John Purcell
In this episode, John Purcell takes us through the process behind writing his novel The Lessons.
We had one of those wonderful long meandering chats, not just about John’s novel, but about lots of other books. We discovered a mutual love for EM Forster’s A Room with a View and why it’s such a perfect novel. And John shared the fascinating method he used to learn from the classics.
Of course we also talked about the creation of his novel The Lessons - how he wrote the 4 first person narratives, how he overcame a lifelong aversion to spreadsheets to help structure the novel and the importance of talking to yourself, preferably while wandering over the Kent downs or your locale of choice. John also shared the thrills and spills of the editing process for this novel - in a word, brutal - as well as differentiating between the character voices and how to end a chapter.
ABOUT THE LESSONS
What if your first love was your one and only chance of happiness?
1961
When teens Daisy and Harry meet, it feels so right they promise to love each other forever, but everything is stacked against them: class, education, expectations. After Daisy is sent by her parents to live with her glamorous, bohemian Aunt Jane, a novelist working on her second book, she is confronted by adult truths and suffers a loss of innocence that flings her far from the one good thing in her life, Harry.
1983
Jane Curtis, now a famous novelist, is at a prestigious book event in New York, being interviewed about the overlap between her life and her work, including one of her novels about the traumatic coming of age of a young woman. But she evades the interviewer’s probing questions. What is she trying to hide?
An intriguing, striking and powerful novel, The Lessons tells a compelling story about literature, love and betrayal, about how far writers will go in plundering their lives for their art, and about how much we’re prepared to forgive – if we forgive.
ABOUT JOHN PURCELL
While still in his twenties, he opened a second-hand bookshop in Sydney – imaginatively called 'John's Bookshop' – in which he sat for ten years reading, ranting and writing. Since then he has written (under a pseudonym) a series of successful novels and, as part of his previous role as Director of Books at Booktopia, interviewed hundreds of writers about their work. John’s 2018 novel, The Girl on the Page was a bestseller, and a film adaptation is in the works. He now lives in the English countryside with his wife, three dogs, four cats and his overlarge book collection.
Website: https://www.johnpurcellauthor.com/
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WHERE TO LISTEN
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