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00:00:05
Speaker 1: Hello, it's me, it's Lisa.
00:00:08
Speaker 2: I am here on my own. David is at Channel 9. He is welcoming in the new old new guard, which he's thrilled about. But yes, so I'm here on my own. So I will make it fast because I've got a great interview that I can't wait to share with you. So Joanne Naden is a writer of, well, you'll see, she'll explain it all. But I came upon this book after Darcy.
00:00:45
Speaker 1: In the bookshop.
00:00:47
Speaker 3: There you go.
00:00:48
Speaker 2: Where else would you find your books? But I hadn't seen anything about it online. And obviously it's one of those things that once you do see, once you become aware of something, then you see it everywhere. and it's a really, really funny, risque, joyful book, and I can't recommend it highly enough. I will put a link to it downstairs. We talk about the book, we talk about her writing process, we talk about her trajectory uh into writing and we talk about press gang um so I will leave you with that and just letting you know that we will have our final sojourn into the Franklinverse on Sunday with our interviews with Liz Doran the writer and exec producer of My Brilliant Career for Netflix and the two stars Kate Mulvaney and Philippa North East. After that, I think it's time that we slipped back permanently into the Austenverse for a bit.
00:02:00
Speaker 1: What do you think?
00:02:02
Speaker 2: But without further ado, here is my interview with Joanna Naden. I have been so enamoured with your book.
00:02:09
Speaker 3: Oh, thank you.
00:02:10
Speaker 2: No, truly, I feel like it was written for me. Can you talk to me about how it came about?
00:02:18
Speaker 3: So....
00:02:21
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:02:22
Speaker 3: I mean, there are various origins for it. It started, basically, I'd written three other adult novels. I mostly write for kids. And I'd written three other adult novels. They were fairly serious women's fiction. And then my publisher, as often happens, restructured and decided it didn't want to publish my kind of serious women's fiction anymore because it doesn't sell enough.
00:02:49
Speaker 1: Books.
00:02:49
Speaker 3: And so I went away slightly wounded and talked, I talked to a lot of people. Um, and everyone was saying the same thing is don't, don't try it until you've got something really, really commercial. And I just couldn't write adult for a while. And in the meantime, I was writing a YA series, a funny, a comic YA series sit set in in the sort of early 20th century. And I was absolutely loving it. And it's the first one was called A Calamity of Manorings. And it takes the premise of sense and sensibility effectively. It takes these sisters. And I thought, well, I'm loving doing this. How can I somehow spend my time doing this for grownups, for adult women? I want to, I don't want to write serious books. I mean, obviously there are serious themes in everything, but I want to write something that makes people laugh and is recognisable. And I wanted to write about sisters, which I don't have sisters. I have one brother. But I like women. I like the company of women. And I was fiddling around with Sense and Sensibility and thinking, no, that's a separate thing. And at the same time, I had all that warning in my head, don't come back until you've got something super commercial. And I thought, okay, what's the most commercial women's book of all time? And it was that. And sadly, that is how publishing works now. It has to be something hooky. It has to be easily sellable. And so I thought, okay, Pride and Prejudice. But I didn't want to do a retelling. Curtis Sittensfeld had done Eligible. It's amazing. I couldn't, why would I want to compete with that? And also I'm not interested in the Bennetts aged late teens, early twenties anymore. I'm in my fifties. I'm interested in what happens to the Bennetts when they're grownups, when they are dealing with kids, when they are dealing with divorce, when they're dealing with difficult teenagers. And I started, it started off completely as Lydia's story because I feel like Lydia's, had a bit of a raw deal over the years and she and Mary are my favourites. And, but the more I started writing, the more I kept thinking, well, I can't just write. It can't just be Lydia because if I was going to do that, oh, I could write a book for every sister, but then I'd have to start with Lizzie because Lizzie's Lizzie. And eventually it just morphed into a much more Austen-esque retelling, not retelling, but voice in that we go in and out of the heads of all. all the sisters so that's a that was quite a long-winded way of saying how that one came about.
