Bella Mackie And Alexandra Heminsley On What A Way To Go
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Good evening, everyone. It's great to be back at Fiber 15 this evening, and we're very excited to welcome you to our first online event of the new season. You will have likely heard much about tonight's speaker in the last few weeks. She's been all over the airwaves launching her smash hit new book, What A Way To Go, which instantly shot to number five on the Sunday Times bestseller list upon its release.

So we're very pleased to have writer and journalist Bella Mackey with us this evening. Bella's debut novel, How to Kill Your Family, was a number one bestseller and it spent 47 weeks in the top 10. It will soon be adapted for television by Netflix. Bella will be speaking about What's A Way to Go this evening with Alexandra Hemmingsley, a bestselling author, journalist and broadcaster, whose books have been published in 15 countries and include Running Like a Girl, Under the Same Stars and The Queue.

Both of our speakers' books are on sale from Newham Bookshop this evening and details about how to order those will be posted in the chat shortly. Remember too that we'll have time for your questions towards the end of the hour, so please do submit these in the Q&A box at any point during the event and we'll get to as many as we can. Without any further ado, Alex, Bella, welcome. I'm here!

Hello. Hi. How are you? I'm Bella and hi to everyone at home this evening. Thank you very much for joining us and thank you, Bella, for coming and chatting to us with 5x15 this evening. It's my absolute pleasure. It's always nice to do an online event because you get to stay warm in your house and also, you know, you can't possibly go all over the country. So it's lovely. It's really nice. Yeah.

Now then, should we get to it? Jack's given us a brilliant introduction. So we're all kind of, we've all got our bearings with who we are. So I'm going to dive straight in with what a way to go. And as I was reading, I was keeping a little list of part this, part that. And it goes part succession, part serial. And then there's a part and then there's some ellipsis and then Christmas carols.

And I was like, is that weird? And then kind of, and then there's a squiggly line and it says, Chili Cooper. Nice, I like that. I feel like that's where I'm at with the composite parts of sort of inspirations for the novel. And before I do a deep dive with you or what your inspiration was, can we hear about the characters, the motley crew of Despicables? Yeah.

Yeah, and they are all despicable. So it sort of centers around this family, the Whiston family. And that involves Anthony Whiston, who is the patriarch, and he's a very successful financial, you know, he's a money man.

And his wife, Olivia, who is, you know, a social butterfly. She is, you know, very she's a very good standing in the social scenes that she wants to be a part of. And then they have four children. And four is important because I think the more children you have, if you're incredibly wealthy, the more it shows that you're successful. You can afford to have many, many children. And the children are sort of delinquent, layabouts, you know, vain, you know,

money grabbing, there's sort of not a redeeming feature to be found amongst the children really. - They're a terrible illustration of indulgence. - Yeah, it's that kind of that second generation wealth thing where, you know, the first, the grandfather will make the money, the parents will sort of inherit and try and do something with it. And then the third lot just, you know, just, you know, do whatever they want, go clubbing all the time.

So there's this family and then very early on in the book, Anthony, the father dies in a really hideous way. And then the family is sort of left to pick up the pieces. They're squabbling over the money. They're dealing with reputational damage. They're trying to figure out how their father died. And then on top of that, there is this sort of this outsider, the sleuth. She's unnamed throughout the book. And she is a true crime armchair detective who is desperate to try and solve Anthony Whiston's murder and make herself famous in the process.

So those are our kind of main characters. And as you said, they're all pretty despicable. And it's told from a sort of unusual perspective because we have the opening and it's this glorious 60th birthday party, no expense spared, you know, real kind of, I feel like it would have been covered in the golden age of Hello Magazine. Yeah.

And Hello Magazine is what I read as a kid in the hairdressers when my mum would go there and I read it cover to cover. Totally. I'm sure that's where my inspiration comes from is 90s Hello Magazine. Yes, that was kind of like my internal mood board was reading that. And we see Anthony, well, we don't see the exact moment of Anthony's death, but he dies at this party. And the sort of, it's not so much a twist, but the quirk of the storytelling is that he doesn't just die and shut up.

He is then taken to the South Gloucestershire Processing Centre, which is sort of part purgatory, part mental health facility, part just sort of nondescript government department.

And he has to work, he can't kind of move on till he, and that's their turn. They're these sort of like sort of Instagrammy speak, but also sort of government speak type busybodies there who tell him he can't move on till he's worked out how he died. So we're seeing the story in part from his perspective as,

And he's working out who he could or couldn't have trusted. So we see all these characters in multiple lights. And then there's the added spice of the sleuth. So could you talk to me a little bit about the inspiration for the South Gloucester Protesting Centre? It's such a cunning device to allow your character to carry on partaking in the novel when the novel is in fact about their demise. Yeah.

I think the first thing was that I'd started the book writing him and knowing that he would die, but not quite realizing how quickly it would be. And then I found myself really enjoying writing his voice. I was really enjoying living through this, this incredibly successful, arrogant man who has no thoughts of, you know, oh my God, did I upset someone? Oh my God, you know, have I done the wrong thing? He just lives his life in the most confident way. And I love that. I was like, God, this is such a nice change of pace for my own brain. Yeah.

so I thought oh my goodness I want to keep him going how do I do that you know I thought okay I could do it in flashbacks I could you know I could tell that story like that but I wanted him to be looking at his family and wondering what the hell was going on so I started to attempt writing you know a sort of purgatory and afterlife for him and then I thought oh my goodness I'm sort of straying out of my genre here you know I'm sort of slightly moving into fantasy or something else and I want I worried about that you know I thought oh you know I'm sort of

I'm crossing into something that I might not fully understand. But then I thought actually, like I thought my last book was quite hard to position anyway. And, and actually I think probably you don't need to stick to one genre and I felt like it was working. So I sort of carried on with it. And I think Purgatory came to me in two ways. One was that I thought, what's the kind of place that a man like that would hate more than anywhere else in the world? Yeah.

You know, somewhere where officious women, you know, are telling him he has no standing, you know, and they don't listen to him. And there's no club lounge. It's sit here on a plastic chair. End of conversation. His money can't get him to a better level. And I think partly that was that was inspired by I had appendicitis last year, this time last year. And I and it burst and I ended up with like a really hideous infection and I was in hospital for five days.

