Jane Crowther

I think the more cynical you get as you get older, you read different things into the book, as Sarah says. So when I read it first time, I was the doomed romance of it. But when I've read it recently, it's very much that sort of idea of the heartlessness of the world that we still see today and the hope that you need to have within it for romance and everything else.

Absolutely, which is why I wrote a sort of reinterpretation of it for the modern day.

Let's make her a woman. Let's make her a social media influencer. And let's talk about the interior lives of the women in this novel, because Fitzgerald himself said he had no important women characters in this book, and he feared that was a failing of it. So, yeah, I took the opportunity to have my own little American dream and re-spin it for today's world.

Oh, I'm sure there will be people. But I think it's a sort of Rorschach test, isn't it? The book itself. And I think that's the case for anyone reinterpreting it, really.

Oh, yes, it's absolutely wonderful. Anyone can read it and enjoy it. Pick a sentence apart and put it on a poster.

Let's make her a woman, let's make her a social media influencer. Fitzgerald himself said he had no important women characters in this book and he feared that was a failing of it.