00:05:47
Speaker 2: No it's fascinating it's absolutely fascinating how did you focus the the pathways that these characters were going to go down because they are so satisfying in the way that they've been created of course Lydia has been on a reality tv show of course she has that makes perfect sense but how did you decide that this is going to be the pathways for each of them that it's so specific and it could have been anything.
00:06:16
Speaker 3: It could have been anything. That's the thing. There were, of course, there were alternatives that they could have all had. And for a while, some of them did. And I sit with the characters for a long time. So I spend about six months before I write anything hanging out with the characters. And that just sounds woo-woo. I'm not. I don't believe I'm channeling them. I'm creating them. It's work, but I am writing notes and I am, the first thing I tend to do as well as I cast the characters, I can't start writing until I can see who, I can see the move. So they were very much, there are actors and actresses in mind who are playing them. And once I cast them, then things become, then that actually feeds into plot. Um, And yeah, they changed. Like Kitty, I could not decide on what Kitty's job was going to be for ages and ages. And that came about
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because I needed a makeover scene, because I love a makeover scene. And that's why Kitty is a hairdresser, effectively, because I wanted a makeover scene. I wanted her to have a job in Meryton so that she was very, very close to her parents. And That seemed like the obvious job for her, basically. But yeah, I think the reality show was almost, that was an afterthought. But again, it came about because I needed her. There is a scene in which, you'll remember it, she starts to be recognised.
00:08:05
Speaker 1: She does indeed.
00:08:06
Speaker 3: She thinks it's because of the time she was on the reality TV show and did something terrible that ruined her reputation in front of the nation. So I needed her to be really vaguely famous, basically. And that's how that came about. But also I just think Lydia is the type of person who would have gone on. Lydia does very risk-taking, impulsive things sometimes. which as you find out, if you read it, because she has a diagnosis of ADHD by the end of the book. I just felt she reminded me very much of women I hung out, hung around within the nineties and wished I could be like, but dude, I'm a Mary. I'm a complete, I just do not have that gall, that boldness, that audacity. So again, these were things that, A lot of the stuff came out because I needed plot points. Again, Lizzie's job as a gynecologist is to do with Lydia. Actually, thinking about this, a lot of this comes back down to Lydia because it started off as Lydia's story.
00:09:18
Speaker 1: Oh, but it all seems so organic.
00:09:21
Speaker 3: And I guess maybe because it developed or it did develop, I didn't set out from the beginning going, right, you're going to be this, you're going to be this. I'd started... playing around with plot. And then it comes out of it thinking, Oh, well, of course you have to, this is what has to happen.
00:09:37
Speaker 1: And the same.
00:09:38
Speaker 3: With Jane and the vets. And it's like, well, she started off. I knew she'd want to, I knew I wanted her to be the kind of person who takes in every injured animal. And of course, so that's how that develops organically. But yeah, I don't set out with the characters. I mean, I had to think. was very lucky Jane Austen had written these characters. I didn't need to come up with their personalities at all. I just had to find modern equivalents to what they might have been doing then. Of course, back then they weren't doing anything except existing in that kind of society. They did not have jobs as such, but it was that, what would they do if they were living now?
00:10:27
Speaker 2: When you said about the casting, is there any crossover with the existing casting that we've seen over the years?
00:10:35
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
00:10:37
Speaker 3: And this is a horrid confession is that I didn't read Jane Austen until about 10 years ago. So my exposure to Austen was through film and television adaptations. I didn't grow up in that.
00:10:51
Speaker 1: There is no shame in that.
00:10:53
Speaker 3: No, I don't think there is, but people get a bit, I work in an English literature department at a very fancy uni. I wouldn't confess it on the corridors there. So yeah, my exposure was all through adaptations. And I only started reading it because I'd been asked to rewrite Sense and Sensibility for nine to 12 year olds by Hachette.
00:11:14
Speaker 2: And so we have we've got Awesomely Austin in this house and it is beloved.
00:11:19
Speaker 3: So, yeah, I thought, OK, I really should read it now. But but when I'm writing anything, it is it's the characters that are already there. So Mr. and Mrs.
00:11:33
Speaker 1: Bennett are.
