Jess Riley's debut, Driving Sideways, is getting raves everywhere - not least from Jen Lancaster and, on the book's cover, Marian Keyes! Jess answers our questions below.
Please describe your latest book in 15 words or fewer:
A kidney transplant gives a young woman the courage to take a life-changing cross-country roadtrip.
Where do you like to write your books (in bed, a coffee shop, an office)?
I write at home, tucked into a cluttered office near my living room. But I may break down and start writing in a coffee shop soon, if only to get me showered and out of the house when I’m deep into a project.
Your favourite chick-lit book?
I love Children of God Go Bowling by Shannon Olson—Shannon is a fellow Midwesterner, and such a talented, funny writer. If I lived in her neighborhood, I might stalk her.
Just kidding, Shannon.
Your favourite female heroine (if different from above!), and why?
I love quirky and edgy with a little smart, sick humor tossed in for flavor, so I’m going to go with Jennifer Belle’s Rebekah Kettle from Little Stalker.
What tips would you give to any of our readers who want to become writers?
Write daily, read daily, always work to improve your craft, support and befriend other authors, and write for yourself first. If you write, you are a writer whether or not you become published. Being published, I’m learning, is a whole different animal altogether.
What are you reading at the moment?
My stack of books-to-read is fairly formidable. Some that I can’t wait to get back into include Julie Buxbaum’s The Opposite of Love, Jen Lancaster’s Such a Pretty Fat, and Emily Giffin’s Love the One You’re With. I just finished Suzanne Finnamore’s Split: A Memoir of Divorce and loved it so much I immediately wanted to reread it.
What are you working on now? (If you can give us a hint!)
My current novel-in-progress is a story set in a medium-security men’s prison, told through the points of view of two people who work there: a social worker in a wheelchair and the teacher he falls for. Essentially, it examines how you rebuild your life after one of the worst kinds of romantic betrayals imaginable, with plenty of the same warped humor that found its way into Driving Sideways. I worked as a teaching assistant in a prison in college, and my parents actually ‘met’ while both working in the same prison. So, you could say it’s the family business. (Although now my Dad is an English professor.)
Do you have a theme song?
You know, I never really thought about it. So I’m going to go with, “Carry on my Wayward Son” by Kansas, because I love those cheesy, larger-than-life power ballads from the seventies.
What question have you never been asked in an interview, but think you should have been? (Tell us the question and answer it too, if you like!)
This is tough! But I like this one: “Is being published anything like you thought it would be?”
And that answer is this: Not at all! Nothing, nothing, nothing at all like my pre-pub perception. The worst part is that initial feeling of vulnerability (the ‘naked in a grocery store’ feeling), just after the book is released, when you know people you’ve never met are reading it. When you know your grandmother is reading the line about the guy whose boy part is the size and shape of a baby carrot, and then you read something beautiful and amazing from another author and think, OhmygodI’llneverbethisgoodwhydoIevenbother. This is the time when you kind of want to hide in a large box and never write again. But then you do write again, because you are addicted to it. And gradually the clouds part and you feel great: Hey, you have a book out! You never thought you’d EVER get to this point! And you imagine Eddie Murphy saying to you, “Have a Coke and a smile and shut the f—up!”
The best part is getting emails from those people you’ve never met, in
which they tell you (hopefully) how much they enjoyed it, how it
reflected their lives or affected them. I only recently started
emailing authors I love to tell them how much I adore their work, and I
don’t know why it took me so long.
Thanks, Jess!
