] Book talk: Graham Palmer chats to Jo Browning Wroe [
“You probably know that I grew up in a Crematorium.”
It’s not what you expect to hear when you first meet someone, but Jo Browning Wroe is not one to shy away from such things. Her first novel, A Terrible Kindness, pivots on the dreadful tragedy of Aberfan and became the runaway success of 2022.
Meeting me in Cambridge University Library’s 1930s tearoom, the best-selling author shares how she got into writing, the importance of stamina and her love of music.
The wrong place
Jo trained as a teacher at Cambridge but soon realised the classroom was not for her.
“I couldn’t exist in that kind of uniformity. I did it for a year and then got a job in a really lovely small independent educational publishing company. That first Friday my boss said, ‘Your job is to read the Times Ed from cover to cover to see if there’s anyone we should be talking to.’ I thought I’d just died and gone to heaven! I didn’t have to be in front of a class of children every day!”
“I’ve never had an impulse to write children’s fiction. That’s why I wrote educational books, it was my arena and I had a really nice collaboration with a friend who’s a child psychotherapist. My eye was always on fiction though.”
“Every year we went to the London Book Fair. We were in one hall and the other hall was fiction. Honestly, everything in me felt like I was in the wrong place. I’ve always wanted to write novels.”
The right place
By 2020 Jo had enrolled with the University of East Anglia on their part-time Creative Writing MA course. To her, it seemed the next logical step.
“So many brilliant writers have never been near a course, but if you’re in the privileged position to be able to do it, what could be better than being with a group of talented people who are as committed as you are? I did it over two years. It was great for me.”
“At least, you know someone who knows about these things has thought you’re good enough to be there. I think that’s really important. I read an article by Rose Tremaine. She said, ‘It’s a head job being an aspiring writer’. You never know if you’re doing something original, but you have to believe in yourself and keep going.”
“At that point it was all about the workshop. There were no sessions on character or point of view. None. The actual teaching content was all about the workshop. You absolutely relied on the people in the group with you.”
“It’s all about developing thick skins”.
“Before a book’s published, it’s about rejections, and once it’s been published, it’s about people. And I do really sense now that there’s no book that everyone will love. It just doesn’t happen. But if enough people like it, then that’s great.”
So does Jo think everyone has a book in them?
“No, I don’t! Well…maybe.”
“I’m a big believer in empowering people to write well. There is a craft to it that you can teach.”
“But I think it’s stamina. I don’t think everyone has that. A novel doesn’t happen willy-nilly. You have to be ridiculously committed to it. Some people just can’t take criticism on board. You need to take it on and wrestle with it. Some people aren’t very good with that.”
“I also have friends who write poetry and then have tried a novel and said, ‘I’m not interested in that prolonged building a cathedral all on my own!’ It is such a big, arduous task.”
How long did A Terrible Kindness take to write?
“Including the research and the writing and rewriting, probably about six years. Which isn’t too bad.”
What part of the writing process does she most enjoy?
“Late editing, I think…and the very beginning, when you’ve got the idea. It’s this great big beautiful shiny possibility.”
“When you start the actual writing, you think, ‘Oh! This isn’t going to be as great as I imagined, but I’ll find my way through.’ Certainly, with A Terrible Kindness it was when it all snapped into place. I was an editor for years, that’s the thing. Some people really don’t like the editor, but I always have.”
“Yes, the very beginning and the very the end…the great big bit in the middle is just hard work!”
The reader of A Terrible Kindness is taken on an emotional rollercoaster. I wondered if Jo had stumbled on the structure and the characters or mapped it all out before she started writing?
“Certainly not stumbled on. The thing was worked on and worked on…the structure was the problematic part of it. The characters felt very real to me very early on. I knew what I was doing with them. I knew how they were, but I didn’t know how to tell it.”
“Initially there was way more jumping around: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.”
“Always at the heart was the slight mystery of what had happened at William’s performance to cause the rift between him and his Mum. I love to read a book that’s well written but if it’s also got a page-turning element….what more could you want really? So, I always wanted to hold that secret.”
After the manuscript’s opening was shortlisted for the Bridport Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award, Jo submitted it to The Literary Consultancy for their opinion on how to take it further.
“Their analysis was that it was nearly ready to go, so they sent it out to agents. I thought that was the golden ticket. I thought it was done. But it took about a year and a half, and none of them wanted it. The feedback every time was, ‘Love the writing, love the subject matter, but the structure is too jumpy.’”
“It was disappointing… but it was good to take on board. I then spent 6 months really looking at it hard. A very wise editor-friend said, ‘Start at the dinner dance, ’cause that’s where it all started for William, go right through until he’s done his bit at Aberfan and then decide how you want to end it all.’”