And when you're in hospital, it is like the great leveler. You know, you're in an NHS ward. Everyone's in there. Every walk of life is in there. It's incredibly run down. It's stiflingly hot. You know, it's overhead lighting. It's, you know, officious nurses who just want you to get up and get better. But you're stuck there until...

until they tell you that you can go home. That's kind of a marker that's constantly changing. So I was there for five days just thinking, how do I get out of here? How do I get out of here? And the only way to get through that is to realize, to surrender your kind of authority and your wishes and just sort of lie there and think, there's nothing I can do here. And they do, they have those posters that say, you know,

we wish you well, you know, be kind to our staff and all this kind of stuff. It's kind of fake, jovial things that actually you think, no, like this is a grim place where no one wants to be, but we're all in it together. And I guess that's death too. You know, none of us can avoid it. Not even Elon Musk or, you know, all these mad billionaires who are trying to prolong their lives forever. That mad guy who thinks he's going to live, you know, to a thousand or whatever and you think,

Who just looks quite ill now. Yeah. And I think, I think he has blood transfusions from his own son.

Which just feels to me so incredibly weird to be like, son, you've been born and now I need all your blood. So yeah, so those kind of men who just think, you know, nothing can ever touch them. I thought where would be the worst place? And to me, it was being in hospital for five days. And it is, for all the details of a hospital, you know, your illness or whatever, the baseline is it's a total lack of control over your environment. Yeah.

And not through lack of people who want to help you, but it is basically a complete surrender. And this is what he has to do. But it's retrospective as well, because he's realising that his life...

as he understood it, wasn't what he thought either. He thought, I'm rich, everything's great. And he realises that his family were ghastly and all of the sort of, the deeper layer than the sort of societal was a little bit more tissue thin than he'd realised. But

I'd also love to talk about the sort of difference between Olivia, his wife, and Anthony, because there's a bit of kind of rub between the power that money has and the power that class has in a way that I haven't really seen in a kind of rich people book. Yeah.

For years, like there's, it's really good on the nuance between the two and what, how to kind of codependent they are as a society as well as individuals.

Yeah, I've always been fascinated by the British class system in general. And I think, do you know who I think does it quite well? It's Julie Cooper writes about class and money in quite an interesting way and how the two need each other. And I think, you know, if you look at, you know, if you look at the old money in this country, you know, most of those people haven't had jobs in a thousand years. You know, they have a castle, but they might not actually have their own money. So they kind of do need the new money.

They need the kind of investors and the people that want to be close to the titles and the houses. You know, they need those people who'll come shooting on their estate because they need that kind of cash. But there is such a disdain for it. You know, there's such a disdain for kind of the new money, you know, and the kind of, oh, you know, how brash, you know, they do things all wrong. You know, the Nicky Haslam tea towel thing, you know, where he does a tea towel every year that says, you know, what's common and what's not, you know, and it's always something that you've done and you think, oh God. Yeah.

And also, really, those lists always just seem completely arbitrary. They're things like putting snow boots on your child in the winter. And it's like, hang on, that seemed like a really sensible idea. Yeah.

There was one that said going on holiday in half term. And I thought, when are parents supposed to go on holiday then? I don't understand. But I guess, you know, if you're kind of, if you're posh like that, maybe you just understand those things. I don't know. But yeah, so I thought it was interesting to have a couple marry who one of them is kind of sort of old fashioned posh and one of them has made their own money. They're both bringing something to the table. Both of them think that they should therefore have the control and, you know, that they're better than the other one.

and so she's quite resentful I think because she kind of brings the clout but he has got everything else and she actually without money financially she is just someone's wife and I think she kind of deep down she knows that and she's slightly hemmed in by that and not to go all sort of white feminist about Olivia like God poor Olivia you know she doesn't have any authority but she sort of came to me because I thought a lot about Lord Lucan's wife Lady Lucan oh yes

And the fact that for those that don't know about Lord Lucan, he was an Earl, a hereditary peer who killed his nanny in the late sixties, meaning to kill his wife and accidentally killing the nanny. And I thought a lot about the fact that actually the kind of mythos of Lord Lucan is that he

No one really talks about Sandra River, who was the nanny. No one really talked about Lady Lucan. It was all the fascination about this glamorous man who maybe escaped the country and what happened, you know, lucky Lucan. His high life, gambling, wearing velvet shoes and stuff. It's like, what's so murderous?

And also if you dig into his life, he was the worst gambler in the world. He was a horrible person. People really disliked him. There really weren't any redeeming things to this fantasy that was created about him. And I thought a lot about her and how tragic her life must have been afterwards, actually. You know, she was estranged from her children. She committed suicide in the end.

But what her life must have been like after this terrible man had disappeared with, you know, taking her reputation and her stability and all of that. And the other woman I thought of oddly was a friend of mine's mother when I was a teenager, who apparently was in the airport with another friend of ours' mother. And they were looking at some duty-free shop. And she turned to her and said...

oh, that's a lovely necklace or whatever it was and said, I wish just once I'd be able to buy something without asking my husband's permission. And this woman was in her fifties. And I remember thinking, oh God, you know, you're wealthy, you're successful, but actually all of this is predicated on, on someone else and what that must feel like. So Olivia, yeah.

she's ghastly, but she's ghastly and she's ghastly because I think she has no, no real agency except that she gets invited to parties and that's not really anything to brag about, is it? And yeah. And it's like, she knows the rules. She's, she talks a lot about like, Oh, I would never have been caught doing that kind of thing. Whereas Anthony sort of charging through life, like, Oh, there's a rule. I'm going to run at it and headbutt it.

And there's a kind of caricature of the English aristocracy is that sort of Isabella Blow, Daphne Guinness sort of limitless wealth so I can be as eccentric as I want to. And actually quite a lot of it is more in we live in one really cold, damp corner of our castle, right?

And the people that don't know the rules do seem to be having more fun over there with their kind of undiscrete clothes on. Yeah, and I...

