Jojo Moyes

And, you know, my partner says to me quite often, you can be quite tough, you know, just get on with it.

I'm much tougher with my girls than I am with my son because I'm a girl.

Yeah, but I think it's also because you know what they're going to be up against.

So you're trying to give them armour.

I didn't go to college for two years.

I was quite happy doing my thing.

And then I was working for a bank doing statements for blind people.

And they sent me on a management training course at Oxford University.

And for the first time, I was suddenly surrounded by young people my age who were fiercely ambitious.

And you talk about pivots, and there was a real pivot that happened at this point because I had been engaged up till then.

I think because I was...

I was a bit estranged from my parents from the age of 16.

Things had not gone well after their divorce and I spent a period of time where I kind of just did my own thing.

I was living in lodgings on the Bull's Pond Road with a very nice family and from there I went to university.

Wow.

Because I just realised after I met all these people, it was in Oxford University, it was a one week course.

I mean, if you've been living in a room with flock wallpaper and a picture of the Laughing Cavalier and the windows shake every time the number 72 bus comes past, I can promise you, suddenly to be in the dreaming spires, you're like, and then there's all these people who are going, yeah, yeah, no, I want to travel the world and then I'm going to do this.

And I was thinking, God, I'm just working at the pub in the evenings and doing statements for blind people in the day.

And I remember my then fiance came to pick me up on the last day and I broke off my engagement on the way home.

Because I was suddenly transfixed by these people who had a really wide horizon.