Outro

I thought I’d write an outro rather than an intro in case I accidentally spoiled anything before we’d even got started, which would be rubbish. But it seems a bit weird, like popping up after the credits. Anyway. Hello! Jenny here. My publishers thought I should talk about this book for a little bit, just because it comes at such a strange time, and why we chose to set it in a non-COVID world. Originally, in the spring of 2020, when I thought everything might be a little quiet for a couple of weeks (ahahahaha), I proposed writing a little book about the lockdown—the first lockdown, in the UK, and promptly did so. Of course, what I, and so many other naive people (my husband says he wants it made clear here that he always said it would last for much much longer so I am putting this in to say yes yes you were right, smartie-pants :)), didn’t realize is just how very long and miserably it would drag on, well past the point where it was interesting or fun for me or for anyone else. So, come August, we made the painful decision to scrap the whole thing and start again from scratch, and I hope by the time you have this book in your hands (I’m writing at the beginning of December 2020), things will be looking a lot brighter for everybody, and that it has not been too hard on you and your family.

Writing about long grief is something I have been interested in for some time. There seems to be an idea in our culture that you should be sad and get lots of attention when you lose someone but after a few months you should more or less just get on with things, and of course grief doesn’t work like that at all. My mother died five years ago and I still have days when I’m as completely furious about it as if it happened yesterday. So I started to write a story about Marisa, and we took that horrible stupid disease out of the equation altogether because I want to forget it as soon as possible. No trace of it remains, except one tiny bit I really liked and left in: when Alexei and Marisa are throwing kitchen implements at each other over their balconies. Obviously there’s no specific reason for them to be doing this in a non-COVID world, but it always made me laugh.

I have made a little playlist of the music Alexei plays, by the way, if you’re interested: it’s on Spotify and the link is www.tinyurl.com/alexeiplaylist. None of his own compositions feature :).

xxx