The Joys of Binge Reading

Jane Green has eighteen New York Times best sellers and ten million in sales in the woman’s fiction genre with several books picked up by film and TV. Her latest Sister Stardust is her first foray into biographical fiction, telling the story of international jet-setter Talitha Getty, wife of mega rich heir Paul Getty, and their rock and roll life in Marrakesh in the sixties.

Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler. And on Binge Reading today, Jane talks about her fascination for Talitha Getty, the woman who had everything and lost it all, and offers some fascinating insights into where she sees popular fiction going in the next few years.

As usual, we’ve got great books to give away this week historical books featuring strong female leaders. I’ve got Sadie’s bow in there. The first in my new trilogy home at last,

DOWNLOAD STRONG FEMALE LEADS

Why not download that and read it in time for the release of Susannah’s Secret book two in the series before Christmas.

You’ll find all the details on the show notes for this episode. At the joys of binge reading dot. dot com

And remember, if you enjoy what you hear, add review of the show on your favorite podcast site so others can hear about us too.

Links to things mentioned in the show:

The Beach House, Jane Green: https://www.amazon.com/Beach-House-Jane-Green/dp/0452295386

Mary Jane: Jessica Anya Blau: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54870208-mary-jane

Hippies: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1967/09/the-flowering-of-the-hippies/306619/

Summer of Love: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2007/may/27/escape

Haight Ashbury: https://thehauntghosttours.com/blog/tips-for-visiting-haight-ashbury-neighborhood/

Sister Stardust Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Fmk66fV8bBaAtTDx2LzaJ?si=wQXWe4OfQhmpKvcnLzfFxA

Straight Talking: Jane Green; https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Talking-Novel-Jane-Green/dp/0767915593

High Fidelity, Nick Hornby: https://www.amazon.com/High-Fidelity-Nick-Hornby/dp/1573225517

Bridget Jones Diary, Helen Fielding: https://www.amazon.com/Bridget-Joness-Diary-Helen-Fielding/dp/014028009X

Rainbow Girl, Jane Green story in podcast form: https://www.janegreen.com/2022/10/rainbow-girl-a-new-audio-drama-set-in-the-rock-star-world-of-1979-available-now/

Emerald Audio: https://emeraldaudio.net/podcasts/rainbow-girl/

Jane Green; The lifestyle brand: https://www.janegreen.com/figless-manor/

Good Assassins Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6TUFsoI45qbWNEZF2Wb5pr

Root of Evil podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5pi39okDAFEW9h9d3iA9Z1

Jean Hanff Korelitz: The Plot; https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Jean-Hanff-Korelitz/dp/125079076X

Jean Hanff Korelitz: The Latevomer; https://www.amazon.com/Latecomer-Jean-Hanff-Korelitz/dp/1250790794

A M Homes: The Unfolding; https://www.amazon.com/Unfolding-Novel-M-Homes/dp/0735225354

A M Homes: May We Be Forgiven: https://www.amazon.com/May-We-Be-Forgiven-Novel/dp/014750970X

Where to find Jane online:

Website: www.janegreen.com

Facebook: facebook.com authorJane Green

Instagram: @Janegreenauthor

Podcasts: Emerald Audio: https://emeraldaudio.net/podcasts/rainbow-girl/

Introducing author Jane Green

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Jane. Hello there, Jane, and welcome to the show. It’s wonderful to have you with us.

Podcaster and women’s fiction author Jane Green

Jane Green: Hi, Jenny. It’s great to be. here

Jenny Wheeler: You’re a top woman’s fiction author. There’s no disputing that you’ve got eighteen New York Times best sellers and 10 million books in print. But this latest book is just a slight change in direction for you. It’s still very much women’s fiction, but it is bio fiction. It’s based on a real person and that person is Talitha Getty, one of the Paul Getty wives.

And it’s based in Marrakesh in the late sixties. Now, what attracted you to this story and to slightly change in your direction?

Jane Green: Actually to slightly change in your direction?

I joined a new publisher, Harper Collins, and I was all set to write a sequel to The Beach House, and then out of nowhere, my new editor suddenly said, Jane, have you ever thought of doing historical fiction? And I immediately thought of World War II books because I know a ton of authors who write World War II books.

But I have spent my whole life slightly obsessed with this woman Talitha Getty after seeing a photograph of her when I was a teenager. She was Incredibly beautiful and very glamorous. And she was crouching on a rooftop in Marrakesh, in this beautiful embroidered caftan. And I said to him historical fiction? Do the sixties count?

A historic story set in the Swinging Sixties

And because he’s 12 years old, he said yes. And so I thought I really would love to know more about this woman, because she was a muse of Yves St Laurent. She was married to the son of the richest man in the world. She was best friends with the Rolling Stones. And yet she died very tragically, very young of a heroin overdose.