Sorry, go on. No, you. No, I was just thinking you're totally right. There is that kind of perception of the upper classes, like kind of the salt burn people. You know, I think like when that came out, I thought, oh, she's obviously done that quite well because I guess Emerald Fennell knows those people. You know, she's in that world. Yeah. And so she kind of hit that perfectly, that thing where, you know, they're sort of loose and excited. But I think you're right. I think there's another element to that class thing, which is,

um, like more that, you know, to live within the rules of kind of, I guess it would be like unknowable things if you're not posh, you know, it'd be things like you're wearing the correct jacket in the countryside or whatever. And they know those things. They're slightly hemmed in by those things. But also I think for Olivia, it's that, it's that sense that nothing's really that serious, that nothing really matters. If something's awful, it's, it's a ball rather than being, you know, a catastrophe that, you know, everything's,

an inconvenience rather than something serious to kind of emotionally deal with that kind of, it's the way I often look at the Johnson family and how they seem to find everything hilarious. Everything's just funny rather than tragic. You know, it's the whole of life is to be, is to be looked at as a game. Cause if the consequence is shame and you've decided not to be embarrassed, there's really not a consequence. Yeah.

And everything can just be a, you know, a good laugh. And, and imagine just deciding that you can be like that. I think, but I think that is, if you grow up like that, I don't think you can, I don't think you can just be like that. I think that you have to have to have been taught that by someone.

Well, this is why the sleuth is so brilliant. And I've just noticed that someone in the Q&A has said, are there spoilers for the book? I'm currently only halfway through and we're going to come to the Q&A later and we're going to spend like the last 15 minutes of the hour on that. But I did want to let that person know that I can't speak for Bella. I'm pretty confident that she won't be doing any spoilers, but I definitely won't be asking leading questions that will get anyone spoiled.

But the sleuth, we hear from her perspective, and she's sort of in the... from the lineage of from Serial and that original true crime podcast, which must... I think I saw something recently about how it's the 10-year anniversary of Serial this year, which made me feel very aged. But then right up to the kind of TikTok world where...

like the couple in the van last year, the sort of the hashtag van life couple, genuinely things that the police had decided to overlook, cases being kept alive and where that sort of clashes with mental

varying degrees of appropriate and intrusiveness because on the whole, it seems like Olivia, certainly the mother and the four children and there's Jemima, the older siblings' husband as well. They all seem quite keen for it not to have been a crime because the societal shame that's sort of bubbling up and they're having to deal with is

Not like the Johnsons, they do seem still to be burdened with a sense of shame. But they're all quite kind of like, yeah, no, the autopsy said there wasn't a murder. But this woman, the sleuth, she's YouTubing live and she's not wise to the ways of...

society's moors and you know she would get everything on the tea towel wrong but she's smart she's the one that's noticing things they all drop the ball around her because she used to work in the village pub and she's just an invisible person

Yeah. And I think, yeah, it's that invisibility and that sort of dismissing her, counting her out because, you know, she's a nobody, which means that actually they're incredibly complacent about kind of what they let her do and how they deal with her because, you know, they just think she's a nothing. And actually, you know, she has the power to ruin their lives. But what you were saying about the kind of the documentary to podcast to TikTok pipeline is sort of something that I am completely obsessed with because it's

I noticed it, you know, I think it's, I think it's kind of a post pandemic thing. And I think it has gone, you know, I think humans have always been obsessed with crime. You know, you look at, you know, 300 years ago, people going to public executions, the penny dreadful magazines in Victoria, London, you know, it's, it's, it would be ridiculous to say that this is a new thing, you know?

And I think part of it, which I think is the uncomfortable part, is that we are interested and titillated by violence. And I think oftentimes we deny that and we say, no, no, no, it's about learning to be safe or it's about finding justice. I think, yes, it's all those things. Yeah, no, I'm not a person.

But it's also that we are kind of animalistic and we're interested in the kind of the worst murders. You know, Jack the Ripper is famous not because he hit someone over the head with a cosh. It's because he ripped people up, you know. Sorry, that's a tangent. But basically, so I think the podcast thing was really interesting that it kind of it's moved from, you know, newspapers, the 90s newspapers, which always had, you know, a serial crime on the front page.

documentaries, podcasts. And then I think during COVID- And at the time, we believed that newspapers were a more respectable way of reporting it because we didn't understand that it was only like decades later that we understood the sort of police and journalists way of working. Yeah, exactly. It's either you're thinking, well, it's in the papers in this similar way to where I would now go, well, it's only on TikTok. But the lines are a bit more blurry. And you

think you know the same power to ruin someone's life because I was thinking about um Chris Jeffries who was wrongly named um for murdering a woman that lived in his flat in Bath I think but yeah and how the papers of Christina Rossetti and he had kind of long hair and they they thought he looked weird and it turned out that the papers had been hacking his phones and all that kind of stuff and they ruined his life but um

but the TikTok thing I find fascinating because I do think the internet has kind of democratized crime for everyone. Right. So, and I think it was the pandemic, it was us all being inside, you know, so actually the idea that you could, you could see a crime happening somewhere, you know, it's two hours old, three hours old, and you're able to go on Google maps or you're able to, you know, you could, you know, you can go on Twitter, you can see someone's social media profile, the victim, you know, or the murderer. And,

And I've seen that so much recently. For me, it was really sparked by Nicola Bulley tragically drowning in the river. And, you know, armchair detectives turning up at the scene. They were investigating outhouses. They were looking for things. They were naming people. They were saying it was her husband. And then more recently with Jay Slater, who died in Tenerife, the teenager. TikTok lost its mind over Jay Slater. They were saying that his family had done it in order to create a GoFundMe campaign.

And even after he was found, they don't believe what's happened. And I think that really feeds into the kind of distrust in mainstream media and the kind of misinformation that the online world is

spreading constantly you know I think it's hard to deny that there's a link between that and the kind of anti-vax you know conspiracy pipeline that so many people fall down do you feel like it's the introduction of the algorithm because the sleuth in your novel she says like oh I chucked out another video I didn't really have anything to add but I knew that we had to keep I kept

to add enough, a bit more content and I had to make it this long because that's what works for the algorithm. And that's what happens if you look on TikTok when you're following a crime, like

you start... It's all it will show you, so it's all you believe. You don't see that there's the whole other world where everyone else is believing the other thing, unless you make a... Which, frankly, I've never bothered to do, to kind of go in like, the other side of the story regarding whatever. And you believe your side is the side, or your opinion or your facts are the facts. And...

