Are you good at keeping secrets?

One of the most frustrating things about publishing - as opposed to journalism - is the requirement that you do just this. For what feels like a lifetime, I have been sitting on the most incredible secret: that Netflix has bought Anatomy of a Scandal and will screen it as a six-part series! (For once, I think an exclamation mark is justified.)

It hasn’t felt real. Though it was optioned soon after being published only a small percentage of novels that are optioned ever make it to the screen. And, despite being made an executive producer, signing contracts, employing an LA entertainment lawyer, meeting key players and feeling very involved with the process, part of me wondered if this amazing opportunity was something I’d imagined. Was it proof I was an imposter? (I had, after all, just been writing about a woman with hugely disordered thinking).

And then, all of a sudden, I had an evening email telling me that Netflix was going to announce the series the next day. The US trade press, Variety, Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter broke the story at 8am West Coast Time - 3pm over here - and it suddenly felt very real indeed. Stylist and Red magazine picked up the story, as did Metro, and before I knew it, I was being interviewed by The Sunday Times.

More than 3 weeks later, I’m finally getting around to sharing some of the details here. Anatomy of a Scandal is being developed into an anthology series by the team behind Big Little Lies: writer David E Kelley, who also created Ally McBeal, and producer Bruna Papandrea. 3Dot Productions’ Liza Chasin will also produce; Melissa James Gibson, show runner on the US House of Cards, will co-write, and the wonderful SJ Clarkson ( Jessica Jones, Succession, Collateral, Love, Nina) will direct.

Filming will all be in the UK. As with every industry, covid-19 has complicated things but the expectation is that, once protocols are put in place to ensure everyone is safe, filming will start by the end of the year.

And I could not be more excited. I can’t wait to share news about the actors - !!! - and, covid protocols allowing, to go on set. More than anything, I’m just so thrilled that a novel that continues to feel relevant - the news broke in the wake of Dominic Cummings demonstrating his entitlement - will reach a far wider audience.

A publication day surprise: an instagram post from Paula Hawkins recommending Little Disasters.

“I’ve got a cough so I won’t hug you,” said my agent, on February 26, at the end of a meeting to discuss the final exciting plans for the publication of Little Disasters. Conscious of covid-19, the rest of us chatted about ginger shots and boosting immune systems, and then hugged each other anyway.

This meeting - just six weeks ago - belongs to a different time. When I next went into London, on March 9, I avoided the tube and walked from King’s Cross to Piccadilly, conscious of the bus drivers wearing masks and an air of fevered, near apocalyptic panic. By March 19, when I was supposed to be filming a youtube Shelfie at Waterstone’s Piccadilly, non-essential travel was banned and it was the eve of school closures. Lockdown came three days later. The world - for all but key workers - had shrunk, swiftly and entirely.

Our plans for Little Disasters, which had once involved buoyant bookshop and supermarket orders, have also radically altered.

At first it seemed churlish to think about trying to promote a book while the UK was engulfed by a virus that, at the time of writing, has reached a daily death tally of 980 - more than any single day in Italy or Spain. My husband is an NHS doctor and most of my anxiety has centred on whether he would have adequate PPE to treat his patients safely - not to mention how to minimise the risk of him transferring the virus, if or when he caught it, to our kids.

But while it has felt a little like shouting into a void, I’ve increasingly felt a responsibility to Little Disasters. The team at S&S have shown such passion and commitment that it felt rude not to champion this book. And, in its detailing of the claustrophobia, anxiety and isolation of early motherhood, the subsequent fracturing of mental health, and the need to look out for one another it could not feel more relevant or relatable to these unsettling lockdown days.

And so, like all of us in this weird new world, I’ve learned to embrace social media. First there was a wonderful, anarchic twitter launch, hosted by Blackwell’s Books and shared with my friend, literary suspense author Lucy Atkins. We’d been due to share four bookshop and literary festival events - all obviously cancelled - but instead have taken our Bad Mothers double act to the radio, with interviews with BBC Radio Devon, here at 1 hour 9 minutes in, and BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, at 2 hours 21 minutes in. BBC Radio Sussex is next.

Then came a complete career high when I talked to the warm, incisive and thoughtful Jane Garvey about Little Disasters on BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour. You can listen here. I felt as if she completely “got” my book - an “excellent read” she told listeners - and I am kicking myself that I froze with one quesiton. The answer to the prevalence of maternal OCD is 2-3% in the first year after birth, according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists. I forgot it momentarily but it is, of course, now ingrained.

I’ve also taken part in two virtual festivals, thanks to Zoom. The first with the My Virtual Literary Festival team (@myvlf), see below, and the next as part of the Stay At Home Literary Festival, which was viewed by over 100 people and involved a real sense of connectivity.

Now that I’ve worked out how to film myself and transfer videos, I’ve filmed that Shelfie for Waterstone’s (click here), not in its flagship Piccadilly branch but my study, and a clip of me reading the first chapter of Little Disasters for The Book Depository. I also wrote a blog for Waterstone’s about my favourite bad mothers in literature, click here.

The publishing industry has embraced Zoom and its potential and so I appeared in a literary “event” with debut author Nikki Smith and her editor, Harriet Bourton, discussing maternal mental health with which Nikki’s All In Her Head is also concerned. The interview on the Orion youtube channel is here.

Finally I experienced my first Facebook Live with the incredibly professional Catherine Isaac, a fellow S&S author and former journalist. You can see the resulting chat on her Facebook page by clicking here. I’m hoping to do an InstaLive with Clover Stroud, though it’s fair to say I’m a long way off being sufficiently proficient to host my own.

