In writing Louisa’s last adventure, as I saw it, I wanted to make sure that the message I was sending to all these girls who have come to feel that she means something to them was the right message. The thing that I’ve become increasingly aware of is, I might not be able to be a solution to anything but I don’t want to be part of a problem.

“And the reason why was that there’s been some seismic changes going on in the world. “This book took about a year of thinking through before I started writing it,” says Moyes, who dedicated Still Me to her daughter. Kinsella not only urged Moyes to stick with the book, but, in my favorite detail of that particular story, Kinsella went home, told her husband about the book and then called Moyes to say, “Henry says you should do it too!” That book, of course, was the bestselling Me Before You, a stratospheric success story that put Moyes on the global map: the tale of the love forged between Louisa Clark and Will Traynor not only struck a chord with readers, it has, in the five years since it was published, led to a successful film-featuring Moyes’ screenwriting debut-and two follow-on novels, the second of which, Still Me, is out now. “I used to feed chapters under their doors and say, ‘What do you think?’ and then they’d say either ‘Oh, yeah…’ or ‘More, more!’ and before I knew it, I’d written a book.” A kind rejection from an agent-“‘look, it’s not publishable, but you’ve definitely got a voice you should keep going”-provided impetus: Moyes hit the publishing motherlode with 2002’s Sheltering Rain, a fictional account of her grandparents’ love story.Īnd then she told me how, over a lunch with fellow novelist and buddy Sophie Kinsella, Moyes admitted to having doubts about her then-current work-in-progress, a novel about a quadriplegic man and the woman who cares for him. How, working The Independent’s night desk, she would spend her days writing fiction: “I had this Bridget Jones life where I knew all my neighbors,” she told me.

How, at 17, she left home and supported herself with various jobs including mini-cab controller, market-stall-holder, typist at a bank and copywriter for a travel company-gaining incisive insights into everything from basic work-place discipline to the vagaries of human nature-before heading to university and, from there, into journalism. The first time I interviewed Jojo Moyes, in 2010, she shared multiple memorable anecdotes: How, at 14, she worked at her East London neighborhood stables, used her wages to buy Bombardier, her first horse-and then went home to tell her mom the news.

Me before you second book