My Story
My story is probably not unlike your story if you’re reading this, only I got lucky. I was born in Tamworth, went to a comprehensive school where I was largely ostracised for being nerdy. I spent my teenage years reading Sweet Valley High and chatting on MSN messenger. I went to the University of Birmingham, studied English and then law, and then got glandular fever so badly that I was unable to work for three years. I applied for benefits and got rejected, got into debt, applied for jobs I could do from home, in bed, but didn’t get many. And, during that time, I wrote a novel called Three By The Sea.
Eventually, I recovered enough to start my legal training, joined a firm part-time, then eventually full-time. I was an unhappy trainee-lawyer, making character notes on blue legal pads in meetings.
Right before I was due to finish my legal training at a law firm and qualify, I got the flu, which prompted a relapse of whatever condition I had (nobody knows: I am pleased to say I am well, these days, but at the time my official diagnosis was ME, though a rheumatologist found evidence of lupus in my bloodwork). During this time, I wrote a second novel, The Quarter-Life Crisis, and queried an agent. To my enormous surprise, this agent requested the full manuscript and, while off sick, I began the process of sending the book off to other agents. Eventually, they all rejected it, and I recovered a few months later and went back to work, but, this time, with something other than an illness: I had hope that, one day, I might get published.
I wrote another novel alongside working, by far the hardest time of my life, my memories of which are sitting in cold train stations at nine o’clock at night, writing on the floor of the waiting room with fingerless gloves on. I finished this novel, For The Life Of Me, six months later, and sent it to the same agents as before, and got signed by one. This agent sent this novel on submission to publishers, eleven of them, and six weeks later, I went to a bar at Christmastime to celebrate finally having qualified as a lawyer. During that party, I idly checked my email, found out all eleven publishers had rejected my novel, and cried on the train home. It was the clearest moment in my life where I realised who I wanted to be. Some of the publishers wanted some amends to that novel, so I rewrote it and the agent submitted it again. This time, three publishers took it to an acquisitions meeting, but they all still rejected it. I found out in the office and pretended I had hay fever.
My agent asked if I was working on anything else, and I said I had had an idea for a sort-of legal something. She asked me to write it, and I did. I wrote this novel, called What Jack Did, and sent it to her. She said she was going to send it to publishers, and, the night before she did so, I changed the title to Everything But The Truth. Two weeks and six days elapsed after she sent it out during which I heard nothing. On that sixth day, at noon, I got a voicemail from my agent. I was in a meeting, couldn’t listen for two hours. I instead spent the time thinking, had I sold a novel? Or was it more rejections? The meeting ended, eventually, and I snuck down to the bowels of the tower block I worked in to return the call, a moment I will remember for the rest of my life. The green swirled carpets, the old-fashioned phone, the blind with its broken segmented cord.
She told me that Penguin had made an offer for my novel as part of a two-book deal. It was the only offer – everybody else had rejected it. We accepted it, of course. The novel debuted at number six on the Sunday Times Bestseller list. Since then, I have published eight more novels, been selected for the Richard & Judy book club, the Reese Witherspoon book club, Radio 2 Book Club, and hit the New York Times list five times and the Sunday Times list every time.
If this is you, it only takes one yes, whatever you’re doing. Keep going, and I hope you enjoy my books if you read them.
