LOVE LETTERS

by Julie Ma

(Mountain Leopard Press, August 25, 2024)

From the author of Richard & Judy’s ‘Search for a Bestseller’ (Mountain Leopard Press, 1 February 2024)

Authorlink interview by Anna Roins

Some old love letters. A lonely teenager. A new beginning . . .

Asta Fung is sixteen and sulky. Her parents moved the whole family to take over the Yau Sum takeaway in another town so Grandpa Charlie could be closer to the big hospital. She’s had to give up her dog, her friends, her familiar teenage life. All too soon, she must give up Grandpa Charlie too. What was the point?

When the builder’s son, Josh, hands her a bundle of love letters he found under the floorboards, Asta realizes they were hidden there by Grandpa Charlie as a young man. Desperate to keep her grandfather’s memory alive, she is determined to track down the mysterious Ela Hennessy who wrote them, but as the new girl in town, Asta will have to do it on her own.

Or so she thinks . . .

AUTHORLINK: Hello Julie! Thank you for sharing your time with us on AUTHORLINK today to discuss your second novel, LOVE LETTERS, which is set in the same Welsh town (but with a mostly new set of characters) as your first novel Happy Families (Paperback) (Mountain Leopard Press, 18 February 2021); Winner of the Richard & Judy’s ‘Search for a Bestseller’ 2020!).

Tell us a bit about LOVE LETTERS. What do you hope your fans will enjoy the most?

MA: Thanks for asking, Anna! Also, can I say how nice it is to be back here at Authorlink. I love what you’ve done to the place since I was last here! Great wallpaper! And that new lamp, gorgeous! (Just for you to know, Authorlink readers, sadly I don’t get to visit Authorlink HQ for the purposes of this interview but I am 100% certain that Anna & Co do, in fact, have exquisite taste in interior design!

Anyway, I’m hoping any readers who are actual teenagers or have ever been one, will find something in common with my teenage heroine – Asta. She’s had to move to a new town and new school just as she’s starting her A-levels. She thinks she’s a loner who can do it all on her own but when she decides to solve the mystery of who wrote all these love letters to her dead grandfather, she comes to realise that no man – or teenage girl! – is an island.

AUTHORLINK: Ha ha ha. Lovely, thank you! What was your experience writing your second novel as compared to your first? Was it faster to write? Did you feel any pressure to make it another award winner like your first?

MA: Well, Love Letters isn’t my first attempt at a second novel; there was a soggy semi-drafted second novel in between Happy Families and Love Letters which didn’t cut the mustard. I spent the best part of a year working on that and then hit the equivalent of The Wall for marathon runners. Marathon runners don’t get sent back to the starting line and get asked to go again from the beginning though! It was all excruciating at the time but completely the right thing to do. That other novel I started was a bit rubbish.

So, in that way, it was not faster to write but in another way, it was because I knew professional readers were waiting for it and recreational readers deserve to have the best novel I can write in exchange for their money and time. This puts a bit of a rocket up your arse!

I was looking through my notes for Love Letters recently and there is a scribble that says I really don’t know what I’m doing here, it’s not bravado so I can look back and say ‘Hey, I did it’. I really don’t think I can do it.

But yes, I did do it in the end. I think most writers get this sensation as their fingers fly/stumble/wade through treacle over the keyboard.

It’s very nice of you to call Happy Families an award winner but it really only won an award to get published. Every other novel you see in a bookshop has won that award too!

 AUTHORLINK: Hmmm. Okay! Where did you find your inspiration for LOVE LETTERS? Are there parts of it inspired by real life? Do any of your beloved characters from your first novel, Happy Families, visit its pages? We understand they were bumping shoulders, waving and trying to catch your attention in your earlier drafts of LOVE LETTERS.

MA: I know I wanted someone barely noticed from Happy Families to step into the limelight this time and the abandoned novel followed a different character who does appear briefly in Love Letters although no longer as its main character. Eventually, it was Asta who stepped forward; she is mentioned only in passing and never even appears in Happy Families.

One of my big obsessions about Happy Families was the accurate description of a truly working class location – a fast food takeaway – into fiction and although it’s not a character, I’m pleased that the Yau Sum takeaway is still an important part of the story.

Not so much is inspired by my own real life this time, partially because when I asked my relatives who were part of mixed-race relationships in the 1960s (only about 1% of the UK population at that time), they just said it was all fine and they experienced no difficulties at all. This does not make for an exciting story, but a little digging did reveal some historical friction I could use in my fiction!

AUTHORLINK: How interesting. Who was your first reader of LOVE LETTERS? How many edits did you go through before you sent it to your agent and later your editor at your publisher’s?

MA: I guess the first reader was me but I don’t think you mean that! My first reader was the lovely Rachel Hart, who was my editor at the time and I was asked to send in the first 30,000 words to make sure it was good enough to keep writing. Then there was a bit of a kerfuffle and my publisher got bought out by another publisher and I got a new editor, the also-lovely Jennifer Edgecombe who was the first person to read the whole thing.

I realise now that many authors re-name their draft novels with the number of draft or edit they are on (War and Peace v 86, 87, 88, etc), but I didn’t know to do this so just saved the current edit over the previous draft and this means I’m not quite sure how many edits there were. Between three and a hundred?!