“That was really helpful. As I was doing that, I knew it was snapping into place, and so much better than it was before.”
“It’s so nice now when people say the structure works…that was blood sweat and tears!”
Did the glowing reviews and the book’s commercial success surprise her at all?
“Yes and no. The further I get from it, the more surprised I am.”
“At the time, it took me months to get over that buzz of excitement and disbelief. But then Faber are so good. They committed to promoting it as their ‘super lead’*. You know I was on Front Row, I had four pages in the Guardian. It just felt like, ‘This is normal’. It just kept happening.”
“It wasn’t until that had all died down that I suddenly thought. “Oh my gosh, that was amazing!”
“I did get one not very nice review in the Guardian which was devastating. Someone said to me at the time, ‘This is really good for you. If all that happened was just amazing, by the time the second book comes out you are absolutely up for a fall!’”
“Hopefully, with the next book I might be prepared to deal with that!”
(*To help understand the significance of this, it should be noted that at one time Harry Potter was Scholastic’s ‘super lead’ in the USA.)
Jo weaves two very different pieces of music seamlessly through A Terrible Kindness: Joseph Parry’s Myvanwy and Allegri’s C17th setting of the Miserere. The first was gifted to her by an episode of Radio 4’s Soul Music. In that programme one of those who had dug the dead children out at Aberfan described how emotive Myvanwy had become for him. For Jo, the Miserere also has deep resonance.
“My father played it to me when I was about eight. We didn’t have lots of classical music in our house, it was more pop music, but that piece is so obviously beautiful, you don’t need to have any background or understanding…it’s just beautiful. He said, ‘That voice is a boy your age.’ It has always enthralled me.”
Living in Cambridge gives Jo many an opportunity to scratch that itch. “I love going to evensong…you walk in and there are these world class singers…they’re world class but some of them are seven years old! It’s just the most extraordinary sound.”
What piece of music would she liked to have written herself?
“There are certain songs like REM’s Everybody Hurts. The sort of song of that expands the idea of innate humanity. I do love great choral music, but I could never write it! I should say, I don’t know as much about music as people might think I do!”
“My husband and I met at college when U2 were just starting out and over the years we’ve been to every single U2 tour. I do love anthom-y, sort of rousing, resistancy music.”
There is a not-so hidden underclass in Cambridge. What made her want to include Colin and the homeless choir in A Terrible Kindness?
“I think E L Doctorow said ‘90% of novel writing’s problem solving’. In terms of the logistics of the book – I needed to get William back into music.”
“My church had run a choir for people who were very vulnerable. I’d gone along to some of those rehearsals and it was obvious to me that music cut across all that stuff. It was a great place to start, a great way to rehumanise William. Walking through Cambridge you are very conscious of homelessness…it’s very much part of the city.”
The myth of the solitary writer
“It’s interesting, as I’ve got a bit older, I have come to terms with the fact that I do like the solitude. I do love being on my own for hours on end writing, but I absolutely believe in community. To be in a choir regularly and do other activities regularly is really important for my humanity.”
The writing day
“When I’m hard at work, it’ll be 6 till 8 in the morning. You come empty, you haven’t done anything, you haven’t had any meeting or phonecalls. You just do it. So, 6 till 8. Then – most mornings – I’ll meet a different friend for coffee…one on one, just chat. Then a bit of admin stuff. Then, in the afternoon I edit what I’ve done in the morning. That’s my ideal. Two big chunks, about 5 hours. This, I learnt from Zade Smith donkeys years ago. You reread what you’ve done the day before, it gets you back in the flow.”
“Things change…it might not be how it always works for me. I don’t need to be in a particular place. I can do it anywhere. A café or at home, it doesn’t matter.”
Have you found the success of A Terrible Kindness intimidating or useful as you sit down to write your new book?
“Both. It can be a terrible pressure because you’ve had years to write your first book.”
“The people I admire so much are the people who just keep doing it again and again: Rose Tremain, Elizabeth Strout. How do you keep doing brilliant things?”
“I was 59 when it was published, so I have a sense of the shortness of time. I’d love to have more than one novel to my name, three or four would be nice but you can’t rush it. What matters to me is the quality of what I do put out and not when.”
So, three years on Jo’s readers will have to remain patient. Cathedrals aren’t built in a day. If they were, they wouldn’t be worth visiting.
If you’d like to find out more about Jo’s bestseller, A Terrible Kindness, you can read my piece about the book on the East Anglia Bylines website.