00:11:36
Speaker 3: Are Alison Steadman and actually Jim and Jim Broadbent is Mr Bennett in my head and the sisters are different they are not necessarily all the same actually no Lizzie is definitely Jennifer Ely I can't get her out of my head as Lizzie um and Darcy and Bingley well they're I mean, spoiler alert, they're dead. We know that from the very beginning of the novel. So I didn't really need to recast them because they don't really appear.
00:12:11
Speaker 1: In it at all.
00:12:13
Speaker 3: But Wickham, I did need to recast Wickham because he does play a huge part and that's Dominic West. And he, I think I've cast him. He's in every adult novel I've written. I just, he's so, he's... He's attractive, but he's villainous. I think he makes a great, the kind of villain you can't help being charmed by, effectively.
00:12:37
Speaker 1: You want to be charmed by him.
00:12:39
Speaker 3: You want to be, exactly. And then Denny, who is the postman, is Johnny Flynn, who again, I cast in a lot of things.
00:12:49
Speaker 1: Because he is and he's a musician he's.
00:12:52
Speaker 3: A musician he's just lovely my biggest regret is that normally I cast Ben Whishaw in everything as well but I couldn't find I couldn't find a role I mean I suppose he could be Colin who was the Mr Colin's equivalent but yeah there wasn't really a Ben Whishaw role in this one which I feel sad.
00:13:10
Speaker 1: About is Lydia Julia Sawala though.
00:13:14
Speaker 3: She veers between being I kept this is the problem is that I wanted to recast them all with new people because I thought I should do and so for ages and ages I was trying to make her um Amelia oh gosh I can't remember her surname she is in Game of Thrones she is in Last Christmas.
00:13:33
Speaker 1: Um yes Amelia yes uh I.
00:13:37
Speaker 3: Want to say Jones but I might be wrong um Anyway, I kept trying to cast her as that with bleached, a bleached bob like she has in Last Christmas.
00:13:45
Speaker 1: Clark.
00:13:46
Speaker 3: Clark. Thank you. But Julia Sawala kept creeping back in. It's really because I grew up with Julia Sawala in Press Gang. And so I always loved her as an actress. Yeah. So she was. Yeah, she was. She kept creeping back in. I couldn't I couldn't keep her out in the end.
00:14:07
Speaker 1: How much do you think Press Gang
had to do with your writing career?
00:14:11
Speaker 3: Oh my God, so much. That's a really good question. A lot. Partly because I have curly hair and I thought I am Julia Sawalla then. And also I was a horribly bossy teenager. I thought I knew everything. And I just could see myself in the Julia Sawala character. And obviously, I had a crush on Dexter Fletcher and thought, these are the kind of things I want to do. But at that age, I didn't want to write. I wanted to be in a book. I wanted the kind of life that was exciting enough to be written about or to have a TV series made about. So I did end up doing drama at university in a kind of, well, I could be like Julia Sawala, the real Julia Sawala, not her character on press gang. That didn't work out. I have stage fright and I'm not good enough. But yeah, that, and I did end up going into journalism actually and became a broadcast journalist. And press gang still is a very happy memory of mine.
00:15:21
Speaker 1: So good. So good. So after that, you became a speechwriter.
00:15:27
Speaker 3: Well, I started off Yeah, I was a broadcast journalist and then I ended up as a campaigns writer for the Labour Party under Tony Blair. And so I was writing, it was called the Daily Brief. It's basically when everyone says, oh, we're all singing from the same song sheet. I wrote the song sheet every day that they're supposed to sing from, i.e. what they're supposed to say on television and radio. And from there, I went into Downing Street as a special advisor. And from there, I became... So I went freelance after the 2005 election and became a government speechwriter, writing speeches for the cabinet.
00:16:07
Speaker 1: That's fascinating.
00:16:10
Speaker 3: I love it. I found politics fascinating. And because I did my master's in political communications during the Clinton campaign. So it's another one of those confessions. It wasn't that I didn't go into it because... I had all these policy ideas and wanted to make the world a better place. I wanted to do ad campaigns like the ones from Clinton's election. I wanted to make people cry and then therefore make them vote. I found that fascinating. And I found the use of words and imagery to move people really compelling. And so, yeah, I was a writer in Downing Street and became a speechwriter. And I still very occasionally write. speeches and I teach it and I use it in all my fiction writing as well, actually. The things that I learned as I was learning rhetoric feed very much into my writing.