And it shows like in this novel very clearly how previously the well-to-do could have gone, yep, no, nothing to see here. Let's all move on. And it is technology that sort of kind of elbows it and says, no, no, no.

She gets the numbers, basically. Yeah, and it completely throws that kind of idea of, you know, if you've been, say you were, you know, Lord Lucan now, there would be people in every bar, you know, in South America taking photos of people they thought was Lord Lucan. You know, he would not have been able to hide. He just got nowhere. Yeah.

Yeah, that was an upper class crime and it was nothing to do with anyone else. And now, you know, crime is everyone's business, basically. It's everyone's entertainment. And it's all about the likes, you know, the algorithm is going to reward you for putting out more content, more insane, wacky ideas, you know? So she's kind of playing along with that. And she's kind of, she knows that a lot of the stuff that she's putting out might not be true, but it doesn't matter. And I guess that's true of everything online now, is that it sort of doesn't matter whether it's true because, you know, that's not the point. You just, if you're getting clicks, who cares? Yeah.

TikTok will pay you for a video if it gets over a million hits. And it doesn't, that doesn't, it's not differentiating on whether you've spouted something accurately. Yeah, there isn't a TikTok fact-checking desk. No, it's the Wild West, it's terrifying. She believes that she wants to, she wants to reach the truth. She believes that she's doing the right thing to get to the truth.

And it's sort of, in lots of ways, a book about legacy, like what Antony perceives is his legacy to the world, like the kind of person, the mark he left on the world he lived in. The kids and Olivia, the legacy is show me the money. And she is wanting the legacy of having, you know, being the truth seeker with her big fiery sword. But also Antony,

It's really funny. I feel like we've gone deep with like the morals of TikTok or whatever. But I think it's important to talk about how this is a really funny book. And is that fun to write? Yes. And I think there are like...

I think for me, I've always loved, you know, crime fiction. When I was growing up, I read every single Agatha Christie book. You know, I read all of Dorothy L Sayers. This is when I'm kind of nine years old. You know, I'm reading all of these books. There's a sort of... And then point horror, point crime, you know, just voraciously reading as much crime. And then in my 20s, you know, I was moving on to kind of Ian Rankin and Val McDermid and then all of these kind of masters of the genre. But I always...

And I always wanted to write like that. And I knew I couldn't, my brain doesn't work like that. I can't forensically plot detail like that. You know, you see it in something like a Bama Dermot, where you just know that she's talked to 50 forensic scientists in the last 20 years and she understands blood spatter and she understands, you know, all of that stuff. And my brain just isn't like that. So I thought if I'm going to write a kind of crime, but it's going to have to have something else to it.

And for me, you know, my whole life is trying to, you know, I'm constantly just trying to be as funny as my sister or my husband or whoever. And so it is really fun to write. And it's also a bit of a cop out because it just means I don't have to kind of worry about blood spatter because I'm like, this is funny. It's not, you know, I'm asking you as a reader, I guess, to kind of step out of

of full reality and I'm moving you into a world which is kind of it's 90 similar to ours but there's a slight difference um and yeah I think without the funny it would you know it would be a very different book and it would be lacking in something if it if I hadn't kind of really whacked out the kind of procedural parts of it which yeah again just not for me I can't do it

But there's something about these sort of new generation of kind of comedic crime, like the Richard Osman books. And one I interviewed at Christmas, Janice Hallett, who did the appeal and then she did the Christmas appeal. And what they really are, I mean, there's a crime.

a crime in them that you want to solve the riddle but their social commentary they are picking up where Jilly Cooper left off in that respect where it's a fun way to poke fun at the people that you usually feel are in charge yeah and I think I've always I'm obsessed with character like that's what I like writing is character like I just get into their heads and I have such a fun time doing it and they stay with me for like months or years and

And my sister, who's always my first reader, who's always saying, "Yes, but plot, Isabella, you have to put plot in here." And I'm thinking, okay, fine. But you know, I love the characters. So someone like Janet Hallett, you know, who seems to be able to do both, you know, plot and character, like good for her. But for me, I'm always like plot, great, but I want to get inside these people's heads, which I guess is why I pick people

who I don't, I mean, you know, the super, super rich, I don't, I actually don't know anyone like that, you know, and I think, so for me, it's quite interesting going to the heads of people who are not me, you know, not like me. I could write about the middle class experience really well, the kind of liberal, lefty, hypocritical, whatever it is, you know, I could do that. And actually, I am going to do that for the next one. But for me, it's so fun to kind of escape into these people's heads. And also, if it wasn't funny, if they were just that unlikable, I think,

the reader would, you probably wouldn't be able to bring the reader along for as long as I want them to be pulled along for. Because I think, you know, you have to, there has to be, you have to root for someone or like someone. And actually they're all so grim that I have to make you laugh. That's kind of my side of the bargain is at least you can laugh with them or at them, you know? So, so yeah, it is important.

You've done two novels with sort of super rich, super ghastly people receiving their comeuppance. And I feel like we have all as a nation put in a long shift of super rich, super ghastly people seeming to never get their comeuppance.

And do you think that life is cyclical and we'll find somebody? Or do you feel like looking at a shift in government that you kind of find that sort of upper tier? There's been a bit, you know, it's harder to be quite so vicious about someone like, you know, deputy prime minister or whatever. You want to...

you want to kind of just carry on being really savage about who's in charge, but if who's in charge isn't quite so aggressively grim. Yeah, I think you'll find a different way of doing a different version of grim. So I think I'll find a different way of doing a different version of grim. And I think that will probably the next book will probably be, you know, kind of the liberal elite, you know, the people that sort of the papers love to hate. And I think that'll be quite fun because that's sort of,

an area I know a lot about. And so it'll be different for me. And there's not sanctimony there. Oh, oh my God. Like so rich to write about. And I'm actually surprised that wasn't my first book, but I think you're right. I think the government we had for such a long time and the cronyism and the super rich people that were kind of hanging around with these people was so in our faces that, you know, we saw it every single day and it felt like it was a government that was

that was kind of encouraging those people, you know, come to Britain, you know, live in Mayfair, you know, give us money. And I think that was obviously quite, it must have been a thing in my brain of, you know, this is the world we currently live in. But on the other hand, there is a secondary thing to that, which is,

That the super wealthy, you know, when I was reading or you were reading Hello Magazine in the 90s, you know, the occasional minor royal, you know, right. And then there's a couple of people in a castle. But they weren't featuring the super rich in the way that we understand the super rich to be now. You know, the 0.0111%, these billionaires, these people who own 30 houses around the world who pay tax.

