Show notes
Olivia Hayfield had a crazy idea in the shower and then she turned it into a blockbuster book. And then she wrote a sequel. Why not, she said, re-tell the story of Henry VIII as a 20th century media mogul?
The end result was first, Wife After Wife, the tale of Harry Rose, a Richard Branson style magnate who’s a lot more likeable than Henry VIII but does manage to notch up multiple wives. One reviewer described it as “rich people behaving badly”, and now there’s the sequel.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in today’s Binge Reading episode Olivia tells us about Sister to Sister, the story of Harry’s two daughters, paralleling the virgin Queen Elizabeth I and her sister Mary Tudor, rivals for the English throne like the modern-day sisters are rivals to run the media company.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
How Donald Trump helped inspire Wife to Wife
How much has changed for women in 500 years?
Making Elizabeth the First a modern mogul
Combining high concept fiction and soap opera
Remembering Jilly Cooper
Children’s books a second love
Where to find Olivia Hayfield
Website: https://www.oliviahayfield.com/
Facebook: @suecopseyauthor
Twitter: @suecopsey
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/suecopsey1/
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
But now, here’s Olivia.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Olivia and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Olivia Hayfield: Good morning. Thank you for having me. I’m delighted to be here chatting books.
Introducing Olivia Hayfield, author
Jenny Wheeler: This is a real novelty because you’re in Auckland, in the same city as me. That happens very rarely in these podcasts and we are both back in a very short lockdown. Hopefully, it’s going to be rescinded before the end of the week, so we’re stuck at home in a Zoom chat. It’s just great.
Olivia Hayfield: I was supposed to have my book launch tomorrow, and that’s the most appalling timing, so I’m a bit sad about that but hopefully it will be postponed, not cancelled.
Olivia Hayfield alias Sue Copsey, author
Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely. All the arrangements and all the booking of premises and things. How annoying.
Olivia Hayfield: I know it is. But these things can’t be helped. There are lot of people worse off. I keep telling myself that.
Jenny Wheeler: You have done two very popular and clever women’s fiction books. You could put them in the category of Rich People Behaving Badly, which is one little tagline a reviewer gave one of them, but you describe them as modern retellings of historical tales. It was a very high concept idea: take Henry VIII as if he was a 21st century womanizing media mogul rather than the King of England. How did that idea form in your mind?
Olivia Hayfield: I think, like all the best ideas, it came out of nowhere. If I sit down at my computer and think hard, it doesn’t happen. It tends to be when I’m in the shower or when I’m out for a walk.
Trump – a modern-day Henry VIII?
With the Henry idea, it was back in 2018, and I was thinking about Trump. I was thinking, he’s turning into a bit of a tyrant. I think we had just had the whole ‘grabbing women by the pussy’ episode and I was thinking, how is this man still in power?
Then I had this progression of thought – the gingery hair, the temper tantrumy things going on, and I thought, he’s really just like a modern-day Henry VIII.
(With apologies to Hans Holbein the Younger) Pic: Courtesy of Foreign Policy.com
I’ve always been fascinated by Henry VIII. Then the idea came to me. What would Henry VIII be like if he lived today? Would he be like Trump or would he be a bit different? I thought, somebody’s got to have done this, so as soon as I got out of the shower, I Googled modern day retelling Henry VIII and no one had. I thought I’ve got to give this a go, it would be such fun to do, and I started thinking what Henry would be like now, and then what his wives would be like now.
The characters were all so strong and it was very easy to picture what they’d be like if they lived now, although once I started researching Henry, he turned out to be nothing like Trump at all. It was just on the surface that he had the kind of Trump-ishness going on. Early on in his monarchy he was a pretty amazing guy.
My big question was, what turned him from that golden prince into this awful, obese tyrant that he was by the end of his reign, and those influences that turned him from this nice guy to this awful guy.
