Three Books – EP2 Rowan Coleman

Hello and welcome to three Books with me, Angela Clarke on women's radio station. On today's show, we welcome Rowan Coleman, international best selling author of over 20 novels, including Richard and Judy Book Club selection the Memory Book, and co writer of Mirror Mirror, the debut novel by internationally renowned actor and model Cara Delevingne. Rowan's latest novel, the Summer of Impossible Things, is an epic transatlantic time travel romantic adventure. Rohan, how did you get to time travel? It took me about 30 years. So I was time traveling just very slowly easing in at the beginning. Easing in. I just loved the time travel genre from childhood, actually, and I love the possibilities and stories and the plots and everything that it opens up. So I was finally allowed to write a novel about it. And it's more of there's no time machine. It's more of a sort of a time falling through time in a very astrophysical way. It is very astrophysical. There is a lot of science in it. I was quite surprised, the level of science and how convincing it was. I totally bought into it. There wasn't a kind of a. I don't know, a magic mirror or a port key or something that took you to another place. I was like, no, this is real. This is totally. I'm totally on board with it. I'm glad you say that because my knowledge of astrophysics is about 1%. Is that entire 1% in the book? All of it, yeah. Okay, so the Summer of Impossible Things explores a number of difficult issues with great sensitivity, including suicide. How important to you is it that books don't shy away from the darker aspects of life? I think it's really important, and I've always done that. I've always balanced light and dark in my fiction since my very first novel, which is like 17 years ago or something. Ridiculous. And I think that we as readers like to be emotionally challenged and not so much challenged, but we like to be filled up with feeling when we're reading. I like to be filled up with feeling when I'm reading, whether it's excitement or falling in love or having an opportunity to explain or to explore other people's experiences of life and walking somebody else's shoes. Which is why reading is a great way to sort of develop empathy, I think. And so important when you need filling up with feeling. What's the book that you always return to? The book I always return to is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, who is. I'm slightly obsessed with the Bronte sisters, all three of them. This is no, no secret. And I've loved this since I was 11. I first read it when I was about 11 and I was mad keen on young Jane's story at the horrible, horrible school. And shocked and horrified and gripped and terrified by that part of the story. And then as she grew up and went to work for Mr. Rochester, I was bored rigid. And then read it again as a teenager, fell in love with Mr. Rochester, read it again as an undergraduate, and started to realize that Mr. Rochester perhaps wasn't the perf. Romantic hero. And actually that it has so much more to say about the experience of womanhood. And even in. Even 200 years after it was written, it has so much to say about the experience of being judged on the way that you look on your prospects. So much about passion, so much about the determination to get the best life that you possibly can against all the odds. And I absolutely love it. That determination to get the best life beyond all possible odds makes me think of how in the Summer of Impossible Things, you really explore how far we would go for love, including spending time. So is love the ultimate story driver? I think a universal. The universal use of the word love is the ultimate story driver. Definitely there's a romance in A Summer of Impossible Things, actually possibly my most favorite romantic storyline I've ever written, but it's really about the love, about love between a mother and a daughter. It's about love between two sisters, and it's about how that kind of unconditional love can bring out the very best in humanity. And in the case of the Summer of Impossible Things, it's. It brings out courage and determination to do the right thing for the ones that you love. And for the wider world, the relationships between children, whether they're still young or if they're adults and their mothers and vice versa, kind of repeatedly appears in your books more than once. Is the relationship between child and mother the one, the most defining one that we have? That's difficult for me to make a judgment call on because I actually write a lot about dads, which is unusual because I don't. I haven't had a relationship with my dad for over 20 years. So I think in the fact that I haven't had a relationship with my father means that he's had quite a big influence on my life. But I would say having just completed my next novel, which is very, very much about mothers and daughters, and that is definitely a theme that appears in my fiction again and again. They are our mothers are the people that have the most influence on us. And they teach us so much and drive us Absolutely bonkers. And. And I'm very conscious of my developing and growing relationship with my daughter, who is now turning into a young woman. And. And how important it is to keep that healthy and to keep that flowing and developing. And. And so I think about it a lot, and I think it does drive my stories a lot. Yeah. What's the book that you wish you'd written? I find it kind of hard to put a finger on this because there are so many books that I really, really