." And that was when you set your sights on writing because you secured a bursary to study journalism at City University and then you got this apprenticeship at the independence. What kind of stories were you covering there? Lots of court stories, you learn a lot about process and you learn a lot about the really important things to do with getting people's names right. So for example, one of the reasons I got the bursary to go to the independent was because I had studied on the Eggman Steens News doing golden weddings and anniversaries and it is so important to get people's names right and the details right because for those people that's such a big thing to have your name in the paper. Your contract did end at the independent though. That's a generous way of putting it. My contract ended and I was one of the very many people to be made redundant from them after six months and I had a boyfriend at the time who'd moved out to Hong Kong and so I went out to visit him and I had an interview at the South Chinese Morning Post and I decided rather than stay at home and scrubble around trying to find freelance work, I'd go and work for a paper in a different country. And how did the working culture compare? I think Chulk and Cheese would be a generous way of describing it. It was a Murdoch paper and it was a very tough culture and some of it I enjoyed and I made some good friends there. You did spend some time there reporting on a story in China and you were actually put under house arrest at one stage. What happened? So it was a story about an American bear foot doctor who had gone to a place near Chengdu which then was a very isolated part of Central China, a tiny town called Yebin nearby where the local government had welcomed this man and his team of barefoot doctors which were quite a common thing in those days. They would go out and they would use their vacation time to do good in different countries and the problem was this guy was a fraud and he basically accepted all the gifts and all the welcome and a statue and his name and the banquets and what he'd brought out was out of date medicines just crates of rubbish basically and the way that the Chinese government operated then I don't know about now because I've never been back was that even though that was not their fault they wouldn't have wanted the loss of face and I'd gone in on a tourist visa and the night that I arrived in this in Chengdu I got a call saying the local police know that you're here and you do not leave the hotel we know that you're here under a tourist visa and that you're here to cover this thing and you do not leave the hotel. How did you go? How long were you stuck? Well I got advice from my foreign editor who for a start when I was on the phone said he said by the way we will talk for 20 minutes and then the phone's going to go dead and that enables them to turn the tape over and so he said I just want you to talk about pandas or you know it's something you've seen at the zoo and that's what we did and he gave me all these tricks like I would carry my passport and my notebook in my bra strap when I was going out to meet these people to try and get in contact and get the story. I made friends with a woman in a cafe who was able to change my air ticket for me. I made friends with an American woman from Boeing who'd come out to do some work out there and when things got very uncomfortable for me in my room which was being searched every time I left it she let me stay in her room and park important things in her room but I remember crying on the plane as I left when I got out. Jojo let's take a break and go to the music it's your fifth choice why are you taking it to the island? So this is Mozart's Laudarte Dominum I told you about how tough I found Hong Kong and I used to self-medicate with this piece of music I used to get a bus from my apartment my shared apartment in mid-levels to the place where the South Tiny Morning Post was and I would listen to this song again and again to try and calm myself enough to make myself go to work and then I decided that I would reframe that piece of music and so I got married in 1998 to my then husband Charles and we had this as part of our wedding music I think it's just a beautiful piece of music. time Mozart's setting of Laudarte Dominum, K339 sung by Edith Mathis with the Leipzig Radio Choir and the Dresden State Orchestra conducted by Peter Schreira. So, Jojo Moys, when did you start to think that you wanted to write fiction as opposed to journalism? It was shortly after I came back from Hong Kong. I had kept in touch with my old editor at the Independent My News Editor, David Felton, and he'd always said to me, "Look, we really like you. If we ever get another space, just stay in touch and we'll try and get you back in." And he called me up and he said, "The only space available is as a night reporter." So I said, "Yes." And what you don't realise about working nights is that it leaves you with a huge sway of time where your friends are at work, and there was no daytime telly and there was no internet. So I had to do something to occupy my time because I didn't have the money to go shopping. So I started writing books and I wrote three of them before I got one published, but that was my training ground if you like, those three unpublished books. What kept you going through all of that time? I mean, working nights, writing in the day when everybody else was working and starting your family. I mean, I think you were pregnant during the last of this era. Yeah, and I was really bad at being pregnant as well. I mean, I was that person who vomited from week six to week 40. I just, I was hopeless at it. I think, a couple of things. I think my mum and dad gave me an enormous work ethic. I just, I'm a pit pony. I just like to work. It just keeps me going. But also, it's that stubbornness. I was seeing people I knew get published and I couldn't understand why if I didn't try hard enough, why it couldn't happen for me. I think we're better here, some more music. It's your sixth choice today. What have you gone for? This is Johnny Mitchell's big yellow taxi. And I have to preface