Harry Rose – softer, more likeable
Would they still be here today, or would they be tempered, would the women have more of an influence on him, and so my Harry Rose figure turned out to be a much softer, more likable and more empathic version of Henry VIII, if you like.
Jenny Wheeler: I’m fascinated in the differences between Henry VIII and Trump. Could you very quickly outline why they became so different when you looked into it?
Olivia Hayfield: Without being too rude, if we have any Americans – Henry VIII was a very deep thinker. He never expected to be king. His older brother, Arthur, was always going to be king and Henry was destined for the church, so he had an upbringing in which he learned a lot of theology, he surrounded himself with great minds, he was very intelligent, he was very charismatic, and he had this common touch.
Wife After Wife by Olivia Hayfield – the first ‘blockbuster’
He got on with everyone. He was very likable. He wrote poetry. He wrote music. He was very, very sporty. He was enormously tall for the time, he was six foot two or three and people weren’t over six foot in those days.
So he was this larger than life charismatic, jolly figure, very likable, whereas Trump doesn’t have that depth of character, I think.
Jenny Wheeler: No, the depth thing definitely lacking. I think we can begin and end there.
The first book was appropriately called Wife After Wife, and it does trace Harry’s multiple marriages, because he has to have them if he’s going to be an erstwhile Henry VIII, and while he doesn’t personally kill anyone, a couple of his wives meet unfortunate ends that he is partially, at least, implicated in. Was it fun working out how to do that, to parallel them but make it believable in our day. I mean, obviously you can’t execute them.
Complicated plot problems
Olivia Hayfield: That was my main challenge – how to make Harry responsible for the two deaths of these lovely women, but I didn’t want him to be a murderer. My biggest challenge throughout writing the whole book was to keep the reader on side with the Harry Rose figure, because the women were so strong, and I wanted them to be very modern, independent, strong women.
I thought, if Harry is an awful person, they won’t stick with him. He needs to have something to make them love him, to make them want to stick with him. I didn’t want him to be a murderer, I didn’t want him to be a bad person, but he needed to be responsible, so it’s more a washing his hands of them, turning his back on them and moving on to the next woman, rather than any murderous intent. That was my biggest challenge with the book.
Jenny Wheeler: The latest one that should have been launched tomorrow is called Sister to Sister, and it’s the next stage in the family drama. It’s Harry’s two daughters in competition to run the empire in much the same way that Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Tudor (Mary the First of England) were rivals for the English throne.
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If we backtrack for a moment, when did you become fascinated with the Tudors? It obviously isn’t just Henry VIII because you really got into some of the other peripheral characters too, like Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. We’ll go into those a little bit soon, but how did you fall in love with the Tudors?
Olivia Hayfield: I grew up in a very historic part of England in Warwickshire and my parents were very interested in history so they were always dragging us around castles and stately homes. I loved the feel of those places, and I loved to imagine medieval princesses wafting around and knights in shining armor, so I kind of grew up with it.
Anne of the Thousand Days
But I think the Tudors, when that took off was when I went with my school to see a movie called Anne of the Thousand Days. I looked it up last night. It came out in 1970 so I must have been about 10 or 11 at the time.
I was aware of Henry VIII – you can’t not be growing up in England, he’s everywhere – gift shops and what have you – but I didn’t really know the story. I was so outraged by the way this man had treated this woman he’d fallen deeply in love with and then cast aside and had beheaded. Richard Burton played Henry VIII and he was absolutely compelling in that role.
1969 movie – Anne of the Thousand Days – a favorite classic movie featuring Anne Boleyn starring Geneviève Bujold and Richard Burton.
After that I started to read historical fiction on Henry and his wives, and then that expanded out and I read everything in the library off the historical fiction shelves, and a bit later on I started to read the more academic works around them as well, so that I could differentiate between what was fiction and what was the truth.
But I always think with the Tudors that the truth is stranger than any fiction you could write, and I think this is why it’s such an amazing dynasty. It’s like a soap opera but it really happened. It’s the most incredible period of history.
