In Depth
Holly McQueen: Heroine for Holly
11.02.08 Anna Richardson
When you have wanted to be a writer since you were four, coming from a family of lawyers might not be a great help—but it didn't deter Holly McQueen. As a child she would write stories instead of doing her maths homework, and now, some years later, publication of her first novel for adults, The Glamorous (Double) Life of Isabel Bookbinder (Arrow, May), is imminent.
The book follows the exploits of the naïvely ambitious and faux pas-prone heroine Isabel, who decides to become a glamorous, bestselling author and bring back the bonkbuster. Not exactly equipped with the talent and discipline to make it through the conventional routes, Isabel blunders and charms her way into agents, publishers and authors' houses—keeping the reader entertained with an innocently ditzy first person narrative.
McQueen herself took a roundabout route to getting published. She dabbled with the family tradition of law ("obviously disastrous!"), before giving professional singing a go; but after a stint in journalism—where she ended up working for Vogue—she managed to secure an agent and a children's book deal. The idea for The Glamorous (Double) Life . . . formed when McQueen's husband suggested she draw on her own experience of the publishing world.
"[The book] feels rooted in reality, but it's obviously not totally real," she says. "All the mayhem and mishaps are exaggerated, although my agent seems to think I am Isabel secretly. But the sheer ludicrousness of the scrapes she gets into—I can't say that I've ever done anything quite as silly as she does."
Finding Isabel's voice was easy, McQueen says—"I could almost write without thinking"—and the supporting cast of dashing agents, millionaire children's authors and scary publishers came just as easily. "But everything else is hard work," McQueen adds. "Sitting down with large amounts of material, plotting, and trying to keep pace and make it funny takes a lot of time."
With a shiny cover complete with touches of pink, there is no doubt that The Glamorous (Double) Life . . . can be classed as "chick lit". It is a genre McQueen always wanted to write in, citing Sophie Kinsella and Marian Keyes as inspiration. However, she adds: "I don't want to say ‘chick lit'. So many people use the term pejoratively. But that was definitely the genre I was interested in. Funny, light, easy-to-read, something you pick up and zip through—that's what I wanted to try, and fortunately it worked."
McQueen might write a "bonkbuster" in the future—"That would be a real labour of love," she says—but at the moment she is working on the second Bookbinder novel, which will transport the ever-optimistic Isabel into the world of fashion.
Meanwhile, finding herself with her first adult book in the pipeline is "beyond where I ever wanted to be", McQueen says, and she is more than ready to launch herself onto the publicity circuit in May. "I don't know what to expect," she adds. "But working on the second book at the same time is fantastic, because I'm right in the Isabel zone. I can honestly talk about it until the cows come home."
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