love. They come out of somebody else's head. And if I'd written it, it would be a different book. So I thought. And I wouldn't want to change the books that I really, really love in any way. So having thought about it really hard, I decided to choose a book that makes that, when I read it, spoke to me unlike any other book in terms of making me think this book is about me. And this book was written by somebody like me. And that's Bridget Jones's Diary. I was lucky enough to read it in proof form in the 90s and when I was a bookseller. That's actually quite cool. I think you're the first person I've ever met who said that. That still got proof copy. Oh, wow. That's probably worth, you know, a few quid, you think? Maybe I'm not giving it away, though. And I worked in a little independent bookshop and laughed my socks off behind the till while I was reading that book and thinking, that's how I feel. That's how I think. That's what I'm like. And it really did feel like the first time that a book had been written for somebody just like me. And I hand sold a copy of that book to every single person that came in through the door. So I'd like to take full responsibility for the success. Absolutely. I think you're responsible for all of it, including the movies and where it all went after all of that selection of Colin Firth Viral Situation. So would you recommend that book to your daughter? So life has changed a little bit since then. And I think. I think, yeah, I think she'd read it and she would find it funny. But the things that Bridget wants to make her life better, to be thin, to have a boyfriend, to have the glamorous job, are not actually the things that I think are going to make a contemporary modern woman happy these days. And that's reflected in the fiction that we write. But do they actually make Bridget happy? Isn't the point that they kind of. Well, I mean, you know, she's happy with her man. But the kind of like the, she never really loses any weight. She never does. No. And that's, that's the awful. I suppose that's the kind of partly the humor and also the pathos. And that's one of the reasons why it strikes such a chord with us is that, you know, often women are told we have to look a certain way, behave a certain way, always smile, always laugh. And we don't always do that and it's impossible to achieve that. So it's, it's, it's incredibly funny because it speaks to us and our experience of life and it's kind of sad as well. So if you had written it going from what you said, what would be different about it? If I had written it, I think it would, I mean, subtle differences, I suppose. I wish I'd thought of it. What a good idea. If I'd written it, I guess it may have been a bit more. It wouldn't have been the same book. It wouldn't have been as relentlessly funny, it would have been more emotional and probably something terrible and dark would have happened in the middle. And stay tuned for more from Rowan after these efforts. 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We have 114 employees, 80% of whom are blind, disabled or have a long term health condition. We're creating real jobs for those people, as I said in East London and in Keswick. The soap company is a luxury ethical brand free from sls, pegs, Triclosan, petrochemicals and other chemical nasties. We're be friendly and we don't test on animals. Most recently we have launched an eco range which includes a rhubarb and geranium scent and a wild nettle and sage scent which was inspired by the British countryside. You can create real social value and real jobs for people living in the UK with a disability or long term health condition. By purchasing our products, one 300 milliliter bottle of our hand wash or hand lotion creates one hour of employment. If you purchase a five litre bottle for a business, this creates around two hours of employment for somebody who is blind, disabled or has a long term health condition. For more information please visit www.thesoapcode.org or for business inquiries please email B2B. That's letter B number two bhesopco.org at distinctively me we're passionate about making clothes that complement any body shape through our Made to Measure tailored pieces. Distinctively Me's smart and elegant clothes are made in our London studio from the highest quality fabrics and will create the perfect outfit for any woman. Our trousers, skirts and jackets are modern yet timeless and can be worn season after season. Visit us@distinctivelyme.com to be amazed at our service and prices. Distinctively me discover the pleasure of Made to Measure welcome back to Three Books on Women's Radio Station, the programme where we discover the three books that have shaped and influenced today's female writers. Today we're talking to Sunday Times bestseller Rowan Coleman, author of Time Travelling the Summer of Impossible Things. Rowan, after you wrote the novel Dearest Rose, you became a lifelong supporter of the domestic abuse charity Refuge, donating all the profits from your novella. A woman walks into a bar to the charity. Does your writing always inspire your life or is it more often the other way around? I think it's a two way street actually, with that particular novel. It was very much driven by the stories that I heard from women who had gone through and managed to escape domestic abuse made me want to do more for the people that had the courage to talk to me and the courage to break away. And I've continued to support Refuge since then. But I think the things that interest me inform my writing and the