Jenny Wheeler: The Tudors don’t encroach terribly much on the storyline. You are aware of them in the background and you give a very full explanation about which characters relate to which historic character. Do you think most readers take up the Tudor aspect or do they read it more as a contemporary soap opera?
How important are the Tudors?
Olivia Hayfield: That’s a really good question because it works on two levels and I always intended for that, because as soon as the Americans picked up the rights to the book – it got sold to Penguin – I thought, a lot of Americans aren’t going to have a clue about any of this stuff.
Even if they’ve seen The Tudors TV series, they’re not going to get all these references. So when we did another edit, I was very aware that it needed to work even if you didn’t have a clue about what the real story behind this was.
There are all sorts of little what they call Easter eggs in there, which will go way over a lot of readers’ heads, things like a bowl of pomegranates on Katie’s table – that was Catherine of Aragon’s symbol. And Henry loved playing tennis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSjfkwvOOAM
Greensleeves – “Best Version” There’s a persistent belief it was composed by Henry for Anne, but according to Wikipedia this is unlikely.
In the new one I’ve got an ice cream van playing Greensleeves. This would mean nothing to a lot of people, but there are a lot people out there who are massive Tudor fans, and they love this stuff and they pick up on that.
I have had a couple of historians who write blogs, who have picked up the books and run with them and loved looking out for all those little references and how I’ve treated that. So it’s very much a two-level thing.
The thing I like best of all is when a reader might know pretty much nothing, but then they go away and find out. There’s a bit of education going on in there as well, because I’m very into educating people about history and learning from past mistakes, and history always repeating itself, so I love it when that happens.
Plantagenets – the next royal line
Jenny Wheeler: I’m wondering, if there ever happens to be a TV version of this, whether it would be tempting for the director to include some footage of the Tudors, do a time warp thing, because it would make it very fascinating to have that there. I thought about how you could do it in the book and it probably would be too hard, but maybe in a film version it might be easier to flag the parallel lines.
Olivia Hayfield: There are always those interesting things where they do ‘the real story behind’, so for my books I’ve put blog posts on Olivia’s website, little biographies of the real people and portraits showing how they evolve through their reign.
I have done all the wives, I’ve done Henry and I have just done Elizabeth and Mary and I’m going to do Robert Dudley.
Then the next book I’m going to do all the Plantagenets so hopefully, when people read them, if they want to find out more, they can go onto my website and read these little mini biographies of the people and learn about what really happens. The same thing happening for a TV or film would be fantastic.
A modern overlay on history
Jenny Wheeler: I was thinking a bit about the way Netflix handled Bridgerton, because I went back and looked at the Julia Quinn books which were published in 2000, and they didn’t have that whole overlay of a black queen and they didn’t have the implication of quite a lot of gay sex, et cetera.
I realized that 20 years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to include that slightly surreal stuff in a straight romance novel, but they had to spice it up a bit. I thought there might be a similar thing happening if you get this book made in 10 years’ time on Netflix, they could well put that kind of overlay on it.
Olivia Hayfield: Yes. There’s a new series on Anne Boleyn coming out with a black Anne Boleyn.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh really? Oh, that’s right, I’ve seen controversy about the fact that she is a black Anne Boleyn.
Olivia Hayfield: It’s divided people, and it’s so interesting watching all the discussions about how close you should be to history, or is it more about the spirit of the person? It’s fascinating.
The difference between my second book, Sister to Sister, and the first book is the first book is set in 1985 up until 2018. The second one is very much now, and so there is a lot more looking at the gay and pansexual relationships. I had to talk to my daughter who was 19 when I was writing it, she’s 20 now, about that side of things because I wanted to get it right. It’s so different now and I think we have to build that into our stories.
Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn in the coming drama
Jenny Wheeler: Going back to the parallels, Mary Tudor vigorously tried to return England to Catholicism after her father’s Protestant Revolution and Maria, in the story, tries to impose fundamentalist Christian values on what was a fairly liberal-minded family empire. There are uncanny similarities, aren’t there?
