You Had Me At Hello

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

Mhairi McFarlane’s Inside Story: “Your first book is such a huge thing that you have to rob your own life because the task of it is so overwhelming. If you were trying to world-build as well from scratch, you’d probably not finish it. The first draft was very grim and serious. It took a while for me to find my voice.

“About five years before the book was published, I was in a Heathrow book shop before taking a flight to New York with my boyfriend, my brother and his wife. I was being snooty, pointing to ‘chick-lit’ saying ‘I could write better than this’. I was about to give up my job on my local Nottingham paper but didn’t quite have the guts. My brother, quite rightly, said, ‘Prove it. Prove you can write a better book.’ We were flying on a very crap airline and on the way back, they just turned the lights out. No films, nothing. I can’t sleep on planes so just sat there in the dark and started writing, but in my head. By the time we landed I had about 10,000 words. I know it was about that because I had to open up a file and write it all down quickly before I forgot. So I genuinely drafted quite a lot in my head.

“The first draft was very grim and serious. I mean, the whole premise of the book is that Rachel meets back up with the guy she was in love with at university but he’s now married. My publisher was very much aware of the husband-stealing element—which I think led me to go quite serious on the moral dilemma of the whole thing. I remember my mum read it and said, ‘But it’s not funny and you’re funny’. I was quite confused because I really didn’t think I was funny either. Unless you’re a massive git, I don’t think anyone thinks they’re funny.

“A friend showed it to an editor mate and she sent some very tough feedback. It basically read: ‘I really wanted to like this, but it doesn’t really work, your heroine’s a bitch and the whole thing’s quite grim.” I was initially gutted and went off to the pub to rant at my friends that clearly publishing was broken because no-one could understand me. I went away and licked my wounds before giving the manuscript one more go on holiday in this Yorkshire cottage.

“Within three chapters my boyfriend was asking, ‘What’s up with you?’ because I was cackling at my laptop so much. It suddenly just clicked. I basically found my voice, which is up there in the top three most challenging things as a writer.

“It’s the closest book to being biographical to me. Although very disappointingly, basically, all of the boring architecture is me. She’s a local paper reporter. She lives in Manchester, which is where I went to university. She’s a born procrastinator. Can’t make up her mind about anything or be decisive. All of that, and to think she did English. She had a best mate who’s male on the course, which is also me.

“The part that wasn’t me is, very boringly, that I didn’t have a man. I wasn’t in love with my best male friend at university. It’s kind of boring from that point of view, but everything else is very me. You always do that with your first book, because it’s such a huge, huge thing that you basically have to rob your own life. The task of it is so overwhelming that if you were trying to world build as well from scratch, you’d probably not finish it.

“There were a couple of mission statements, too. At the time it felt like all chick-lit was absolutely full of people opening bakeries in Notting Hill. So my book absolutely had to be set in a northern city. I was also conscious that the genre seemed to be full of angels who were assailed by bad men doing bad things, and what they needed to do was find a good man who would be nice to them and everything would be alright. I felt like that didn’t really resemble me or any woman I know. So I very much wanted to make my heroine the architect of her own downfall.”