You know, they have a shell company on an island. They fly in by private jet and helicopter and you don't they don't use any of the same facilities as you. You know, the most they're going to use is a road with a driver, you know, in a Rolls Royce. And we don't we can't see any of that, except in things like when you walk around. If you're ever in central London, you walk around Mayfair at night.

then there are no lights on on any of the houses because those houses have been bought by the super rich and no one lives in them. So I think there's quite a lot of that that I see. And then things like, you know, hedge funds and private equity buying up almost every business restaurant,

Anything that you ever frequently find out that, you know, behind that is a private equity firm. And that for me is the kind of galling bit is the kind of the wealth disparity only seems to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And these people, you cannot get to them in any way. You know, these people are they are so invisible. They're not on the rich list. They don't want to be anything as gauche as, you know, on the rich list. Yeah.

they want to be invisible and they want their private island off New Zealand that they can go to when the world floods and they get to, you know, disappear. And we don't know who they are. Yeah. And I just find that so interesting. Do you remember Ed Caesar wrote that amazing piece about trying to figure out there's a house in Highgate. Apparently it was one of the biggest private houses. Yes, the Millionaire's Row. Yeah. And he wrote this whole piece about his kind of two year search to try and find out who owned it because it was in such a

web of like legalese. And it ended up, you know, it was owned by an offshore firm and again, like off the seychelles somewhere. And he finally did figure out who owned it, but it took him two years because these people can do whatever they want. And actually I downplayed that in the book because I don't know those people. So it turns out they should have had, you know, 15 helicopters and all of this kind of stuff. And I, I completely, I completely downplayed it. And now I'm sort of pissed off with myself for not going harder on it.

have a fair bit I don't think you should start beating yourself up about it um now I would love to we've got sort of 10 minutes before we're going to do some questions and I can see the questions coming in which is brilliant so if you do have one and you've been um

stealing yourself get going because we've got about 10 minutes but I'd love to talk to you about your pre your first book jog on and a little bit about running and then ask you a little bit about what's coming next because we both wrote running books back in the day and I think I'm right in saying that you are very much still running regularly I am are you not running anymore

Are you swimming now? I swim a lot and I do do weights a lot, but I have, I've been really injured. I got, I had something wrong with my pelvis when I was pregnant and I've never quite kind of got it back and I miss it.

But also, and I would like your professional opinion about this. You don't do loads of events, do you? You don't set yourself huge. You just, you're like a quotidian runner. You've got your roots and you just keep yourself to yourself. Yeah.

Yeah, I've never ever run a public thing ever. And actually, I remember reading your book because your book, I was like reading your book, writing mine, being like, right, okay, good, great. I was like, apologies for that. But I was definitely, I did credit you. So it's not like I just boosted passages from it. But I remember, you know, you were going hard, you were running a marathon and me thinking like,

I'm never going to do that. Like that, it's just not, I could never, I could never do it. And sometimes people say, oh, I read Jog On and then I ran a marathon. I think, oh, you fucking bitch. You know, you went and did further than I did. But yeah, I think that, I think it would take the love of it out for me. And I think that is partly what happened with me. Yeah. So I remember reading yours and reading about, you know, the glorious finish and all of that stuff. But then there's that bit afterwards where you're sort of like,

okay, like I've overtrained to the point where I'm exhausted. I've done this impossibly hard thing. Why would I, why would I take three days off and then go back out there? Why would I, you know? And I think that's so true of so many runners and the person that got me into running is my sister. And she's done that several times. And then she hasn't run for like two years. And I think, Oh God, you know, I never want to lose that kind of,

that easiness that comes with just, you know, running down your high street or whatever. Yeah. That's what I miss. I don't miss marathons at all. I really miss the feeling like doing some exercise and being doing some exercise 10 minutes later. Yeah.

Exactly. And it's immediate, you know, whereas, I mean, I now weightlift as well because I'm post-40 and I think, oh my God, my bones, you know, Christ. Yeah, I'm like, I hit 40 and you're like, oh God, my bones. So I've been doing that as well and a bit of Pilates. And I like both of them, but neither of them for me give me that immediate rush that running sometimes can. It's very elusive, obviously. But that moment when I was running through a park the other day and I suddenly realized I was having it, I was tingling. I was like, oh.

Oh God, it's so good when it happens. And I've never found anything that comes as close to that as kind of keeping my head on straight. And so, yeah, I think if you, I mean, it's so shit to have an injury like that, that you've just not been able to quite write again. I mean. I sort of know I could run, but it would make everything worse again. I know. And if you've worked so hard to get to a point where that's not impacting you, so then suddenly. Maybe I could just get like some Heelys or something. Just like.

I'm sad that you can't run because your book really made me understand that love of running. I think I could, but I think that the commitment it would take of physio and maintenance with the

Yeah. And actually... Bigger than the time I'd spend doing the running. Exactly. Exactly. And if you found other things that you love, I mean, it doesn't, you know, I think the whole point about running is that, you know, great if you like it, but don't struggle on with it for years if, you know, it's painful or you can't do it or you don't like it, you know. And actually, that's what I really, I treasure the fact that my book, your book, there are a few, there are not many women's running books. Yeah.

But, you know, every other book in the running section is by a man who's doing kind of an ultra marathon, you know, wearing no shoes and going backwards and, you know, racing, you know, the best racer in the world. And you think, OK, it's just quite nice to read books about people who just who just want to run for the love of it rather than kind of the sort of aggressive competitiveness of it. Yeah. Yeah. The quantification of the self. Yeah.

But does this, and this is going to be an amazing segue now, does, see, I admire you keeping going without, you're not training for a thing. You're able to do this sized amount of running and put it away and come back to it tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Did that mean that you're one of those writers who goes,

I've had an idea for a new novel and I shall write 1,000 to 1,500 words a day until I have finished my novel. Or are you just a huge fits and spurts person, Google whole for two days, don't speak to anyone for two days? Or do you have the sort of comparable discipline that you do with running? Yeah.

