Lisa Jewell
People with big ideas worry. They lie awake at night and fret as they try to climb up the social or financial ladder. They probably feel proud of themselves for what they've achieved, but I'm proud of the fact that I've done very little - and hence have little to worry about - and I've still got somewhere.
I look about my house and see there are lots of lovely things in it, but I constantly buy more.
My father, Anthony, was a textile agent who sold fabric in the West End and was away a lot. He was very glamorous. When he first met my mum, he swept her off into this big, social world.
My mother had breast cancer when she was 39.
If you feel that your father was lacking as a husband, it affects your own choice of man.
Getting married young was the worst experience of my life. It was horrible - really horrible.
If you have a calling, you need to let it find you.
My father was a self-employed textile agent, and the shop below his office was an art gallery.
People say 'chick lit,' and what they mean is 'crap.' And so even though you might sell 100,000 copies of a book, you're never going to win a prize. These are books that people don't just read, they devour them - they stay up into the early hours because they want to devour them.
I don't think my first book was chick lit.
The older I get, the more I love psychological thrillers.
Everyone thinks they've got a book inside them.
For a very long time, I thought everyone I met through the process of getting an agent and a publishing deal had made a mistake. When they agreed to pay me for the book, I thought they would ask me for the money back.
My first husband dragged me out of London and made me live in the suburbs in Surrey - not where you want to be when you're 23.
I write in cafes, never at home. I cannot focus at home, am forever getting off my chair to do other things. In a cafe, I have to sit still, or I'll look a bit unhinged.
For me, the optimum circumstances for writing a book are those of stultifying routine.
I take the six weeks of the school summer holidays off because I'm pretty sure I'm not going to look back on my life one day and say, 'Damn, I wish I hadn't spent so much time with my children.'
I don't really get into a writing routine until March or April, when I'll write a few hundred words a day, often in a cafe in the morning after the school run.
If you can start and finish a book, then you're already a million miles ahead of all those people who talk about wanting to write a book.
Agents and publishers are always looking for something 'different,' a fresh viewpoint and a new voice, not just re-hashed versions of stuff that's gone before.
Writing a book is not easy.
Every brilliant book I read is an influence and an inspiration. As is every brilliant movie I watch and every brilliant box set.
I must always, always have a box of Extra chewing gum in my bag because I have developed a terrible cheek-chewing compulsion. It's not only uncomfortable, but I look really weird when I'm doing it, and chewing gum is the only way I can stop myself.
When I travel, I can leave everything at home apart from books. I curate my holiday reading rigorously and would be devastated if I found I'd left one at home.
When I was a little girl, I was a real, drippy bookworm. But when I went into fashion, I stopped reading.
It wasn't until I was 23 and got married to a guy who was really bookish that I got completely hooked on reading and writing again. He had so many paperbacks, I didn't have to buy a book for four and a half years.
I knew I wasn't the sort of person who could do a full-time job and write in the evening and at weekends.
Sometimes you need to be shaken out of a situation.
Whenever I watch any kind of competition, my immediate reaction when they call out the name of the winner is to look at the loser.
I changed my mind about being a famous pop star when I realised that it meant I'd never be able to get on the Tube again.
A strange side effect of sudden success is the sense that if you can succeed in one field, then it might well be worth trying to succeed in another.
You feel undervalued when you write the kind of fiction I write.
I was made redundant from a job as a PA in a shirt-making company in 1996. I was devastated. I had been there for three years, and it was a job I really liked.
Nick Hornby's a genius.
I tried to write about my first marriage in a fictional version but got two pages into it and realised it was too personal. Then I came up with an old-fashioned love triangle, which became the plot for 'Ralph's Party.'
My mother's childhood was complex, disjointed, and disturbing. As children, we would gather round and ask her to tell us again and again The Story of Her Childhood. It was Grimmsian, Andersenesque: a classic fairy tale replete with goodies and baddies.
My mother was born on February 8, 1944, in Lucknow, India. Her father, Albert, was half-Indian and half-Portuguese.
My mother died in 2005. She was 61 years old.
I am the oldest of three girls and the only one not named after one of my father's ex-girlfriends.
'Ralph's Party' was supposed to be a psychological thriller, but I fell in love with all my characters and wanted only the best for them.
I am a terrible, terrible typist. I could not have been a writer in the age of typewriters.
Ever since 'Single White Female,' the 1990 novel which was turned into a supremely scary film, the idea of a seemingly normal woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants has become an abiding literary trope.
There's something uniquely unsettling about the unhinged woman on a single-minded mission. Especially when she's the last person you ever imagined to harbour a dark and seething soul.
No man ever fell in love with me for the way I fill out a Lycra dress.
I never had one of those glorious young bodies that make older men and women weep. So I don't tend to look back with nostalgia or yearn for what I've lost. Because it was never all that.
Publishers have published women's fiction into a corner, and now we are all trying to punch our way out of it. We just have to write the best books we possibly can and hope that, once the pink covers and Bridget Jones have faded from memory, we might finally be allowed just to be called writers.
If one of my romantic-comedy colleagues had written and directed 'Love Actually,' they would have been torn limb from limb. I thought it was awful, contrived, dreadful. I could see every twist and turn. I thought it was despicable. It was the writing that got me.
When we were kids, we couldn't wait to have our own rooms, not to have to share anymore. And that is what I love about having my own bedroom. It is mine. My sleep is mine. Both pillows are mine. If I wake up, it is me who has woken me up... It makes me feel like a grown-up. I love it.
My husband loves having his own room.
My parents' marriage was, on an aesthetic level, very pleasing to behold.