this by saying this is not my favourite Johnny Mitchell track, but in 2005, my husband and I had our third child, Lou, who was born profoundly deaf. And we didn't know that they were going to be born deaf. It turns out we both carried a gene called Connects in 26, which gives you a one in four chance of having a deaf child. So we'd had two children where it hadn't shown up and then with Lou, it did show up. And we had two children. I didn't know I'd do anything was wrong until the two-week hearing check that they failed. And then at eight weeks we went into this more extensive check and I remember being on a rocking chair holding this tiny baby and then put sensors all over his head. And then the sensors were getting loud and loud and I remember rocking this child and it got impossibly loud and his little eyes were just peacefully sleeping and I suddenly realised that oh my gosh this child can't hear and I have this memory of tears leaking out of my eyes and my husband leaning forward trying to block my eyes on a rocking chair which is really hard to do. And then all the doctors turned away from us. It was like they entered this little huddle and they wouldn't look at us anymore. And then they said we're very sorry but this is the case, he has absolutely no hearing. And I wish I had known then what was going to happen because a few weeks later Lou contracted an antibiotic resistant bacteria in his ear and we think it may have been on the back of these hearing tests. And the weird thing is when I went to the doctor they tested it and she rang me up and she said this is very odd. It's called Asinobacter Balmanii and it's only found on the battlefields of Iraq. It was so random but I panicked because she said it was antibiotic resistant. So I being a journalist studied to just ring round every top consultant because I thought I didn't know if it was going to eat into his brain, I didn't know what was going to happen. I found this amazing man Patrick Axon and I took him in and he was very reassuring about the infection. But he said I'm much more interested in his deafness. He said you do realize he could have a cochlear implant and we'd never heard of it. And he explained that this was a hearing that would bypass the cochlear in his ear and just pretty much speak straight to his brain. And we umdened and we thought about it and we thought well, I know it's a very good thing about deaf culture but if we do this for him, he has the option. He can choose to identify as deaf by taking the cochlear implant off or he can choose to have hearing when he's older. But the key thing was he was the youngest child in Essex ever to have it done and having it done at 15 or 15 months gave him the plasticity of his brain was such that within months he was speaking normally. But the best thing or one of the best things because it's all been frankly miraculous and I said to them before I did this, do you remember the first piece of music you ever heard? And what happened was they were given a few years ago a thing called a compilat which hangs around their neck and basically they can feed music via Bluetooth through the compilat straight into their head. So I have no idea when I'm talking to them whether they're actually listening to music. But what it means is that they hear everything that we hear and I said what was the first song you remember hearing and they said they were in the car with their dad and Johnny Mitchell's big yellow taxi came on and they remember thinking yeah this is quite cool and that was it. And so even though it's not my favourite Johnny Mitchell track it feels important to say this was the first piece of music that Lou really enjoyed and for that it means everything to me. [Music] [Music] [Music] (upbeat busy music) - Joining mutual and big yellow taxi for your youngest JoJo Moise Lou. - So JoJo your 2012 novel Me Before You was a mega-headed, featured louise o'clock who got a job looking after Will. He'd become quadriplegic in a traffic accident. It sold 15 million copies and was made into a film which you screen wrote, but you almost didn't write the book. - Why not. - Well, I'd written eight books by then and none of them, as I said, ever troubled the bestseller charts. And my them publishers were very game, but they were losing faith in me and what to do with me. And I get it because I write a very different book every time. And this was at a point when the supermarkets dominated book selling and they wanted something that it was obvious what it said on the front of the tin and none of my books are like that. And I knew I was in the last chance alone when it came to my publishing career. And I came up with this idea and I mentioned it to my publishers and they were lukewarm to say the least. And I had had some overtures, should we say, from Penguin Michael Joseph and they loved the idea. And this was a story that was based on a new story that I'd heard. It was about a young rugby player who'd been left quadriplegic after an accident. And a few years later, had persuaded his parents to take him to Dignitas, the Centre for Assisted Suicide. And I was so shocked by this story, I couldn't understand how a parent could agree to do that with their child. And I felt very judgmental, if I'm honest, I couldn't believe that they would do that. And then the journalist in me kicked in and I started to read more about what had happened in this particular case. And I realized that like my things in life, it wasn't black or white, it was many shades of gray. And it fascinated me. So I decided to write a story based on a similar premise. And I wrote 20,000 words. And often when I write 20,000 words, I lose confidence in the story. It's my crisis point, if you like, between 20 and 30,000 words. I've got so many books that I've stopped at that point. Oh, really? Why is that then? What happens at that point? I don't know. I think at that point, you either really feel like this is going to work or this something niggling or you suddenly realize it's too close to something else you've written or somebody else has written. So you're far enough into it to have that perspective? Yes, but far