Once, I think it was Philip, Philip Pullman said he writes 500 words a day. And I thought, on earth do you ever get any of your books finished? Because 500 words a day does not feel like enough to be like powering through novels, like, you know, like the novels that he's written. No, but it's 15,000 words a month.

Yeah. So when you put it like that, and if he has no days off, then that's amazing. So for me, I think I'm, I'm rigorous when I know there's a deadline looming, but if they, you know, publishing is the worst like that because they're like, okay, you've got a year to write it. And you think, great, I'll start next week, you know? And then obviously you've got three months left and you think, Oh,

And so then you get on it. And so I've sort of, what I will do is I'll write a thousand words every day with the Pomodoro method, you know, using the timer. And that's fantastic. And then I normally find anything over that does start getting slightly sloppy. Um,

And then if I'm in deadline mode, I'll write way more than that and then edit the next morning looking back and thinking, oh God, that was rubbish. You know, that hasn't worked at all. But I'm not, I'm not, I don't treat it like a nine to five. I'm not sort of sitting down at the desk at nine and clocking off at five. I'm much more like,

I'll go and sit over there for a bit. I'm going to walk around and procrastinate. Then I'm, you know, so there is a luxury of being able to do it at home and, and not having to worry about kind of, you know, having to do set hours. So, yeah, I mean, for the next one, you know, my editor said like, cool, just have it in for like, I think she said July next year. And I'm just thinking, great. That's so long away. It's not, it's so not long away, but you know, in my head, I'm like, great. I'll just take a month. Like, cool. You know, I just need a research trip to on team. Yeah.

Yeah, and can I expense that? Can I expense that to the publishers? Sure. I bet you they could do that in the 90s. I bet you people like Robert Harris could do that in the 90s. Oh my God, yes. And how did you find, from a sort of nerdy writerly perspective...

the transition from nonfiction to fiction as a writer. Because for me, when I was doing nonfiction, I almost felt like, well, I know it happened. It's just on me to describe it as well as possible. I just need to be as sort of charismatic and persuasive as possible. And then I kind of got a sort of vertigo when it came to fiction of like, everybody can have yellow hair and purple feet and any of their rules. And what do I do? My, how? Yeah.

That is exactly how I felt. And you're living with invented people all day. You can't go off and interview someone to quote them in the same way, but...

Especially when you've done something nonfiction where you know that the truth has to be kind of, you have to be so careful, you know, especially if you're writing about things like mental health, that you don't spread misinformation or get the wrong thing, you know, write it blithely in your book and expect, you know, no one to challenge you. So that feels really daunting, but I understood how to do that. And then you're right. You sit down to write fiction. You're like,

sorry, this is all coming out of my head. Like what I can just make everything up. And you kind of feel like you're lying. I felt like I was lying in the beginning. I was like, this feels like I'm just making things up because if you, yeah, nonfiction to fiction is you do feel like vertigo. And then I think it was about three months into it. I suddenly felt like this is the most freeing thing I've ever done because it's that flip side of like, Oh, I'm making it up. And then being like, Oh my God, I can make it up. This is amazing. So yeah,

So, you know, when I'm writing Anthony in death, I'm thinking, this is fantastic. No one can tell me that I can't do this because, you know, it's made up. It's brilliant. And sometimes people will message me about how to be a family and say, you know, I think that death wasn't very realistic. And I'm like, yeah, it's not. I made it up. Like, it's just, it's not real. It's great.

So, yeah, I can't imagine going back to writing something nonfiction now, especially, I think, because obviously for the books market, for someone like me, it would be write another personal book, you know, which they tried to get me to do after Jog On. They said, you know, why don't you write about, you know, trampling your way out of sadness or whatever, you know, they were kind of coming up with other ideas. And I was thinking it will be disingenuous and like a weaker thing to do. So I kind of try, I deliberately thought this is my moment where I can try and pivot to fiction. Yeah.

But yeah, I think I've sort of drained that well of, you know, unless my husband sort of leaves me for, I don't know, you know, Taylor Swift, it's probably not another memoir in there. So, so yeah. Fiction for me is now I'm happy. I'm like, oh, this is great. I don't have to put any footnotes in the back. It's great. Well, quick, quick. We've got a couple of minutes before I dive into the questions, but putting aside the, my husband left me for Taylor Swift memoirs,

what's coming up next because there's there's TV adaptation is that genuinely are we is that happening where like sometimes that sits on the bottom of a press release for five years and then everyone politely stops asking and well maybe that

that is very possible. Exactly. I think people in TV, like I didn't understand until like they came to see me as well. I kind of thought if something gets announced, they've already made it and it's already filmed and you know, you'll see it on your screens in six weeks. And I keep trying to say to people like, oh, it's not filming until 2026, supposedly. And Taylor Joy, who they've got attached to it.

because easily drop out you know she might get a much better offer in which case you know they're going to find another actress or you know the director or drop out and you're right it might just end up quietly shelved and people say weren't you gonna and I say no no no that was a long time ago so I'm not having anything to do with that really I mean I've been allowed to I've been allowed to meet the writers but I think when it comes to the book author they really want you to stay as far away as possible I think they think thank you so much now please you know shuffle off

and let us kind of rework everything for TV, which is completely fair. So I'm letting them do that. And I just want to watch it like a viewer, you know, where you watch eight episodes in one day, you can't remember anything about it three weeks later. That's how I want to watch it. And so, yeah, the next, I'm just writing another book basically. Like it's that convey about thing of you, you finish it and you're like, I finished, this is amazing. And then you're like, what am I doing? And then you're like, Oh, I'm just writing another book. That's what I'm doing. I'm writing another book. You have your idea and you're off and running.

I do. I'm off and running. It's going to be set in North London about a kind of, as I said, a sort of liberal elite family. And I think that is Rich Pickings. So hopefully I won't just be punching up. I'll be also punching sideways. Punching myself.

Oh, thank you for telling us about it and chatting so brilliantly about everything. Now, I'm going to resign from being questioner. I'm going to be questioner, reader, outerer. Okay. Is there a reason The Sleuth is unnamed for most of the book? And I...