00:17:11
Speaker 1: And of course, constantly having to write in other voices.
00:17:14
Speaker 3: Exactly. I spend so much time and I used to spend, if I was writing a speech for somebody who I hadn't met before. I'd spend the day with them. I'd interview them. I'd try and learn everything about their child, you know, as much as possible about their childhood, about their life, so that you can bring these anecdotes in so I could get their tone of voice. I could know
which words they would and wouldn't use in any situation. It's the only time my drama training has come in useful is embodying cabinet ministers and And then, and it's the same thing I do when I'm writing is that I kind of, again, it sounds a bit woo-woo. I become my characters and I don't mean I'm method acting and I'm being Lydia when I'm making a cup of tea, but I'm talking out loud sometimes to myself and I am becoming Lydia effectively when I'm writing. And it's, yeah, it's the same with speech writing. I'm trying to embody, well, at the time it would have been John Prescott or Alistair Darling.
00:18:15
Speaker 1: And they're so similar. I mean, this is very, very exciting.
00:18:18
Speaker 2: So when, because one thing that I loved about it, and being an expat, I think that this has a lot to do with it. We'll get onto your opinion of Australians later. But when you, the specificity of your writing and how, you know, whether it be the fact that somebody's waiting for, wearing something from vented or whatever. It's those details, which I found so, so enjoyable and so vivid in.
00:18:57
Speaker 1: We all know those people. It's so specific.
00:19:00
Speaker 2: It was just a joy to read with those. Is that, does that come within your embodiment of things or is this just from, from your observation of others?
00:19:11
Speaker 3: It's my observation of others. others and things. And also I am obsessed with these kinds of, I grew up, my father worked in advertising. I grew up knowing that different products signify different classes of people, different. I was very aware of who had which brand of whatnot. And, and I also find there is a very British sense of humor. Um, and you'll see it in a lot of, northern comedy and the i'm trying to think if peter Kay does it and where just the use of a certain brand is hilarious because we all like I find Battenberg cake hilarious it's and I've had to translate that into an American novel because they don't understand Battenberg cake and they were trying to make me use cookies it's like no cookies aren't funny and they're not granny-ish enough they're not specific enough and I just I love all these little giveaways about people if and does it unfortunately does mean my books don't tend to travel to the states because they don't understand all of these very very British references to Captain Birdseye or all you know whatever it happens it happens to be and I'm thinking of Jane with Pharaoh and Ball and and all those you know yeah i am obsessed with how we define people i suppose and these outward clues are to me they're like they're a set of rules.
00:20:56
Speaker 2: Almost yeah oh and a shorthand for.
00:21:00
Speaker 3: Us a shorthand exactly that and i i do firmly believe I know we all we'd all like to think that it's what what is on the inside that counts and obviously that does but our outward appearance does affect how society interacts with us it affects how everyone sees us and what we do what we consume also gives away so much about ourselves so to me it's really it's really important.
00:21:30
Speaker 2: That's fascinating that's fascinating Um, yeah, I mentioned the Australian thing.
00:21:35
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:21:36
Speaker 1: So we do have an Australian character in After Darcy.
00:21:42
Speaker 2: Shane, um, I mean, you, the characters discuss, uh, the way that Australians, um, pronounce the word pasta and.
00:21:54
Speaker 1: Just you wait till you hear yogurt.
00:21:58
Speaker 3: I know, I have a very wonderful, like part of my family is Australian and they are fab, but the way they say yogurt makes me, it's just, but the pasta thing, I think it's partly, I had an ex who's Australian and he makes me quite ragey and the way he pronounced pasta, it just, you know, when things give you the ick, that really gives me the ick. but I do want to say that I have huge fondness for Australian. Shane is again, it was an organic thing. Shane is Australian because I needed, he was someone that they met traveling. So everyone I, whenever I've been abroad, it's just huge numbers of Australians coming over. So, and my cousins are actually over here at the moment traveling. They're much, much younger than me. They're in their early twenties. Um, So it was that, and I needed him to then go quite far away so that there would be no contact with Bridget, Kitty's daughter. That's why he is effectively Australian. And also I thought he's a photographer for Vogue, but I thought of all the Vogues, which Vogue would we slightly look down on because we're snobbish in England? And it would be Australian Vogue because we have a probably very misguided sense. I've never been to Australia. that fashion in Australia is not as great as fashion in Europe.