 AUTHORLINK: Ha! Very helpful. How do you cope with constructive criticism? You said once (regarding your first novel, Happy Families), “One of the times I sent it out, I was told the story is quite boring, so I had to work out which were the boring bits, and I chose to take out that subplot. It seems to have worked and that, perhaps, it was a bit clunky to have in.” (Besea.n 2020).

What kind of feedback did you receive for early drafts of LOVE LETTERS that were tricky to swallow?

MA: Happy Families was a chubby infant of about 120,000 words when I received that feedback. I see often in writing forums that new writers struggle to edit their draft novels down to size and that was a bit of a problem here too.

As you might guess, a novel called Love Letters has a number of actual love letters in it and I wrote a lot more than appear in the final version. I do remember being told ‘there are a lot of letters here, aren’t there?’ so I did have to cut several out and I was happy to do it. One of the best things about finally being published is that a professional editor looks at what you’ve written and makes constructive, considered and carefully explained suggestions. You’d be a fool to ignore all of them!

 AUTHORLINK: Ha ha ha! Is it true that one’s first book is quite often autobiographical in some way? Did you attempt to write a novel before Happy Families and if so, when and how many and what were they generally about?

MA: I know it was for me; I hope it wasn’t for Andy Weir who wrote The Martian! Although I think he was a proud scientist like his main character. Sometimes the autobiographical elements aren’t obvious.

The book that became Happy Families was a much, much modified version of my first attempt to write a novel. All of the previous attempts shared one thing in common – to want to show that even a small town has a Chinese (or it can be Indian or Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan) takeaway and in that way, every town has a little diversity. They’re usually populated by working class customers and staff too.

 AUTHORLINK: Your debut novel, Happy Families was published during a pandemic How was that experience different from LOVE LETTERS so far?

MA: Oh, it was very different! Back then, it was common for authors to launch books online instead of a real-life equivalent but now they do it as well. Do you know, if you meet people in real-life, you have to put actual trousers, shoes and socks on.

I decided to have a launch event at my local bookstore this time and it was nerve-wracking to meet, in the flesh, the people who were kind enough to exchange their money for some of my words. I did bribe them with cake and wine though so most were pleasingly complimentary!

 AUTHORLINK: Of course! You once said. “My stories are about what lies behind the ordinary folk you see every day and sometimes take for granted.” In this light, one can find stories upon stories within stories.

How overwhelming is it to siphon a story from many backstories and subplots?

MA: I don’t find it overwhelming; I find it fascinating. Oh no, now you’ve planted it in my head, I suppose it can be an enormous responsibility to take someone you’ve met or only seen from the passenger seat on a bus and put them into a fiction!

I am very careful not to trivialise the experiences of my characters though. If I pluck someone to appear even only briefly in my writing, I want to hint at a backstory. There is a Syrian shopkeeper and a tipsy Scottish racist who appear right at the beginning of Love Letters and I know far more about them than is ever indicated in their blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments.

AUTHORLINK: You once felt that Chinese folk were not often featured in fiction, and this inspired you to write about them. Do you think there’s been enough of a change by 2024 to see writers, actors, directors, singers, and creatives with an Asian background finally and properly-being welcomed to the forefront? Or is there room for improvement?

MA: I think we’re making some headway on this and hopefully, we’re not still at the stage where people run to the television and shout ‘Look! A Chinese person!’ as we might have to do that several times a day. Whether it’s a lazy cliched representation that turns out just to be a plot point is another matter! We’re definitely moving in the right direction though.

But as with so many things, we can never be complacent about the leaps ahead we have painstakingly made. If the recent past has shown us anything, it’s so very easy to fall backwards again. We have to keep trying to improve representation of everyone, knit it so seemingly effortlessly into our everyday that we barely notice it at all.

AUTHORLINK: Too true. What are you currently working on now?

MA: I am chipping away at Book No 3 now and there have already been a few false starts. If any budding writers are out there, my best writing tip is that you do not lash yourself to your desk and keep typing out trash from your bleeding fingertips. Some of the best ideas float to the top of your mind when you’re walking to the shops or scrubbing that burnt roasting tin.

 

AUTHORLINK: Amazing. Julie, we are so happy for you and wish you every success for LOVE LETTERS and look forward to reading more about your charming stories about ordinary folk living extraordinary times.

MA: Thanks, Anna. I hope you’ll be willing to have me again when you’ve completed the new extension at the back of the house!

 About the Author

After graduating from Aberystwyth University with a drama degree during the recession in the late 2000s, Julie Ma worked in an eclectic mix of jobs, trying to find her ‘niche’ before taking over the family business when both her parents died.

Despite early success, coming runner-up in the Orange Short Story Prize, early drafts of ‘Happy Families’ were sent to publishers only to be rejected.

Julie is Welsh-born Chinese, having been born there after her grandad settled there in the 1930s. After graduating from university and working away from home, she now owns her family’s Chinese takeaway with her brother in Wales and is also a debut author at the age of 51.

Julie won the Richard and Judy’ Search for a Bestseller’ competition for her book ‘Happy Families’. Richard and Judy are hugely popular TV presenters, and they have a book club and annual novel award.

LOVE LETTERS is Julie Ma’s second novel.

You can find out more about Julie Ma at https://www.juliema.co.uk/and  https://www.instagram.com/reallyjuliema