Uncanny similarities
Olivia Hayfield: Yes. I thought about the conflict between Elizabeth and Mary, and I have a lot of sympathy for Mary Tudor. I’ve been reading a lot more about her, even since I wrote the book, and she was a really unhappy person. She had such a sad life, it was awful.
But she was fanatical when it came to burning heretics. She honestly believed these poor people had no chance of going to heaven unless they were burned at the stake.
By the time she’d finished, she’d burnt knocking on 300 people, and the English people had had enough, they were sick of it and they were desperate to have what they were calling their Elizabeth, who they knew was going to be much more moderate, on the throne.
I thought about how I could bring those sorts of attitudes into the modern day. The most fundamental people in the West in the Christian religion are those kind of evangelicals, but I didn’t want to offend anyone, so Phil Seville, my evangelical empire ruler, is actually a bit of a fraud. I think I’ve made that quite clear. He is like those American evangelists who make billions and billions, and you feel they don’t actually believe a lot of what they’re preaching.
But Maria of course does. The tragedy is that she falls in love with this man who is a fraud, and she has a different outcome from the historical one, but I won’t give that away.
Power and love in conflict
Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. There is a lot of love and falling in love, but there aren’t very many happy-ever-afters for your characters in this book. It’s not a traditional ending romance.
Eliza, for example, decides that she’s not going to be able to marry. During the course of the book, she comes to the conclusion that if she’s going to run a media empire, her work is going to be first and she can’t spare the time for family life. I wondered if that was a satisfying conclusion for your readers, or whether you have got some third installment where she can have it all.
Olivia Hayfield: This is the million-dollar question. She’s only 25-ish by the book so I think there’s plenty of time for her to develop more and think about things more.
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I actually rewrote the ending a couple of times. I don’t want to give anything away here, but I had a very clear picture of the happy ending I wanted her to have. My editor in London didn’t agree with me at all, so we had very long discussions about how closely Eliza should parallel Elizabeth I.
There were very obvious reasons why Elizabeth I didn’t get married. She would have had to give up all her power because women were subservient in those days. The same wouldn’t apply to my Eliza. She could get married and still be the boss and still do all this stuff, so we had all sorts of discussions and we compromised a bit. It has been left open and, as I say, she’s very young.
It wasn’t quite the ending I was aiming for, but I decided it worked. I wouldn’t have written it that way.
Jenny Wheeler: I think it does work, but it does leave that slightly woeful idea that 500 years later, you still can’t have love and career. That’s the final blatant conclusion you have to come to. I don’t think you probably wanted to convey that idea as a final permanent solution.
What’s changed in 500 years?
Olivia Hayfield: No, I think it was more that when I talked to my editor about it, we were saying there are lots of women these days who decide not to have children. That shouldn’t be seen as a sad thing necessarily. If they have made that decision, they’ve made it for very good reasons, so we had those women in mind.
Trying to run a media empire and bring up a family would be pretty exhausting, and she makes a decision that she thinks is best for her at that point in her life. I think a lot of 25-year-old women would relate to that.
And the character Rob, he is very ambitious. I looked very closely at who he was based on – the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, and I wasn’t hugely taken with him. I’ve made him a lot more sympathetic than I think he really was. I think he was very, very ambitious.
The ‘Virgin’ Queen – Elizabeth the First – paralleled in Sister to Sister. Pic courtesy Brittanica
He did love Elizabeth I but I think he was a lot about power. He came from a very powerful family, very ambitious father, so I was very suspicious of his motivations. I brought a bit of that across in my version although, as I say, he is a bit more sympathetic than I think the original was. My Eliza character is, I think, aware deep down that he’s not all just about love. There is a bit more going on.
Jenny Wheeler: He probably isn’t ideal husband material in the end. You do sense that too. Do you think there ever will be a third book in the series?