00:23:29
Speaker 1: Well, we would welcome you to Australia.
00:23:31
Speaker 2: And some characters do decide eventually to grace our shores at some point. So I feel as though we're redeemed.
00:23:46
Speaker 3: Every year I say next year, and I'm bound to university terms and things, but I've got... Very close friends in Tasmania and Melbourne and obviously family in Bunbury, which is over near Perth. And I really do need to come over.
00:24:02
Speaker 1: It's really nice. Come on. It'll be lovely.
00:24:06
Speaker 2: So one thing I want to talk to you about is that obviously you've had great success with your novels being turned into television adaptations.
00:24:17
Speaker 3: Yes.
00:24:18
Speaker 2: This one needs that.
00:24:20
Speaker 3: Oh, I, do you know, I would, I would say love that. Yeah. Who knows? It's, it's, it hasn't been optioned yet. I would love it to be optioned because I've already cast it in my head, but you know, these, yeah, it's, I was very lucky with Joel alone that came about before the book was even published. That was a complete stroke of, of luck that my editor at the time happened to be in a room with a production executive and he was she was trying to pitch something else and he
wasn't interested and she happened to have my manuscript on her lap and she said well I've got this thing um and he it was bought within a week and I mean it took years for it to be made because that's how it works but it it did really really well but and then I've had another much younger series optioned but that's that was optioned I don't know how long ago and I suspect that will never happen because this is it's you know it's sort of yeah feels like pie in the sky really but it.
00:25:29
Speaker 2: Makes so much sense because also I mean honestly we've been doing this show for a year and I've consumed so much so much more beyond canon things than I anticipated but the voice that you have is so everything about it makes sense because we are looking at people who were young during the time that Pride and Prejudice 95 was released.
00:25:58
Speaker 1: So we've got all of that.
00:26:00
Speaker 2: And now we are all putting on oestrogel and working out what it is to be menopausal. So all of us are there. We are ripe for the picking. We are these characters. And add to that that we've got the element of of, I mean, it's hilarious, but also the sexual aspect. I think it makes so much sense to have these characters and to hear their view on sex and what their sex lives are like now. And this version of themselves feels completely relatable and something that is sort of, of course, unspoken in a Regency retelling of humans, but it makes sense for it to be there now. So Let's get this happening. I don't know how that happens, but it has to.
00:26:48
Speaker 1: It will be perfect.
00:26:50
Speaker 3: It's the first time that I've written something and thought, well, this could be television. Because usually I do the massive mistake of writing something that's set both in 1988 and 2018. So you can't get the same actress to play the same, you know, without a ton of... It just... there's too much time split usually. And I think all three other adult novels I wrote before this are, yeah, they cover huge, either they cover the like five decades all the way through or they're two timelines or three timelines. This one's set over a year. It's, they stay the same people, which is a really basic requirement, I know. But I just, it's, it's warm and it's funny and it's sad as well in places. And I, yeah, I do. I would love it if that, if that happened, but.
00:27:48
Speaker 2: It does feel like in, it feels like the natural progression in the world of if Bridget Jones exists here and we love that in the nineties, this feels like what we need now.
00:28:03
Speaker 3: I'm a huge fan. I'm a huge Bridget Jones fan and huge Marion Keys fan. And both of those are fed into After Darcy. Absolutely.
00:28:13
Speaker 1: Oh, Joanna, it's so wonderful. It really is. Congratulations. And thank you so much for taking this time.
00:28:19
Speaker 3: It's so much fun to talk about writing. So I've loved it. Thank you.
00:28:25
Speaker 1: Wonderful. Well, I look forward to doing it in person when you come over to Australia.
00:28:29
Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
00:28:30
Speaker 1: Done. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.
00:28:33
Speaker 3: Bye.