I used female pronouns because I listened, I did part of the book as an audio book and I, I did that thing of not knowing. And then when I heard the audio book, I was like, oh, okay, they've made the decision for me. Yeah. That was funny actually, because I wrote The Sleuth as a man and my editor was like read it and said, oh, I love The Sleuth. She's fantastic. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. The Sleuth is a boy. The Sleuth is not a woman. And she was adamant. She said, no, The Sleuth is a woman. I thought,

Okay, actually, that's probably more interesting because in my head, it was a kind of maybe the slight cliche of a lonely man who, you know, kind of, you know, in his parents' house, you know, being a bit sad. And actually that is a stereotype and it's not a great one because actually the people that are interested in true crime are all sorts of people. And so my suit, she's unnamed because I think,

partly I don't want you really to understand or know anything about her because she's so obsessed with this other family. You know, she's kind of, you're in her world a little bit, but you don't really get to know her properly. And then partly because at the end, there is a kind of, you might get a better understanding of what's motivated her at the end.

But I just, I like the idea that she's kind of, for the reader, she's a faceless internet account in the same way that that's what you'd get if you were, you know, if you were watching these people, you know, sometimes they don't show their faces at all. They're just narrating to photos or images, you know, and actually you don't know who's telling you this information. So that's kind of why she's anonymous. But it's interesting that, yeah, that you sort of were listening and then suddenly, oh, it's a woman, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And somebody else has asked, thank you for a fantastic Q&A, first of all. And they recently listened to your podcast with Annie Mack. And they want to know, who would you say is most influential in your writing? And whose validation do you mostly seek when you've completed a book? Which I love that question. I'm totally stealing it for all future interviews. Yeah.

I'm also stealing that. I've got to interview another author tomorrow and I'm going to steal that. So thank you. What was the first part of the question? Because the second part was so good. The first part was who was most influential?

Oh, okay. That's difficult because I think if you say, you know, say I said, you know, Charles Dickens, then I sound like I think that I'm as lofty and brilliant as Charles Dickens. Do you know what I mean? I say like, well, actually, you know, of course, you know, it's all based on, you know, some random philosopher. So I can't say anyone fantastic because that just makes me sound appalling. I think probably for me, it's like, you know, it's comedies like, I don't know, Veep and Succession, things like that, the humor of those comedies.

mixed with, for me, it's Agatha Christie, who I just, I think writes the perfect crime novels. And they're always about kind of terrible, normally terrible upper class people, you know, doing terrible things and having terrible things done to them. And I just, I love her so much. I go to bed every night listening to one of her audio books every single night of my life since I was a teenager. Yeah.

uh my husband just goes to sleep like like a normal person like as I would say like raw dogging the world just nothing in his ears and I'm like lying there listening to like you know Murder on the Orient Express for the 78th time being like this is so comforting they're just about to get to the murder so um

So yeah, I always have her at the back of my brain. Yeah. And sorry, the second part, who do I want validation from? I want validation from everyone. I think writers are like some of the most insecure, like whiny babies in the world. And Joe Lysak once said a really funny thing to Greg, my husband, about how

how the dream for every famous person is that their agent one day texts them and says, by the way, everyone else has died and you've won. Because they want all the gigs. They want every show. And so as a writer, you kind of, the idea that I would ever go on to my own Goodreads or something would, it would just kill me dead in a minute. But really what I want is I want my mum and my sister to laugh. So they're my first readers. And if they laugh,

Then for me, that's magic because they're not hard to make laugh, but, you know, they would tell me they're the kind of people that would say like, this isn't good. They're the people I always want to impress, I guess. Brilliant. If you lived a day, as this is from Laura Colburn, Colburn P, I think that is rather than Colburn. If you lived a day as one of the super rich, what would you do?

Oh, I used to have this fantasy when I was little that all I wanted to do was be invisible. And I just wanted to go to like the most expensive department store and just take everything. And I don't know how I thought that would work, but I just thought I could just walk in and take all the diamonds, all the dresses, you know, do all of that. If I was a super rich person, what would I do in a day now? I think they live quite boring lives. That's the thing. I think...

you know, okay, fine. You can jet around the world and you can go for lunch in Saint-Tropez and then fly back in your helicopter. Actually, now I'm saying that that does sound quite nice, doesn't it? But I think in general, I'm thinking if I, okay, if I was the super rich, I would have like

eight modern clothes down for me for the day. And I would go and look at every single art piece. And so I would do that for museums. I would just make them close them down for me so that I could walk around them and have my own access. Because I think that's the good thing about having money is that it allows you access to things that like,

everyone else doesn't get. So that's what I would do. I would spend money and like make the Vatican open for me on a weekend as long as I didn't actually have to meet the Pope or anything. So yeah, that's what I would do. Someone once told me about 20 years ago, there was a massive Hollywood star, like a kind of someone who's still famous, but like was young and beautiful in the seventies who had on retainer,

one of our London's sort of best... I think they presented even... They did stuff on Front Row or something, but like a cultural critic. And whenever he came to London, this person was just sort of on retainer to like...

go around some galleries with him, telling him, explaining the paintings and saying, oh, well, actually the guardian thought this, but the Financial Times, they were much kinder. And I always thought that seemed, I couldn't tell which part of the equation was more intoxicating to me. To have that, to have the luxury of being able to summon your chosen critic to just sort of chat to, always,

or being a kind of scruffy London critic that somebody would, you'd be like, I've had the call. I've got to get to the National Portrait Gallery by seven. It's definitely the critic. The critic has the best time there because all that critic wants is for people to listen to him spout off about how, you know, interesting he finds himself. And he's doing it for a Hollywood person and he's getting paid. Like,

you assume that was the best day of that critic's life. And to be a celebrity, it'll be like, you know, something he can brag about for five minutes. That critic, it's like on his tombstone. Yeah, to be able to pay for people to do things like that would be phenomenally fun. But I think most of those kind of super rich people, they're just sort of bored on their phones flying around in private jets like the Kardashians or whatever. They don't seem to do anything interesting. You know, they just have balloon parties or whatever. I must say, I've sort of drifted off the Kardashians because I've, Khloe Kardashian in particular, I found...

to be it was no longer aspirational it looked miserable miserable yeah and she like 10 years ago I thought she was quite funny and sort of human yeah and then just sort of became like the rest of them and I just find them all yeah just quite dull I just think they all look so bored

Yeah, definitely. Now we've had two different questions about which are effectively about the same thing. Someone's asked about what software you use and if you just write in Word and someone else has quite rightly picked me up on what the Pomodoro method is that you mentioned. And we just galloped past because I could see we were running out of time and I didn't. I'm interested in that. But now we can stop and pause. So

Do you work in any particular software and can you give us a run through of the Pomodoro technique? Yes. So I use Google Docs.

