Jojo Moyes
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And he always used to ask me what I was working on.
I said, oh, well, I've just started this book.
It's a bit weird.
It's about a quadriplegic who's decided he wants to end his life.
And it's about, you know, this carer.
And he just looked at me.
And I said, okay, let me change how I describe this.
I said, it's about a man who has everything and then decides that because he can't live the life that he had, he wants none of it.
And it's about a woman who falls in love with him and decides to try and change his mind.
And he went, oh, that I would read.
Then my dad, when I first, he read it and he said, well, darling, it's very good.
But I think, you know, you're going to get in terrible trouble with the Catholic countries.
They're not going to like it.
And the truth is, for the first three years that that book went out into the world, I think I was deluged with the emails.
Well, I've got them at home still, but probably thousands of emails from people who were either in a similar position, they were carers, they were people suffering life-limiting illnesses, or they were people who were in a wheelchair.
And people responded to it in this extraordinary way.
So by the end of that three years, I had to take every Sunday simply to respond to all the messages.
And in all that time, I only had one message while it was just the book from a woman who was furious with me.
And I entered into a correspondence with her and it turns out her daughter had taken herself to Dignitas without telling her.
Wow.