NEW ROMANTIC
Jojo Moyes’ career as a novelist was on the wane, until she pioneered a new approach to romance with the novel she really wanted to write, as Tina Jacksondiscovers
Tina Jackson
If you read romantic novels – and even if you don’t – there’s a good chance that you’ve bawled your eyes out to one in particular: Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You. Of the 20 million copies of Jojo’s novels that have been sold wordwide, 9 million are of Me Before You. The heartwarming and immensely moving story changed the bar of what constitutes ‘romance’ in popular fiction, with Jojo shifting the romantic leads miles away from conventional stereotypes in her depiction of quadriplegic Will and his kooky carer, Lou.
Her new book, Paris for One & Other Stories, is a collection of short stories: lighter and frothier than her full-length romances but all shot through with Jojo’s trademarks of humour and an element of surprise.
‘They’ve all got a twist,’ says Jojo. ‘That’s really important to me – I want people to be surprised. I work really hard to do that. If you have books with love stories as a main theme, people can be very derogatory, and expect you to go from A to Z.’ In each story in Paris for One, there’s an unexpected element that stops Jojo’s romances from ever being predictable. ‘I love books where you’re carried away,’ she says. ‘I hate it when you can tell who’s going to end up with who. I’ve become very zero-tolerant of that kind of book now. There’s a lot of books being hurled across my living room at the moment.’
The stories in Paris for Oneoriginally appeared in anthologies, on the radio and in magazines. With Jojo currently working as a scriptwriter and on the third book in the Me Before Youtrilogy, the decision to put them out as a collection was a pragmatic one for a hugely successful writer with a readership avid for her work. ‘This is the first time I won’t have a book out, not every year, but nearly. Having finally built up a readership, it would be a shame if it disappeared, and my agent noticed I’d built up quite a collection of short stories.’ In fact, there were some Jojo had lost track of. ‘It turned out I’d quite a few, though I didn’t remember writing some of them. They’d been on Radio 4 and in women’s magazines.’