enough not to have nearly finished. Written the whole thing up and go again. And there was a lovely novelist called Penny Bencensi, who was a sort of doyene of the women's magazine scene. And it was her memorial. And I met up with my friend Sophie Kinsella and had a lunch with her beforehand. And I was broke at the time. And I was feeling quite depressed because I thought my writing career was coming to an end. And I've never forgotten it. She very gracefully, I thought we were going to Starbucks and she said, oh, no, no, no, we're going to go to the Gavrosh. And I was like, what? And I panicked because I thought, very awful. Very strong. And she said very sweetly, oh, no, I had some Bulgarian royalties come in today and I've got no idea what to do with them. So this will be a lovely thing to do with them. And I remember thinking, gosh, that was gracefully done. And then I told her the story of my 20,000 words over lunch. And she just looked at me and she said, you have to write this book. You do know that. You have to write this book. And then when I got home, her husband Henry, she told him and he called me up and said, Jojo Maddie, which is her real name, told me about this book. And I think you should write it too. I love her for many reasons, but that's one of them. - Me before you is, it's one of those stories that people just love. If it's their book, it's their book. I mean, you know, it's hugely popular with book clubs. Pretty much everyone who's watched it as a film or read the book cries at the end. I know people will send you kind of selfies of them. So that's heartbroken or joyful. Or you know, this kind of combination of emotions that it conjures up. What was it like writing it? - Well, I did cry. I've learned over the years, I mean, I think I've written 18 books now or nearly written 18 books. And if I don't cry, the reader's not going to cry. Or if I don't make myself laugh, which is a terrible thing to say about your own jokes, then the reader's not going to laugh. But I remember there's a letter at the end of this book that Will has written to Lou. And I remember writing it and sobbing so hard that the man in the next office, I used to rent an office when I lived in the countryside. The man in the next office came next door to see if I was okay. And I had to sort of say, "Snotally, I was going really well." Thanks for asking. I knew I loved this book. And I knew it was the best version of itself that it could be, but I had no idea it was going to resonate in the way that it did. And Richard and Judy started the ball rolling. I was lucky enough to become part of their book club. But then it just achieved this momentum. Every week I kept thinking, well, it's sold 3000 copies this week. Surely that's it now. Because my publishing career up to that point had been a series of being disappointed once a year or once every 18 months. And it just kept snowboarding. And then suddenly it was a bestseller in Brazil and South Korea and then America. And my whole life changed. And I don't think I could look at the success for about three years because I couldn't believe it was finally happening. And I think that's what happens in your 40s instead of, maybe if it had happened in my 20s, I would have just thought, "Oh, that's what happens in publishing." It's time to go to the music. Tell us about your next track. This is Adrienne Lenko, who is an artist I discovered in my Kentucky research time. I got very into American folk, modern American folk, especially, and she's an extraordinary woman with an extraordinary life. But mostly I just love her voice. And there was a period when my marriage was ending and when my mom was dying and I'd overworked myself where I got very afraid at the edges. I got very sad. And I actually couldn't listen to music for a while because it was too much emotion. And I am so grateful to be well. So for about five years, every morning was a struggle. This song makes me think of that time in a wistful way because it was a period of such great change in my life and it's like, you know, the chrysalis that you have to kind of go through to get to the other side. Adrian Lanker and a better time to beat. So Joe Joe Boyz having spent most of your career as a worker holic, you finally learned to slow down how and when did it happen. I think it was the last time I realized I'd started to fray at the edges again. It's really hard to get out of the pattern if you work a holic because if you're privileged enough to do the thing that you love, it's much harder to place boundaries around it. And it's only when, for me, my body just starts to go, nope, I start to stay awake or I get an anxiety not in my stomach that I won't, that I can't get rid of or I can't eat properly. And then I'm like, okay, my body is saying something to me now. I've learned to listen to it rather than take an anti-anxiety med or take a sleeping pill or push through. I don't push through anymore because I've learned that I come from revoltingly, hardy stock. There's no mental health issues in my family that I'm aware of. And so when I started to fray, it came as a real shock to me. I didn't understand the signals. I didn't understand what was happening and because I love work and because I probably being a girl of the 80s, you know, learned that hard work is the answer to everything, I just kept pushing through. And then twice now I've pushed myself to a point where suddenly I started to get ill. And this time my best friend stepped in, my partner stepped in and they basically told me enough is enough. So now I've got hobbies. I've got hobbies. So what kind of hobbies? Oh, God, I'm a North London cliche. I took up Pilates, which I love, which I do about three or four times a week. I took up classical dressage, which is the most ridiculous thing ever. So this is Dancing Horses? It's Dancing Horses. Well, it's almost time to cast your way. What kind of islands are you hoping for? Definitely a sun person. I don't want a Nordic cold place. I'll just shiver and be utterly miserable. So yeah, I want the classic coconuts, palm trees, maybe some undergrowth that I can create a shelter from. I can picture you there, speaking of creating a shelter. I think you've got a practical streak too, because you shared online that you'd later wouldn't floor yourself. Not just the floor, the joists. