Interview with Jojo Moyes and giveaway for "One Plus One"

Photo by Charlotte Murphy

In honor of Jojo Moyes' latest novel, One Plus One, publishing on July 1st, Viking/Penguin did an interview with the author. We're sharing some of it here, along with a giveaway of TWO copies for some lucky readers in the US and/or Canada!

Synopsis:
Suppose your life sucks. A lot. Your husband has done a vanishing act, your teenage stepson is being bullied, and your math whiz daughter has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that you can't afford to pay for. That's Jess's life in a nutshell--until an unexpected knight in shining armor offers to rescue them. Only Jess's knight turns out to be Geeky Ed, the obnoxious tech millionaire whose vacation home she happens to clean. But Ed has big problems of his own, and driving the dysfunctional family to the Math Olympiad feels like his first unselfish act in ages . . . maybe ever.

Your characters are fun and quirky and so real. Tell us a little about where your ideas for your characters and their stories come from.

Thank you! Most of my books are inspired by different snippets of things, whether they be news stories or things people have told me. In the case of ONE PLUS ONE I’d wanted to write a road trip for ages—and then when I started thinking about the differences between today’s haves and have-nots, it suddenly seemed like the perfect thing to put some very different people together. Anyone who has sat next to a stranger on a long haul flight knows that there’s no better way to really find out who someone really is than to be shoved together in close confines travelling for any length of time.

ONE PLUS ONE is a novel in a contemporary setting, just like Me Before You and some of your other novels are historical, such as The Girl You Left Behind. Do you prefer writing one over the other? How do you decide where and when to set your books?

I often write one in reaction to the last. So The Girl You Left Behind was a huge, sprawling romantic epic that crossed a century and took all sorts of historical research. After that I just wanted to write a tight little emotional comedy set in the modern day with very little research in it.  It’s entirely possible that in a book or two I’ll be back to doing something on an epic scale again.

Like Me Before You, ONE PLUS ONE has a love story between two people of very different socioeconomic backgrounds. What draws you to explore that disparity?

Well, Me Before You was basically about class and aspiration. Lou came from a background where you were encouraged to have little of either. ONE PLUS ONE, on the other hand, is simply about money. I’ve been watching the difference between rich and poor in society grow ever wider, and with ONE PLUS ONE I guess I wanted to ask: what happens if you have the aspiration, or the talent, but simply don’t have enough resources to be able to climb up to the next rung of the ladder? We’re always being told you can have anything if you work hard enough. Well what if the deck of cards is really stacked against you? Does that truism still stand?

ONE PLUS ONE has such a cinematic feel, it would translate really well to film. You wrote the screenplay for Me Before You. Did that experience change the way you write novels? Do you imagine how they would work as a movie as you write?

It certainly made me realize how much slack we leave in them! I have always written ‘visually’—i.e. I have to play a scene out in my head, almost as if I’m acting it, before I write it, to see if it works. I don’t think the way I write books has changed, as I still do the same thing, but I do perhaps make every scene work a bit harder—asking myself: does it move the story forward? Does it tell us something about the character?

There are some steamy scenes in ONE PLUS ONE! How do you approach writing sex (or near) scenes?

Well, if my editor had got her way, they would have been a fair bit steamier. I do struggle with sex scenes, mostly because of the language. Either you employ biologically accurate terms, which tend to pull the reader up short, and can sound a little startling, or you go with awful euphemisms that make your toes curl. I’m getting a little braver with every book—but it’s hard when you live in a small village. Everyone assumes that you base the scenes on your own life… weirdly. they never do that with anything else I write about.

What do you hope readers will take away from ONE PLUS ONE?

Firstly, as with all my books, I hope it just gives them a few hours’ escape to somewhere they hadn’t expected to go—that’s certainly what I want from a book. I hope very much it makes them feel something, whether it’s laughter or tears. On a wider note, perhaps they might not judge or dismiss those around them quite so swiftly—I heard a really good saying the other day, along the lines of “be kind, for everyone is battling something you don’t know about.” And I suppose I’d like my books to have a similar message. Although saying my books should have a message makes me sound unbelievably pompous. So maybe just a good read….

Thanks to Viking/Penguin for sharing their interview and the book with our readers.

How to win: Use Rafflecopter to enter the giveaway. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.


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US/Canada only. Giveaway ends June 29th at midnight EST.