things I write about inform the things that interest me. So now, after writing We Are All Made of Stars, which is set in a hospice. I do creative writing workshops at a hospice every couple of months now, and I try to do as much sort of literacy help emerging readers and dyslexic people as well. So I am dyslexic. So yeah, it's kind of all. I haven't been able to incorporate time travel into my actual life yet, though. Yet there's always hope for the future or the past. You speak about being dyslexic and I know that you wrote two novellas for the reading agency's adult literacy scheme, Quick Reads, which has recently and very sadly lost its funding. How important is reading to society? I can't emphasise enough how important reading is to society. I said earlier that reading is one of the ways that we develop empathy. It's also one of the ways that people are able to broaden their horizons, to experience other lives, other possessions, possibilities, to Widen their education to be able to speak, to be able to write, to be able to apply for jobs. And as a girl who came from a working class background, for me the library was absolutely my haven and one of the places that I went to when times were difficult as a child and one of the very much one of the reasons that I am a writer now. I'm so sorry to. I can't believe that Quick Reads can't be saved. I'm refusing to believe it can't be saved. For those listeners who don't know what quickreads is, can you just give them a little outline? Yeah, sure. So Quick Reads are very short novels, about 18,000 words long, so novella length. And they are adult content aimed at emerging readers. So if you have a reading age of about 8 or 8 to 12, you'd be able to read a crime thriller, a romantic novel, comedy, all the genres basically written by best selling authors, best selling British authors. And they go to libraries, they go to literacy groups, they go into prisons. I met so many people who have had their lives positively affected by Quick Reads. My favorite one was a grandfather that I met who had, although he'd been in the Navy and also run his own business for 30 years, he hadn't had literacy skills to be able to read his grandchildren bedtime stories. And when he was first able to do that, he said it was the best moment of his life. And that's the kind of impact that they have on people who received Quick Reads. So I'm really hoping that there's somebody out there who's going to sponsor them. It's only £120,000. It's a lot of money, but not to a big corporation. I'm sure somebody can step forward, especially because we are losing the libraries as well so much at the moment. It is very frightening. I think it's very frightening. Yeah. We could be leaving people without words. I think it's a real possibility that children like myself, when I was a kid, I didn't have money to buy books. I didn't have parents who bought me books. I didn't have access to books anywhere other than the library. And there are a host of children like that today who are not getting that kind of support. Rowan, can you tell me the book that made you think differently about women? So I think the book I thought about, chose for this is the Handmaid's Tale. And it's really interesting for me because I first read this book a long time ago as a young woman and I thought, well, this is you know, a scary and interesting dystopia. And then I reread it last year, and I was absolutely terrified. And I think what it taught me was that everything that I had taken for granted as I've been growing and maturing as a woman and believing that progress is inevitable and that you can never lose progress and it's always a forward, moving thing, has been swept away in the last couple of years. And when I read the Handmaid's Tale the second time, I thought, this is terrifyingly too close to the truth and not that far away from happening to myself, to all the women that I know, my daughter's generation and beyond. And it is more important, I think, now than ever, to step up and to band together and to. To fight and to preserve women's rights. Our rights to have equal pay, our rights to do whatever job we want to do, our rights to have dominion over our own bodies, all of these rights are being eroded around the world as we speak. And in some places, actually, they've never even been in place. So I'm a feminist. I'm a proud feminist. And when people say to me, well, why are you a feminist? You don't need to be a feminist anymore, I say, listen, as long as children are being forced into marriage around the world, or being denied an education, or a woman isn't allowed to decide what she does with her own body, then I'm a feminist. When that doesn't happen, talk to me then. Do you think when you first read it, it was the naivety of youth, and do you think that made you think that it was so dystopian, so kind of unrealistic, so not close to reality at all? And do you think that Margaret Atwood thought that when she wrote it, or do you think that she's kind of always known there's a documentary aspect to it? I think when I was. When I first read it, I was very, actually conditioned in the way that we have all been conditioned very subtly, for many generations to think it's not that bad, Life is equal. Yes, I get harassed on the tube, Yes, I get told to smile, all this stuff, but I'm fine. I'm good. And then over the last few years, I have started to realise that that actually is not okay, and I'm not fine and things are not good, and there's much, much more work to do. I think Margaret Atwood is incredibly