Jill Mansell - May 2011

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Hello again!

Well, it's May already and the paperback edition of To the Moon and Back is about to be published. I really hope people will like it – thrillingly, this book has had the best reviews of any of my books and I'm even starting to like it myself now!

A few weeks back I was invited to write a guest blog for a fantastic American-based website called The Lipstick Chronicles, which I really recommend. It's here: http://thelipstickchronicles.typepad.com/. Amazingly, I managed to write a guest post that was interesting and captured the imagination of many readers. This is the link to that post and the replies: http://thelipstickchronicles.typepad.com/the_lipstick_chronicles/2011/04/from-guest-blogger-jill-mansell.html. I'm also going to repeat my own words here for you to read and think about:

Hello!

Question for you – do you like yourself? If it could happen, would you like to be your own best friend? I think the answer has to be yes, because you'd enjoy each other's company, love doing exactly the same things ALL the time: enjoy the same TV shows, visit the same shops, read the same books. Perfect, really. (Yes, I know. These are the kinds of things I think about when I can't sleep at night.)

Then I started to wonder if I would be as happy if I had to be best friends with a younger version of myself. And that was when I realised how very much I'd changed over the years. It had never occurred to me before, but I'm different now – at 53 – in so many ways.

I used to be passionate about clothes and wore different outfits every day. I adored high-heeled shoes. Now I wear pretty much the same thing all the time – long bias-cut skirts and flowing tops and jackets, almost all of it black. I have refined my style to such a degree that I own many versions of the same clothes and would never consider trying anything else. I own no pairs of shoes at all, just a few pairs of boots for winter and jewelled flip-flops for the summer. The twenty-something me would be utterly baffled by this! (Can I just say, I do aim nowadays to look elegant rather than frumpy. And I do go wild with the accessories. I don't actually resemble a nun.)

I used to read only non-fiction, and mainly books about World War Two. Now, I read chiefly light commercial fiction. That's the wrong way round, surely?

I used to LIVE for music and knew the lyrics of practically every song ever written. Now I rarely listen to it and never buy any. My younger self would WEEP if she knew this.

On the plus side, all those boys who broke my heart, made me cry and had me wondering miserably if I would ever be happy again? I can't remember most of their names or even what they looked like. Although when I'm enjoying a particularly glamorous bestselling-author moment I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I occasionally think, wouldn't it be great if they could see me now . . . ?

Another major difference is that I now spend most of my working day home alone, which is something I couldn't have done in my twenties. I had a genuine fear of solitude and made sure I was NEVER on my own. I shared apartments with friends, then married at twenty-two. When my marriage ended after five years, I became a landlady and filled my house with tenants.

My life is wildly different now. I have changed so much. I might still like my younger self – she's basically a nice person, after all! – but we wouldn't be best friends, not in a million years. But what of the future? It's only just occurred to me that twenty years from now I could have metamorphosed into someone completely different again. What might I be doing then that I wouldn't dream of doing now? There's sky-diving . . . triathlon races . . . nude modelling . . .

Oh my goodness, I could turn into one of those completely outrageous and fearless old ladies who are always up to all sorts. I want to start now, right away. That's it, I'm going to dye my hair purple and get a tattoo!

That was what I wrote. The replies were fascinating. As well as the ones on the site there were some very moving personal messages from people, some of whom were shocked to realise that they had turned into the kind of person their younger selves wouldn't have appreciated at all. It prompted them to address the issue of the direction their life had taken . . . maybe too much emphasis on work and not enough on family. It really is a fascinating premise. My own younger self would be pleased, I hope, to see how she turned out. I think she'd be excited to know she became a bestselling author worldwide! Although she'd definitely be shocked and appalled by my loss of interest in music. And clothes. And especially high heels...

Love

Jill x