The fascination with Richard III
Olivia Hayfield: In this series, I’m not sure. I took a step backwards for my third one because I wanted to do something with Richard III and the princess in the tower story. I’d become very fascinated by all that and the Plantagenets, your ancestors. So I did that. I have now got to think about what I might do for a number four.
One idea I have been exploring is perhaps moving forward with the Tudors again. There are a few interesting characters. I could tell the next installment from their point of view. I’m not sure about whether I would take Eliza on from her point of view or not. It’s all quite up in the air at the moment.
Jenny Wheeler: That storyline we’ve been discussing – the woman’s place – it would be interesting to have Eliza at 40 say, because she’s still got plenty of time. I’m thinking of the sort of marriage, I’m trying to remember her name, but the very famous English novelist, she and her husband lived in separate houses, Margaret somebody, I forget what her surname was.
As far as we know, they had a very happy marriage for 20 odd years or maybe longer, I don’t remember all the details. But they maintained interestingly independent lives, and had a very happy union as well.
(See Dame Margaret Drabble and Sir Michael Holroyd: We used to maintain separate houses…) The Guardian newspaper. – Ed note.
I think the possibility is there, without even having children, that many women could relate to. You can see that it got me a bit – that storyline.
Reader investment in happy endings
Olivia Hayfield: I can see you want Eliza to have a happy ending, but that’s good because it means that you’re interested in her and you like her.
Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely. You got me hooked in.
Turning away from the specific books now to talk about your wider career, could you tell us something about your working life around being an author? You do have another identity. How has that fed into your writing?
Olivia Hayfield: I’m split three ways really because I have my day job which is editing books, and then I have the Sue Copsey, which is the children’s author – I’ve written children’s books for years and years – and then I have this new beast Olivia Hayfield, who writes adult fiction.
I’ve been an editor for years and years, and I’ve also done a bit of writing as part of that. Then when I came to New Zealand, I was working a lot in educational publishing, but still as a freelancer, so I was able to do a bit of writing in my spare time.
A career in publishing
I didn’t have a go at fiction until around 2010-11. I’d done non-fiction but then publishing in New Zealand contracted massively. A lot of publishers closed down, some went offshore. The one I was doing most of my work for, which was Pearson, shut down without warning, and so I started to work a lot more directly with authors who were self-publishing and getting their books ready for submission.
The Ghosts of Moonlight Creek – Sue Copsey as children’s author
That’s when I started to really get into fiction and to learn what made a good story – things like pace and character and story arcs and all those things. I reckon it probably took me about five years before I felt I knew enough about how fiction worked to have a crack at it properly myself.
I started off, I wrote three children’s novels, they’re all ghost stories set in New Zealand. Then I wrote another one which is coming out later this year. That was out on submission and with an agent for quite some time and I was so invested in it that I didn’t want to write another children’s story until I knew what was happening with this little book.
Olivia Me and Sue Me
Which is why I thought, why don’t I try something different? I wrote the Henry VIII story and it just all took off. I couldn’t quite believe what was happening. So Olivia Me has definitely taken over from Sue Me for the last year or two, which is quite nice because she’s a lot more fun than Sue. She gets away with more bad behavior.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. Is there one thing you’ve done in your writing career more than any other, that you think has been the key to your success as a fiction writer?
Olivia Hayfield: I was thinking about that when you sent that question through, but there’s an awful lot of luck involved. Definitely I have had a lot of lucky breaks, but I think the key is being a bit obsessive, and passionate about what you do.
I’ve got a lot of author friends and when I look at the ones who are successful, it’s the obsessives, it’s the ones who would rather be writing than doing anything else, not the ones who are going, oh God, I’ve got to do this book, I’ve got this deadline. It’s the ones that going, can’t wait to get stuck into it. They’re a little bit mad and we lose track of what’s reality. We have always got the plots in our head and it’s kind of a way of being.