Meanwhile, the reviews so far have been thoughtful, incisive, and very positive. From The Literary Review to heat, the Daily Mail to the Daily Mirror, Cosmo to the WI’s Life magazine, my novel about the darkest reaches of motherhood seems to have resonated. The novel’s currently £4.99 as an AppleBooks audio book of the week and is, of course, also available as an e-book if you can’t find it at Waterstone’s, Hive, Amazon or Blackwell’s. You can read the first 3 chapters here, read a clip from Grazia Online here, or listen to a four-minute snatch of the audiobook here.

I hope that, if you buy it, it proves an immersive distraction in these difficult times.

I’ve a novel coming out, incase I hadn’t mentioned it sufficiently, and to celebrate I’ve lined up lots of events. I’m particularly thrilled that I’ll be pairing up with Lucy Atkins, whose literary thriller Magpie Lane combines Oxford Gothic with one of the most narcissistic mothers ever created, and with Jane Shemilt, whose Little Friends is a compelling mix of Big Little Lies and Lords of the Flies.

Both these novels detail dysfunctional parenting and so dovetail with Little Disasters - my psychological drama about the darkest reaches of motherhood - extremely well.

I’m also excited that the Oxford Waterstone’s event will be chaired by Cara Hunter, whose recent All the Rage is riveting, and that I’ll be meeting Joanne Harris, chair of the Society of Authors and a multi-bestselling author perhaps best known for Chocolat, which was made into a film starring Oscar-nominated Juliette Binoche.

To make it easier to book - here are the relevant links (just click on the venue)

Exeter Why do we love a good thriller? with Jane Shemilt

Cambridge Bad Mothers with Lucy Atkins

Leeds With Joanne Harris. Gliterary lunch.

London Bad Mothers with Lucy Atkins

Bath Bad Mothers with Lucy Atkins

Oxford Bad Mothers/Crime and Wine with Lucy Atkins

Marlow Me alone! Please come and join me.

Further events are planned - details when they’re firmed up. In the meantime, please do come to listen to us. There is little better than discussing a novel with readers, or potential readers - and it’s such a refreshing contrast to sitting alone, staring at a screen.

And, just a gentle reminder that five weeks from publication, you can always preorder Little Disasters from your local independent bookshop, or from Amazon, Waterstone’s or WH Smith.

Photo credit: REUTERS. Boris Johnson confirming his intention to stand as Conservative leader at a business meeting in Manchester last week. “Of course I’m going to go for it,” he said.

The voice down the end of the phone was rich and cajoling: the tone that of someone used to charming their way out of situations, either by appealing to your better nature or by playing the hapless buffoon.

“Deep background, deep background,” Boris Johnson chuntered. It was the day after he’d been sacked by the then Conservative leader Michael Howard for lying about his affair with the journalist Petronella Wyatt and the reason this had become such a huge story - other than it being of sex scandal involving an MP - was that Boris had dismissed it with characteristic élan a week earlier as “an inverted pyramid of piffle.”

I was the Guardian lobby correspondent working that November Sunday in 2004 and, with the News of the World threatening to reveal details of the affair and a subsequent abortion, I was tasked with tracking him down. To my surprise, he rang me back. Obviously this couldn’t come from him, he explained, hence his “deep background, deep background” - journalistic code for his comments being completely non-attributable. And there was a definite “all-chaps-together-because-we-work-in-journalism-let’s-not-stitch-me-up” air about our conversation. But yes, amid all the bumbling and the skirting, it was clear the story was true.

We didn’t stitch him up. We didn’t run a story about him confessing to this, partly because we wanted to throw the story forwards. (He’d been sacked as Tory vice-chair and shadow arts minister on the Saturday afternoon, and this story would appear on the Monday morning, after all.)

But the fact that he had lied about the affair and had thought he could get away with it for almost a whole week rankled. It sounds naïve but I think this was the first time I was aware of a public figure blatantly not telling the truth. Not in a semantic sleight of hand; a sly massaging of the figures.

But by telling a great big fib.

I wish I had a contemporaneous note of that conversation. I have searched my attic for the relevant notepad but after three house moves, and 14 years, I can’t find one. I never imagined ever relaying it: it goes against all journalist ethics to betray a source, even one who’s betrayed his wife countless times and, in spinning the erroneous £350m a week for the NHS claim, has betrayed the electorate. (To say nothing of his slapdash betrayal of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratliffe by conveying inaccurate information about why she was visiting Tehran.)

But the conversation stuck with me for over a decade, and was a key inspiration when I dreamed up the idea of a novel involving an Old Etonian and Oxford-educated minister. Not that Boris is in any way my fictitious James Whitehouse, a man accused of raping a parliamentary aide with whom he’s been having an affair, in a lift in the House of Commons. For one thing, James is an athletic, former Oxford rowing Blue who is conventionally handsome with his chiselled jaw, green eyes and six foot three rower’s frame. For another, for all his faults, I never thought the former foreign secretary abusive at all.

But in his relationship with the truth – crucial to the issue of consent at the heart of my novel - there are clear parallels.

As my narcissist James tells his wife: “I told the truth, near enough. Or the truth as I saw it.”

It’s a philosophy Boris Johnson, the favourite to become the next Conservative leader and prime minister and a man whose relaxed attitude to the truth has been copiously documented, could have spouted himself.