insightful, and I definitely think that she was writing this with the knowledge that this was a threat that could very much rear its head in our in western society as it does actually in many other societies around cultures around the world. On a different Tack completely, the 1970s movie Saturday Night Fever features in the Summer of Impossible Things. How important is pop culture to you and society as a whole? I love pop culture. I love it. I'm a huge fan of many, many things including Saturday Night Fever. And I love the way that that movie that nobody really thought was going to do anything kind of blew up. Disco. Disco was on its last legs and then either came out and it had this massive resurgence and suddenly turned this little blue collar part of Brooklyn into the center of the disco universe for a little while. And I love that. I love Star Wars, I love Kylo Ren especially, he's my favourite. I'm a fannable. I love Hannibal, I just love tv, I love plays. I'm a big fan of all the things and I love and I'm a big fan of fans. I love fans. I love geek people. One of my happiest days last year was going to Comic Con and seeing all the people cosplaying and talking to them and just people who love stuff. I love people who love stuff. Thank you Rowan the Summer of Impossible Things by Rowan Coleman is published by EBRI and is out in paperback from the 3rd of May. If you have any questions for three books, email us on presentersmensradiostation.com or tweet us. Womensradio. That's Women's Radio Stn. You've been listening to three books on women's Radio Station with me, Angela Clark. If you'd like to listen again or catch up on our previous programs, you can head to the presenters page on womensradiostation.com thanks for listening. Women's Radio Station will give a voice to your brand. Advertise your product, services or goods on air with a package tailored to suit you. For more information, visit womensradiostation.com hi, I'm Sarah Austin and I'm the founder of the really Helpful Club, an online and offline community that helps, supports and connects thousands of women in our personal and business lives. We are buzzing. Join us to share and discover your best ideas. Come to our events to meet other members and learn something. New book now for our London workshop on 10 May helping you prepare for and manage the menopause. Membership is free. Join now by visiting reallyhelpfulclub.com Please also find us on thewomensradiostation.com Hollywood Babes is a unique ladies wear boutique situated in Thought Bay Broadway in South Ben On Sea. We carefully select all our lines and offer you only the very best in women's clothing. Here at Hollywood Babes, we ensure you look and feel the part. Whether it is for a special occasion or loungewear, we can help you find that special something to make you feel a million dollars. So pop on down to Hollywood Babes, Thorpe, Broadway, Essex and get ready to be styled. Adam and Alice London are a British luxury fashion label offering timeless collections for bold and beautiful women at affordable prices. Enter the giveaway lucky draw for a chance to win a fabulous silk dress made from pure silk crepe, fully lined with digital printed silk and handcrafted details. Worth 475 pound. Available in two colours, Mazarin Blue and pastel. See the dress and enter our competition on the giveaway page on womensradiostation.com Ready for a challenge? Then take on the pink ribbon walk for breast cancer care. Coming to Oxfordshire and Essex this summer, we've got everything covered from snacks along the route to a massage and medal when you cross the finish line. And while we support you with every step, you'll be doing something special to support the thousands of people going through one of the toughest challenges they'll ever face. Breast cancer Visit Breast Cancer Women's radio station is creating a global network for the empowerment of women and we want you to be involved. Join us on Instagram and Twitter womensradiostn or Facebook Women's radio station to keep up to date. Keep up to date with all our exciting news. The Soap Co is a social enterprise manufacturing soap in East London and in Keswick in the Lake district. We have 114 employees, 80% of whom are blind, disabled or have a long term health condition. We're creating real jobs for those people, as I said in East London and in Keswick. The soap company is a luxury ethical brand free from SLS pegs, triclosan, petrochemicals and other chemical nasties. We're bee friendly and we don't test on animals. Most recently we have launched an Eco range which includes a rhubarb and geranium scent and a wild nettle and sage scent which was inspired by the British countryside. You can create real social value and real jobs for people living in the UK with a disability or a long term health condition by purchasing our products. One 300 milliliter bottle of our hand wash or hand lotion creates one hour of employment. If you purchase a five litre bottle for a business, this creates around two hours of employment. For somebody who is blind, disabled or has a long term health condition. For more information please visit www.thesoapcode.org or for business inquiries please email B2B that's letter B number 2 bhesopco.org hi, my name is Gary Parker and my company is called CNT Associates. We provide fundraising, business support and training services for small businesses, charities and non profit making organizations. We've raised over £20 million since 2003 and we'd like to help you. Visit us NT Associates.com or on Twitter NT Associates.