In my office, above my desk I have a sign that reads: "No Matter. Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better."Samuel Beckett wrote that, and O.K., not necessarily the jolliest messages to face you each morning, but for the thirty years I've been a writer, it has kept my feet on the ground. It's a sign that encourages you to write, write, write, because that is what you long to do, but to do it without hope and without fear.
In my case, baby's first steps were as a writer of short stories, then I was a journalist and then, in the last five years of my life, I've been a novelist. So, imagine how flabbergasting, even disorienting it was to find, last year, that my second book, East of the Sun, was a bestseller in the United Kingdom where it was published first.
My book is about three young and hopelessly naïve girls who take a trip to India in 1928, as members of The Fishing Fleet, the unkind name given to English girls who went East in search of husbands. During my down times of writing it, I thought that if I was very lucky it might appeal to one or two doughty old Colonels and their wives who had lived in India, but on this occasion I was wrong. It had struck a chord and for two or three glorious months I seemed to hear almost nothing but good news. The book was bought by the Richard and Judy Book Club in Great Britain, our version of the Oprah book club.
The book was optioned for television by a top producer, Allan Mc Keweon, who is out in India as I write looking at locations for what will, hopefully, be a six-part television series.
Most thrilling of all, I got actual letters!! From actual readers! Young girls backpacking across India who wanted to write, an 80-year-old former memsahib whose own mother had given birth to her in Kashmir. I talked to a blind woman who had listened to the story on audio and who talked about my characters as if they were as real to her as they were to me.
My friends, of course, teased me unmercifully, calling this my "spice girl moment."
But the funny thing was that actual publication day was a complete non-event. I was on holiday in France and actually spent it miles out to sea on a boat.
No parties, no fanfare, just, I guess, some vans trundling around the country delivering East of the Sun to various destinations. No, the real shock came when I was back in London again. I'd gone there to listen to the audio edition of the book being recorded, by Sian Thomas, a fine actress. I left the recording studio just as the sun was starting to set.
Too excited to take the bus, I decided to walk up Piccadilly and as I walked I saw my book in the windows of almost every bookshop I passed. It felt like a mad dream, and I was so overwhelmed, that I did something I would never do normally. I stopped off at Fortnum and Mason, that posh shop where the Queen buys her tea and quails eggs, and I sat down in the wine bar underneath and I drank a glass of pink champagne.
While I was sitting there, I thought about all the moments of boredom, of intense ecstasy, of uncertainty, of fear, of fascination that had gone into this book.
And I thought about Mrs. Smith Pearse. She was the woman who began my obsession with India. I was five years old when we met; she was in her late sixties and easily the most fascinating grown up I'd ever met. She'd just come home after nearly forty years in India and told me wonderful stories about camping out in the Himalayas, elephant hunts, finding snakes under her bath.
I wished my mother, Vicki, were there too. She was the one who took me out to lunch when I was 56 years old and said, "You know this novel you've been wanting to write. Well, you're cracking on a bit, I think you should get on with it now." She wrote me a check, not a lot, but it enabled me to give up teaching and journalism for two unpaid months. "Time," as she put it, "to fail if necessary."
I thought about luck and timing too. While I was writing East of the Sun, I asked a 90-year-old woman, once a member of the fishing fleet, why she thought so many of these young girls had been prepared to risk so much in order to find a husband in India. She fixed me with a beady eye and said:
"What you must remember darling, is that, in those days, we had no keys: no keys to a husband, or a career, or a house; our only hope was to find a husband, either that or you had to live at home with your parents for the rest of your life."
So here I was a woman of a certain age sitting with a glass of pink champagne in my hand, feeling for one dragon fly moment, that I had all the keys. I knew absolutely that this feeling would pass --- in fact, I'm back in my study again today, underneath that sign again --- but for that moment it was heaven.
---Julia Gregson
