Me Before You: a novel

A
BOUT THE
 A
UTHOR
Jojo Moyes was raised in London. She writes for the Daily
Telegraph, Daily Mail, Red, and Woman & Home. She’s married to
Charles Arthur, technology editor of The Guardian. They live with
their three children on a farm in Essex, England.

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A C
ONVERSATION WITH
J
OJO
 M
OYES
What was the inspiration behind Me Before You?
It was a number of things. I had two close relatives who were
dependent on twenty-four-hour care, and the issue of quality of life
and how we behave around the severely disabled was high in my
mind. But the novel was really spurred by a news story I heard,
about a young rugby player who was left quadriplegic after an
accident and who persuaded his parents to take him to Dignitas, the
Swiss clinic, to allow him to go through with an assisted suicide. I
couldn’t believe any parent would agree to do that—and yet the
more I read up on his story, the more I realized the issue was not as
clear-cut as I would have liked to believe.
With Louisa and Treena, you perfectly captured the
love-hate relationship that sisters often share. Do you
have sisters yourself?
I have half sisters, who are much younger than I am. I’ve always
been fascinated by their relationship and the relationships some of
my friends have with their sisters. What I’m most captivated by is
that ability to be at each other’s throats one moment and yet totally
bonded and presenting a united front in the next. If you are an only
child, as I was for nineteen years, that kind of relationship is pretty
mesmerizing.

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The novel reflects an in-depth knowledge of the
issues related to quadriplegia. What kind of research
did you do? Were some of the characters in the
quadriplegic chat rooms based on real people?
The chat room characters are an amalgam of attitudes that I heard
online. And I had a lot of personal experience from within my own
family and friends as to how people treat the disabled, and of some
of the issues they face.
As far as other research goes, there are quads who upload
footage of their daily routines to the Internet, and this was a great
help in making sure I could accurately represent some of the
procedures. I’ve had a lot of carers and families of quadriplegics get
in touch with me since the book was published, and I have been
relieved that they thought I had represented their lives accurately.
Louisa narrates the first third of the novel, but the
remainder is divided between various other
characters, including Treena and Mr. Traynor. Why
did you choose to organize it this way?
In the early part of the novel I wanted readers to go through a
journey of almost blind discovery with Lou, and to feel as out of their
depth as she does. Later, I thought it was important for the other
characters’ dilemmas to become a bit more three-dimensional. The
only person whose mind I couldn’t enter was Will’s, because I
wanted his intentions to be one of the central tensions of the book.
Whose voice did you find easiest to write? Whose
was the most difficult?

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Unusually (for me), I found them all easy, possibly because they
were so different, and because they were each so clear in my head.
The hardest was actually Treena, because she was the closest to
Lou, and I needed them to be distinct from each other.
Treena can’t relate to the way Louisa feels about Will
because she’s never really been in love before. She
can only do so by imagining the way she would feel if
her son, Thomas, were in Will’s situation. Maeve
Binchy’s death revived the ongoing debate about
whether a woman writer needs to have children in
order to really understand the human condition.
Where do you weigh in?
Oh gosh. That’s a toughie. I have writer friends who would kill me if I
dared to suggest they couldn’t imagine their way into some aspect of
the human condition because they’d never given birth. But all major
life experiences will change you as a writer—they have to. I
acknowledge that when I had children I personally felt like I’d lost a
layer of skin, and I do wonder whether that visceral level of love and
fear does somehow feed its way into your writing. I know it does into
other aspects of my life.
You’re a two-time winner of the Romance Novelists
Association Book of the Year Award. What do you
think distinguishes a really great romance novel from
a merely good one?
For me, it’s steering away from the obvious; also, perhaps, taking the
reader into settings where she might not normally go, whether that
be into the past or some extreme situation.

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Do you like reading romances as well as writing
them? Who are some of your favorite writers?
I don’t tend to read romances per se, but I read across all sorts of
genres and most of what I read has a love story at the heart of it
(don’t most books?). Some of my favorite writers include Kate
Atkinson, Nora Ephron, and Barbara Kingsolver. More recently I
loved the Hunger Games trilogy and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.
You’ve been writing fiction for more than a decade,
but your previous book, The Last Letter from Your
Lover, won you the attention of a much wider
audience. Has your suddenly higher profile changed
the way you write?
It’s made it harder! I find I’m questioning what I’m doing from a much
earlier stage: Is this plotline going to tie me in knots later? Is this
character relatable? Is this story too slow getting going? I feel as
though, ten books in, I’m only just learning my craft.
What are you working on now?
My next book, The Girl You Left Behind, is set in modern-day
London and in Occupied France in 1916. I’m 80,000 words into a
new book, which is very different. It’s about a single mother, working
as a cleaner, who makes some possibly unwise decisions while
trying to help her children. It’s a road trip, and an unlikely romance,
and it’s about unconventional families and love and getting by when
the world seems set against you.

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Q
UESTIONS FOR
D
ISCUSSION
1. If you were Louisa, would you have quit working for the Traynors?
If yes, at what point?
2. Were you able to relate to the way Will felt after his accident?
What about his outlook on life did you find most difficult to
understand or accept?
3. Discuss the meaning of the novel’s title. To whom do the “me” and
“you” refer?
4. Louisa often finds Mrs. Traynor cold and judgmental. Is there an
appropriate way to behave in Mrs. Traynor’s situation?
5. What is your opinion of Mr. Traynor? Did it change after you read
his side of the story?
6. Why is Louisa able to reach Will when so many others could not?
7. Were you as surprised as Lou to learn of Will’s plans?
8. Compare Louisa’s relationship with Treena to Will’s relationship
with Georgina. Do siblings know one another any better simply
because they are related?
9. Would Patrick have asked Louisa to move in with him if he hadn’t
felt threatened by Will? If Louisa had never accepted her job with the
Traynors, where would her relationship with Patrick have gone?
10. Discuss Louisa’s own secret ties to the castle. Would most girls
in her situation have blamed themselves? Should Treena have
behaved differently in the aftermath?

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11. What did you make of the way Lou’s mother, Josie, judges Lou’s
decisions regarding Will. Is Josie’s reaction fair?
12. Before his accident, Will was a philanderer and a corporate
raider who would probably never have given Louisa a second look.
Why is it that people are so often unable to see what’s truly
important until they’ve experienced loss?
To access Penguin Readers Guides online, visit the
Penguin Group (USA) Web site at www.penguin.com.

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