Richard & Judy Book Club pick author Julietta Henderson wrote her latest novel during the world’s longest lockdown.
The Australian author who has strong links with Scotland penned Sincerely, Me on the veranda of her Melbourne home during the city’s six Covid-19 lockdowns that totalled 262 days.
Henderson’s debut, The Funny Thing About Norman Forman, featured by P.S in 2021, was a runaway success. Exploring a small boy’s dream of finding his dad and becoming a stand-up comic at the Edinburgh Festival, its 2022 paperback version saw the author interviewed on screen by ITV chat-show hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan – Madeley stating that Norman Forman, “grabs you by the arm from page one and refuses to let go”.
Her latest offering is equally gripping. Cue the loveable, cheeky and incorrigible “waster” Danny Mulberry, who is estranged from his sister and whose life changes after he appears in a misleading newspaper report causing strangers to seek his advice. It also leads to the niece he has never met but who needs his help.
Speaking from her Melbourne home, Henderson, who spent part of her youth backpacking in Scotland and is a regular at the Edinburgh Festival, tells P.S: “In Melbourne we had the longest lockdown in the world. I wrote about 140,000 words on my veranda when the world closed but I only had little scenes and vignettes.
“When I came back to it, I found I had no memory of writing at least half of it. It was like I picked it up off the library shelf. Some of it astounded me. I fashioned it some more, weaving in the plot, but nothing else really changed, not the characters or their motivations.”
Henderson, who divides her life between Australia and the UK, reveals: “Luckily for me, the second novel wasn’t difficult. It just flowed.
“I wanted to write a book about an adult sibling relationship and how your place in your family unit carries over into your adult life, affecting how you engage in relationships in the future.
“But, I also wanted to show how we can find ourselves standing at a crossroads with three choices: live in the past and focus on what’s happened that you can’t change; stay where you are and not move or grow but be very comfortable, or step forward and go into the unknown. Any time you step forward you are stepping into some kind of fear; financial fear, fear of what people might think, fear of the unknown. I wanted to write about the transformation of guy who did step forward but because he was forced to.”
A dual narrative, the other voice in the Sincerely, Me is Danny’s dark, quirky and clever 15-year-old niece Wolfie, who feels responsible for her mentally vulnerable mother, his sister. “The book touches on some heavy things – depression, mental illness – but with a light touch,” says its creator. “I didn’t want to write a book about someone with depression. I wanted to write about the people who surround and support someone with depression; how that makes them feel and how it changes their lives.”
It’s a tale that will in turn tempt tears and tickle funnybones and is worthy of another Richard & Judy gong.
Julietta Henderson – Sincerely, Me, Bantam, £16.99
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