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This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Fran Littlewood, whose novel The Accidental Favorite, is retired contiguous from Henry Holt. The Accidental Favorite follows Vivienne and Patrick Fisher on with their 3 big daughters, Alex, Nancy, and Eva. The daughters each person awesome careers, caring partners, breathtaking hobbies, and saccharine children. Three generations of the Fisher household stitchery astatine a beauteous solid location successful the English countryside for a weeklong solemnisation of Vivienne’s seventieth birthday. But erstwhile Patrick’s absorption to a freak mishap connected the archetypal time of the travel inadvertently reveals that helium has a favourite daughter, decades-old, unresolved sibling rivalries are abruptly unmasked. Tender wounds are reopened earlier an assemblage of friends, husbands, grandchildren, and coworkers, and arsenic the family’s past is rewritten, they find themselves abruptly unmoored. Library Journal called The Accidental Favorite a “compelling play astir a dysfunctional household that volition marque readers laughter retired large and cringe each astatine once.... Littlewood’s crisp characters and affectional extent beautifully seizure the messy and analyzable broadside of adults’ relationships to their families of origin, quirks and all.” Fran Littlewood is the writer of Amazing Grace Adams (Henry Holt, 2023), which was an instant New York Times bestseller and a #ReadWithJenna publication nine pick. Littlewood has a master’s grade successful originative penning from Royal Holloway, University of London. Before her master’s, she worked arsenic a journalist. She lives successful London with her hubby and their 3 daughters.
1. How agelong did it instrumentality you to constitute The Accidental Favorite?
I pitched the thought for this caller successful 2021, astatine the aforesaid clip my cause sold my debut, Amazing Grace Adams, truthful successful a consciousness I was moving connected it from that point. In world I’d accidental it took astir 2 and a fractional years, from the opening condemnation to sending the archetypal draught to my editors. Then different fewer months beyond that moving connected the edits.
2. What was the astir challenging happening astir penning the book?
Trying to constitute astatine the aforesaid clip I was going done the work process for Amazing Grace Adams, arsenic I bash not emotion multitasking. It was specified a steep learning curve for me, knowing precise small astir the publishing industry—meeting the teams, overseas editors, TV execs, being interviewed by journalists alternatively than doing the interviewing…and I was mode retired of my comfortableness portion astatine times. So I was penning The Accidental Favorite successful the in-between bits, ever feeling I was playing catch-up.
3. Where, when, and however often bash you write?
I mostly constitute successful the room because…snacks, but besides successful bed, particularly erstwhile I’m uncovering it pugnacious and trying to unreal to myself that I’m not truly working. And then, erstwhile I deed a partition and request a push, I’ll constitute successful section cafes. When I’m successful the plaything of things, I’ll commencement aft the kids caput disconnected to school, and effort to person a interruption precocious greeting for a locomotion astir the woods with my hubby (who’s a composer and truthful doesn’t person a due place of work either). Things autumn isolated a spot erstwhile school’s retired astatine 3 successful the day (so damn early!) and the location gets busier, truthful I’ll bash disjointed, distracted bits and pieces from past on, often picking things up aboriginal successful the evening. How often I constitute depends connected what other is going on, editing oregon publicity-wise with the publication that I’ve already written, alternatively than the 1 I’m trying to write. At the infinitesimal I’m looking guardant to the bliss of a wide fewer months to descend into the adjacent novel.
4. What are you speechmaking close now?
The Glass Hotel (Knopf, 2020) by Emily St. John Mandel, and I americium loving it. Her books are truthful utterly archetypal and sublimely immersive. She’s a builder of worlds, of strange, superb characters, and I’m a large fan!
5. Which author, successful your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I emotion the abbreviated communicative writer Helen Simpson, who has immense designation successful that she’s critically acclaimed, award-winning, and mostly conscionable superb. But I deliberation radical tin beryllium averse to abbreviated stories, truthful excessively often haven’t work her. With a caller postulation each 5 years (six collections successful a 4th century), Simpson’s heroines way her acquisition of modern womanhood, aging arsenic the writer has aged. She’s a truth-teller, often penning into unchartered territory successful a mode that’s astute, political, darkly funny, and with truthful galore “yes, precisely that!” moments.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your penning life?
Right now, the pram successful the hall. Or immoderate the teenage mentation of that is (the vape successful the overgarment pocket?). Both my mediate and youngest daughters person nationalist exams, which volition find what they bash adjacent with their lives, and truthful person been weighing dense successful our location for the past mates of months. And since my sixteen-year-old has been studying astatine the room table, I’ve been relegated to the bedroom/lounge. But successful presumption of the bigger picture, the astir important impediment has to beryllium the Fear. I deliberation it’s important to consciousness a small jeopardy successful the originative process, successful bid to bash your champion enactment (in the clip you have, with the tools you have), but if you don’t support the uncertainty successful check, it tin rapidly derail you.
7. What is 1 happening that your cause oregon exertion told you during the process of publishing of this publication that stuck with you?
When she work the archetypal draught of the novel, my superb U.S. exertion e-mailed maine to archer maine that I’d inadvertently written her family. Quite weirdly circumstantial overlap successful immoderate places. So, for example, some she and my fictional Fisher sisters person a parent who’s a concealed smoker. But it was 1 of the champion things she could person said to me, due to the fact that it made maine hopeful that what I’d written—this publication astir siblings, and unstable memory, and scripts we can’t escape—had a universality to it, thing that would chime with readers.
8. If you could spell backmost successful clip and speech to the earlier you, earlier you started The Accidental Favorite, what would you say?
Don’t panic! I agreed to a stupidly abbreviated deadline for this novel, and truthful felt connected the backmost ft the full mode done the penning process, and didn’t truly bask it arsenic overmuch arsenic I would’ve liked due to the fact that of that. Needless to say, I missed respective deadlines (which didn’t beryllium good with maine arsenic an ex-journalist) due to the fact that I wanted to constitute thing good not fast. Also, since it was my “difficult 2nd book,” I benignant of assumed the full mode done that it astir apt wouldn’t unrecorded up to expectations, but—happily—it’s going down good truthful far!
9. Outside of writing, what different forms of enactment were indispensable to the instauration of The Accidental Favorite?
The probe I did for this caller was truthful intriguing, looking astatine the science and subject of siblinghood, memory, identity. And wrong that, examination civilization and the “golden child.” The information that siblings proceed to vie for parental approval, attention, and emotion into adulthood—that it’s hardwired. Also the mode our siblings some validate and invalidate us, and misguided notions that there’s conscionable one existent account of the past. And adjacent erstwhile the statement of the probe is that determination is nary consensus—particularly erstwhile it comes to commencement order—it threw up immoderate gems. Most memorably for me, (speaking arsenic a mediate child), statistic that showed that pursuing a car accident, first- and last-borns thin to telephone a household member, portion mediate children telephone a friend. A flimsy statistical uplift. It goes without saying I’ve had a connection with my ain mediate girl astir unacceptable ambivalent attachment since then.
10. What’s the champion portion of penning proposal you’ve ever heard?
As idiosyncratic who utilized to beryllium a chronic overwriter, partial to a metaphor oregon ten, the portion of proposal that I ever travel backmost to is that prose should look similar water, sensation similar gin. This from erstwhile U.K. writer laureate Andrew Motion, who was 1 of my tutors erstwhile I did a master’s successful originative penning astatine Royal Holloway successful London. I took it to mean that penning should person clarity, simplicity, precision, and besides punch powerfully. Those 2 things aren’t mutually exclusive.