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the joists. This is a few years ago, but I discovered that there was damp running under my house. There was an actual river running under my house. And I had to replace all the floor joists in the living room and it was the run up to Christmas. I had to get a builder, so I thought, well, how hard can it be? How hard it is really hard. Turns out, there's a reason why you don't replace the joists in your house. But my dad helped me and we did do it. We replaced the joists. I won't say that the spirit level didn't have a few opinions about it, but we were able to relay the carpet over the top and nobody really noticed with a rug on top. So yeah, I am a very practical person. Well, that'll help you out on the island then. What about the solitude? Because as a writer, you must be used to spending time alone. I think writers are really good at solitude. As long as I can work out how to come up with stories and record them in some way, I think I'll be okay. All right, JoJo, well, we'll let you have one more disc before we cast your way to your desert island. Your final choice. What's it going to be? This is Frances Gabrielle's Gillin Amuril. I love her to death. It's a pure piece of French cheese, basically. And when my marriage ended, I was 50 and I thought, well, that's it for me because we all know the statistics on people getting involved in your relationships if they're women, especially at my age. And I was really lonely for the first year. I'm not going to lie. It was pretty miserable and it's adapting to being somebody that you weren't used to being. You used to being a unit and suddenly you're out there on your own and I found social situations really difficult. And I went to a party and I'd said to my best friend, I'm only going to come for two hours because I don't feel comfortable staying for longer than that. And I bumped into an old friend, someone I'd known in Paris in my 20s. John, and we had a hug and hid been through some staff and I'd been through some staff and we had a chat. And somehow we've been together ever since. And it's been kind of the most astonishing revelatory thing for me to have to learn, have to navigate a new relationship. And he's very funny. He's a comedy writer, so he makes me laugh all the time. But in the early months of our relationship, he used to sing this song to me a lot. And at first it made me laugh and then I read the lyrics and then it made me a bit emotional. It's just a song that recognizes perhaps some of the things women go through and loves them for it. But it's also just lovely and cheesy and frankly to be sung to by anybody is delicious. So I'll take this one. Frances Kebral, Gillem, Amourio. So George, your boys, I'm going to cast you away to the island now. I'm giving you the books to take with you the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare and just one other book. I'm so sorry. Well, one of my great modifications is that I've never read the Russians and it feels like a massive gap in my literary education and I always think I must start with Dostoevsky and then there's always a good reason why someone sends me another book and I have to blur for it and I never get round to it. So this will be the perfect opportunity to sit down. So can I have the complete Dostoevsky to work my way through? You may have it though. You're going to lift it up. It's going to wear it on. It's beyond me. You'll stay strong on the island anyway. You can also have a luxury item. What do you fancy? Okay. Well, this is a little bit niche but I have seen these amazing mechanical horses that you can learn to perfect your riding on. So I would like a life size mechanical horse so that I can spend my hours perfecting my classical dressage seat and hands and legs. That would complete my triumvirate of brain, physicality and community because I would have somebody to talk to and I think my horse would be like Tom Hanks and his volleyball. Well, I would give it a name and we would have conversations and by the time I got rescued I could join Karl Hester as a dresser Olympian. That's my aim. Because also I'm not very good if I'm not doing something. So I would have something to work towards. What a top notch luxury. It's yours. And finally, which one track of the eight that you shared with us today? Would you save from the waves first, George, your voice? I think it's going to be the Elvis Presley because I think the one disadvantage to being on your own is that you could get melancholy and I would save it for special melancholy occasions when I needed a bit of lifting up. But I think once every few weeks I'd give myself a blast of Elvis and feel like I had something to laugh about. Absolutely splendid. Jorjo Moise, thank you very much for letting us hear your dazzle and desk. Thank you so much. It's been an honour. Hello, it was so lovely chat to Jorjo and I hope she's very happy on her island with her model horse. There are more than 2,000 programmes in our archive that you can listen to with cast away plenty of other writers over the years including Helen Fielding, Marion Keys and Dame Jelly Cooper. You can hear their programmes if you search through BBC sounds or on our own desert island discs website. The studio manager for today's programme was Phil Lander. The executive production coordinator was Susie Royalens. The assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky. The content editor was McGarby Turea and the producer was Sarah Taylor. Hello, I'm Nula McGarby. I want to tell you about a BBC podcast called Send in the Spot. The number of children with special educational needs is increasing. Two money parents are having to fight to get those needs met and councils are spending money that they do not have. Against a backdrop of government reform, I bring together families, teachers, experts and decision makers to reimagine the system. Listen to "Send" in the spotlight on BBC Sounds. [BLANK_AUDIO]