I wrote one up in Google Docs and it nearly sent me up the wall. So I love Google Docs because it auto-saves everything. Whereas when I've worked in Word doing edits, it doesn't auto-save. And I once lost three days worth of edits because I hadn't realized that it wasn't auto-saving. I do need to get Word because I saw someone on Threads the other day being like, please

please, for the love of God, authors stop using Google Docs. It's so insecure. You know, word is so secure for authors. Oh, I haven't realized that. Yeah. So I've written, you know, 130,000 words in Google Docs and without ever thinking, like maybe that's not secure. So,

Oh my God, that's actually made me feel quite nauseous. The thought of someone able to access you halfway through. Imagine like Russian hackers got halfway through your writing and then asked for a ransom for you to give it back. I mean, so it's going to be a word from now on.

And the Pomodoro method is really simple. It's just, I mean, I'm making it more simple than it probably is, but it's basically, you can get an app and all this kind of stuff, but it's basically just set a timer on your phone for 25 minutes and then you put your phone somewhere else. And for some reason, knowing that there's a timer makes you concentrate incredibly well on any tasks that you're doing, be it writing or anything else. And the timer goes off and you get like a two or three minute break.

put the timer back on and then you get like a four minute break after that. So you do it in shifts. So it's called the Pomodoro method because I think they used one of those old fashioned tomato timers. And it's, it's such a helpful thing. If you're struggling, your mind's wandering, you're procrastinating. If you do the Pomodoro method, you'll be amazed at how quickly your mind focuses. It's really good.

I must confess, just setting the timer isn't enough for me. I use software called Freedom, which you can... Originally, it just locked you off the internet. But now you can set it so, you know, you can choose three people if they email you or something like that, or, you know, breaking it if there's a, you know, disaster. But you...

you can set it to how long it locks the internet for you. And I just, I can't do anything without the first, usually what happens is in the second 20 minutes, I've forgotten about it and I carry on writing. But the first 20 minutes I'm like, this is horrendous. Oh God, oh God.

I think about that, but then I see my husband has one of those lock things and he's just constantly, all I can see him doing, he doesn't use the internet less. He's just typing in the code more. Like, well, this kind of defeats the point because it's just more, it's more work for you, but you're still doing it. Oh, I don't, I've never managed to crack freedom. Oh, really? Oh, okay. So maybe yours is a more hardcore version. Okay. Now then I'm just scanning through.

Oh, people thanking you because they've become runners. I love that. Again, it makes me intimidated because they're always better runners than me. And then I'm always like, oh God. She's very specific. It's somebody called Claire. She's not a marathon runner. She said, it's not a question, but jog on inspired me to try running after deciding I wasn't a runner. And I found, I love it. I'm not a marathon runner. 5k is my max, but I've never done a park run. So thank you, Bella.

uh gear shift Amina wants to know if you have a dramatic death like Anthony spiked literally what would that look like for you oh god what if I was to be if I was to have a dramatic death myself um like the opposite of having your I'll tell you what it would be it would be um for me I don't know why it would be falling out of a hot air balloon yes because my friends just sort of

It's all, yeah, all it kind of collapsing. But my friend's ex-husband's mother owned a hot air balloon company in the north of England and they were constantly offering us to go on free hot air balloons. And I always thought, I'm sorry, but like fire in a tent with like sandbags. So like, I just thought no one thought this through. This is a Victorian contraption that we should be better than this now. So that always freaks me out. It's incomprehensible to me.

Like, let's make a floating platform with some fire on it and put it this high. It just wouldn't happen. Why is the pretty colourful balloon making people fall from it? It's because it's so beautiful. And also imagine you're up there in the sky and it must be so beautiful just moments before your death. You know, I just think...

I got really obsessed with reading about the Hindenburg the other day, because it turned out that there was an English version of the Hindenburg, which did like a couple of journeys to... I think they did one journey across the Atlantic and one somewhere else in Europe, and then just a fiery ball pit. But I thought, who thought that this was a good idea? They were smoking. They were smoking on board. Like...

Just, you should go and Google it. I can't remember what the British version was called, but it's like the whole thing just reads like a Darwin Award. It's fascinating. I told someone recently that I could just about remember as a child that people used to smoke on the tube and that the tubes had wooden steps. Wooden escalators. I mean, what on earth? I know. My mum said that. She was like, you know, we'd smoke on planes. Planes!

It's just mind blowing. Okay. There's two key questions left. They're both very brief. One is you're talking about the new book, but when is it coming out? So hopefully that will be out in 2026, early 2026. So it'll be quicker than this one.

Because, yeah, this one was three years. The next one will be two years. Publishing takes forever. It's not it's never the writer. It's just that the whole process, you know, this takes so long. Yeah, it does. And weird, unfathomable things to do with scheduling that are to do with paper stock at certain types of the year that my eyes glaze over when they tell me them. But I still don't know what they're saying.

Finally, somebody says they heard Barney bark and can they see him? Yes. I would never offer this because then I'm just being the person who's made their dog a personality. But you can see him. I mean, that horse dog has bolted. Yay! Luckily, I am. Oh, look at that!

I took him out for an incredibly long walk just before we did this so that he would be exhausted. So one bark, I will say, is incredibly impressive from Barney because normally he's like pushing me, hitting me, trying to get me to take him out. So yeah, that's the... Look at him though. He's like dream dog. Well done on your event, mum.

Honestly, I mean, imagine this dog came from Battersea and now he's just lying here demanding belly rubs. He's got the best life in the whole world. So yeah.

I thought I was going to get away with not one message about Barney, but it's never going to happen. Yeah, I was worried that that would be an inappropriate question, so I asked it right on eight o'clock. No, no, it's very good. You had the option to go, no, no, time's up. He's nowhere near. Well, no, sadly, he's always there. Thank you so much, Alex. That was so fun. Thank you, everyone who joined us. And thank you, Bella and Barney.

Bye.