And there’s very little written about her. So her whole life was something of a mystery. So this gave me the opportunity to do a deep dive and really find out about,

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Now, as you say, historical fiction definitely does now start in the 1960s, which were some us who were in their teens in the 1960s seems a bit strange, but it does. And World War II books must almost be reaching their peak because they’ve been popular for so long now, and quite a number of people have chosen this niche of sixties and particularly music related fiction.

I’m thinking of people like Taylor Jenkins Read who did, I can’t even remember the book now, but the one

Jane Green: Yes, Daisy Jones and the Six. Taylor Jenkins Read and then Malibu Rising and Jessica Anya Blau did Mary Jane. There’ve been lots of books about the sixties, but interestingly, they’ve been very, Americans, so they’re very much Laurel Canyon or Malibu, obviously, as you can hear from my accent, I am not I am American.

One of the famous pictures taken of Talitha Getty in Marrakech – Credit: Photographer Patrick Lichfield for Conde Nast. The Sixties were different in Europe

I’m a naturalized American, but I was born and brought up in London and I was born in the sixties, but my. Vision of the sixties, my version of the sixties, the stories that I grew up hearing from my parents were all London based and so the European sixties was very different.

In America, it was all the hippies and Summer of Love and Woodstock and Haight Ashbury and San Francisco. Whereas in Europe it was much more, the influences came from India and Asia and North Africa particularly. So it was a very different kind of sixties, and of course you had London bursting into color and becoming the epicenter of the psychedelic sixties with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who were the gods of that time?

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Now as we’ve mentioned the Rolling Stones feature quite prominently in it, and I. wonder if you prepared a playlist for the book, as you’ve mentioned a lot of music in it. You obviously have done a lot of research into the music of the Rolling Stones and the sixties generally. Did you love that part of it?

Jane Green: Yeah, it was huge fun. Actually I made a soundtrack, which is in fact available on Spotify. So if you go onto Spotify and put in Sister Stardust under playlists, you’ll find the Sister Stardust playlist, which is actually all the music that I listened to while I was writing this to keep me in the mood.

A 60s and 70s playlist for the book

And it’s really music from 1966 to 1971, and it’s specifically the music that was in the charts in England and also music that I know that Talitha Getty was listening to at that time. She really liked Dolly Parton, I found that sort of fascinating and unexpected.

Jenny Wheeler: So how do you know that she was listening to that music? Did you manage to get hold of letters or diaries or some very personal reference point for knowing that?

Jane Green: I did speak to a couple of people who were very close with her, although most people didn’t want to revisit the past. It was really hard getting people to talk. I also think because she died so young and so tragically, and her husband was somehow culpable in her death. But I think the family closed ranks, which is why I think there is so little known about her.

So I had to come at it sideways, and I made lists and lists of anybody who might have come into contact with her, or anybody who was ever photographed with her or mentioned with her. And then I read everything about them, and it was really like searching for a needle in a haystack. And every now and then, I’d stumble upon a paragraph or a page and sometimes a few pages in somebody else’s book, and it was just glorious.

Talitha Getty’s tragic end

And it took almost a year. And by the end of that research I really felt that I had a very good sense of who she was.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Tell us a little bit about the circumstances of her death. She had been clean of the heroin, she claimed for quite a period of time, but then she went back to visit her husband and very suddenly died of an overdose. He basically fled out of the jurisdiction so he escaped really being questioned on it, didn’t he? Tell us a bit about that.

Jane Green: I there are a few accounts of her death her last couple of years, she had a baby in 1968, which brought thyroid problems that she was struggling with. She was struggling with terrible depression. Not that you’d ever know. because actually I think really, the thing with Talitha is she was brought up in the Dutch East Indies in the prison camps after the Japanese invaded and.

And it was terribly traumatic because the guards would torture the children. And I think she carried that trauma with her and her drug of choice was really people she couldn’t bear to be on her own. And she always surrounded herself with people and parties, so you wouldn’t necessarily have known.

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But they separated she and her husband after she had the baby and he was living in Rome and she went back to their wonderful house in Chelsea, in, in London, in Cheyne Walk. And the story that I have heard that feels like it’s the most likely is that she was clean. Heroin was never a big problem for her anyway.

It was really her husband, Paul, who was the heroin addict. Alcohol was much more her thing. She knew that she loved him, but I think she also knew that he would destroy her. She flew to Rome to serve him with divorce papers, but one version of the story is that she tried to seduce him and he rejected her. She then went into a bedroom in his apartment and took a huge heroin over.

And at the time was so deep in his addiction that he didn’t know. And that’s the thing that he was an addict and he was struggling himself. There were people in and out the apartment all night long, and he kept looking in on her and thought she was sleeping, when in fact she was dying.

And by the time they realized it, was too late. But yes, Italy at the time had a mandatory ten year sentence for possession of heroin, so he left and never returned, as far as I know.

Opening closed doors on family life

Jenny Wheeler: Very sad. The rest of your work very much deals with family issues, people struggling with life’s challenges, and I’m thinking of a recent one, The Sunshine Sisters, about a narcissistic mother who has alienated her three daughters.

