And is that process of grieving your father-I'm curious how this has become such a central theme to your work. There are elements of it I see in some of the others. So she was a much trickier character to kind of fight to negotiate.īut also, because her story is so much about the kind of passing through grief to something else, and the whole trilogy of the books I think has been about my working out my process of grief with my dad, I was never really ready until very recently to think about kind of facing that last-I don't know that it's the last stage, because I think it's always there with you-but a kind of essential stage of letting go.ĮC: Right. And she has a tendency to say the wrong things. She's not like Harold, who, I mean, not everybody loves Harold, but despite his quietness he has a sort of openness and an extrovert quality, whereas Maureen is, she's much tighter and she's much more, she's shy, really, but she's much more guarded. I think it's partly because she's a tricky character.
I haven't found it." So I've had to discard it and get on with whatever else it was I was doing. And each time I've got to the end and thought, "That's not it. I've actually written four versions of this book, and I don't just mean the beginning, I mean the whole thing. RJ: Actually, I have been trying to open it for years, and every time I opened it the wrong things fell out, I would say. What finally propelled you to get in there and tell Maureen's story? You sort of described her story as a sticky closet that you were hesitating to open. Maureen is such a presence in both of the other stories. But I did know that it wouldn't be complete without it.ĮC: Right. But the third part, for lots of reasons, I really stalled on, and it's taken me a very, very long time to get here, and it's taken me a lot of thought. It became the second in the trilogy, which is The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. And Queenie's story I found very easy to find.
But as with readers, they're often right, and she kind of saw what I'd sort of seen but had turned my back on, and that was that there was Queenie's story and that there also needed to be Maureen's story at some point. I just didn't really think I could do it all over again. And I think at the time, I thought, "Oh, no," because I'd only just got to the end of the first book. So, it was just after The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry had come out and I was doing a kind of book event, and that was when this reader came up to me and said, "You do know that it's a tryptic, don't you?" Which kind of floored me. You said that you hadn't thought that Harold's story was a trilogy at first, and it was a reader who suggested to you that it absolutely had to be. I wanted to actually talk to you a little bit about some of the things that you wrote in your prologue, which I thought was so interesting and just really added a lot of color to this trilogy. It's so nice to be here.ĮC: It's so nice to have you. Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.Įmily Cox: Hi, I'm Emily, an editor here at Audible, and I'm so thrilled to be speaking to one of my absolute favorite writers, Rachel Joyce-the author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect, The Music Shop, among others-about her newest book, Maureen.
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