As she faces a serious illness at the end of her life, she has this urge to call on them for help and try and get the family all rallied together again. And it’s a wonderful way to start a story. And a lot of your stories have been those kinds of stories, haven’t they?

Jane Green: Yeah I’m really in human nature and why we do the things we do. And I’m interested in the dark sides and also this whole concept of not knowing what goes on behind closed doors and that we so often think that other people have easier, better. I don’t know, more lavish or whatever it is, but better lives than we do.

And actually we never know. So I quite like opening those closed doors taking a look at what’s really going on. And it’s often quite dark and quite difficult and traumatic. And I like helping my protagonists overcome adversity and overcome the challenges of their childhood to carve out some version of a peaceful life for themselves.

Jane’s serendipitous author’s start

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic look 10 million books sold. New York Times best sellers. How did you get started on this road?

Jane Green: I was a journalist and I was working for the Daily Express in the UK and a friend of mine out of nowhere wrote a book and suddenly phoned me up one night to say that she had a publishing deal.

And I remember thinking hang on. She’s not even a writer, she’s not historian. I’m a writer.

If she can do it, I can do it. And I just thought I’m gonna do this as well. And I, My first book was called Straight Talking, and at the time, I’d just read Nick Hornby’s book, High Fidelity, and it was a book that seemed to be the story of every single 30 something man I knew.

And I thought no one’s doing this for women, so I’m going to do, I’m gonna write about my life and my girlfriends.

Of course, little did I know that Helen Fielding was. sitting in a flat in Ladbroke Grove about mile up the road from me writing Bridget Jones’ diary. But I was very lucky because that book was such a huge success that my first book came out about three months later and the press seized upon this and said, Oh, this is new genre. This is Chicklit.

Welcome to the world of ‘chick-lit’

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. You knew which way the wind was blowing.

Jane Green: Yeah. Exactly. I was very lucky. Wish I knew, well actually, I think I do know which way the wind is blowing. Which isn’t necessarily great for books, but storytelling will continue.

Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely. Storytelling will, and that leads us back to your historical fiction. Do you think you’ll do any more historical fiction?

Jane Green: I actually have, interestingly, a podcast coming out on October the 13th, which is a scripted fiction series and it’s set in 1979. And it’s a standalone, but you don’t have to have read Sister Stardust to enjoy this,. A rock star couple who featured in Sister Stardust.

It’s about Eddie Albright and Lissy Hillary who now have a son and they live in Sleepy Hollow, New York and. It’s 1979, so it’s Studio 54 and disco. but it’s absolute chaos. And Lissy is diving into drugs and black magic and it all ends in a terrible tragedy. And that’s called Rainbow Girl.

And actually that’s on amazon.com/rainbow Girl or wherever you listen to podcast. You can follow it.

Rainbow Girl – a new audio drama and stand alone sequel to Sister Stardust A Rainbow Girl sequel on podcast series

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. And how many episodes?

Jane Green: There are six half hour episodes and we have a full cast of actors. And it’s really exciting cuz it’s a new way of telling stories and I am passionate about podcasts, so thank you very much for inviting me to be on your show. And I think that we are all so busy now

I find it much harder to set aside the time to watch TV show or read a book, whereas podcasts accompany me wherever I go and whatever I do, if I’m cleaning, if I’m walking, if I’m driving, if I’m ironing, I’m always listening to podcasts and we are bringing fiction to podcasts, female driven fiction to podcasts.

Jenny Wheeler: When you say we, who? Who is doing it with you?

Jane Green: Ah, so I have actually been brought in to partner on running a podcast network called Emerald Audio.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh wow.

Jane Green: I’ve taken my writers cap off for a while and I’m back in business and And finding and producing these fantastic fiction series, a bit like the old fashioned radio plays that we grew up with that serialized and it’s lovely and I’m having a blast.

A lifestyle brand at the Mouse House

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. That does actually morph beautifully into I was going to ask you about your lifestyle brand because I guess as your life moved on, you start with the chicklet, but now you’re very much a family person with a family and you’ve got a following as a lifestyle brand. In your own right with your cooking and your gardening, and you’ve got a wonderful entry in your on your website about your home, which you call Figless Manor and explain why it’s called Figless Manor.

Tell us how all of that evolved.

Jane Green: [00:16:00] Well, I think I’m just a natural nester. I’m really a homebody. I don’t like leaving my house, and that means that wherever I live, I have to create something that is not only very beautiful because I, I do a bit of. Bit of beauty around me, but also very warm and cozy. I’m all about the cozy and in fact, Fless Manor was a house that we built a few years ago, but now we are in the mouse house.

All our homes have ridiculous names cuz they make me laugh. But the Mouse House is called The Mouse House because it’s just teeny tiny. We are in a teeny tiny little beach cottage. But because I don’t like leaving my home very much, what I do is I gather the people I love in my home and I feed them and I feed them the kinds of.

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Jane Green – Swinging Sixties Romance