Reality check for writers
I think you also have to be incredibly thick skinned because the whole rejection part is very hard. It’s quite hard to keep getting yourself up off the floor and dusting yourself down and getting on with it. There’s lots of determination.
There’s a lot of luck. I’ve been lucky and I’ve got a very supportive group of author friends – children’s authors and adult authors as well now. They have helped enormously, and the community here in New Zealand is really supportive. I think I might’ve even given up if I hadn’t had these friends to talk to and vent to and bounce work off, so all sorts of different things have contributed to my success.
I also think it’s very important to define what you mean by success, because if you’re talking about money, then I have international publishing deals and people assume I’m now rich. It’s hopeless.
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You cannot make a living as a writer, even if you’re published here, there, and everywhere. Even if you get your books optioned, you’re still not going to make enough money to live off. You have to have a day job or a very supportive partner or some other means of income.
To me, success is holding that book in my hands and sharing it with people and having a book launch party and good times and hanging out with other authors. That’s success for me, not getting that royalty check after six months and then sitting down and crying over it.
Pandemic pandemonium
Jenny Wheeler: In your other role as book editor, you have obviously been seeing a lot of the trends in publishing over the last few years and there has been a dislocation in the publishing industry, just like there was in newspapers and magazines in the eighties.
Apart from that, we then had the pandemic last year. Right now, how do you see publishing health? What do you observe changing?
Last One At The Party by Bethany Clift. An Olivia Hayfield favorite read – a pandemic novel that;s funny and moving at the same time Published by Hachette.
Olivia Hayfield: With the pandemic it’s difficult to tell. I can only speak from personal experience and what I read on people’s blogs and so on. For me, it’s been hugely disruptive because my editor in London – their offices, as far as I know, have been shut since March. That’s the massive Hachette Building on the South Bank, it’s got 25 different publishers in there and it’s shut. Everybody’s working from home.
My own publishers have put people on furlough, so you’ll get three weeks of them and then they’ll disappear for three weeks. Pretty awful for them and for the people they’re working with. All the book fairs are canceled and that’s where they sell the foreign rights, so they’ve had that disruption going on as well.
The ‘summer blockbuster’
My first book, Wife After Wife, they were calling a ‘summer blockbuster’, then it went down to a ‘garden read’ and then it dribbled out. Friends back home were saying, where can I get this book, and I was saying, I don’t know. They were being told by the bookshops that we’re not stocking anything that’s come out during COVID.
Then we have this ridiculous situation where about 600 books appeared in one day in September. People were trying to get shelf space, people couldn’t get reviewed because so many books came out at once, so incredibly disruptive. We’ve just had to feel our way through.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Olivia as reader, because this is The Joys of Binge Reading, I’m sure you are a big reader, but what do you like to binge read and what would you like to recommend to others as nice, entertaining, uplifting fiction for this period where, away from New Zealand anyway, people are still in fairly grim circumstances.
What Olivia is reading now
Olivia Hayfield: There is one book in particular I was a bit hesitant about recommending, but I’ll come to that in a minute. Personally, I tend to read lots and lots of historical fiction. I’m a massive fan of Philippa Gregory, as long as you know what’s made up and what’s not made up.
NZ author Eileen Merriman – praised new book The Silence of Snow
The Hilary Mantel trilogy, if you are interested in that period of history, is absolutely fantastic – the Thomas Cromwell books. I like women’s fiction – people like Jojo Moyes, Marian Keyes – they are always good for a light read to lose yourself in. Here in New Zealand, I’ve recently read Eileen Merriman’s book, The Silence of Snow, which I really enjoyed. That’s a terrific read. Catherine Robertson’s books I really enjoy, she’s got another one coming soon.
Then this one I was going to mention. My publisher here in New Zealand, Hachette, sent me a book called Last One at the Party. It’s by Bethany Clift and it’s just come out and doing really well. It’s about the last person left in Britain after a pandemic. At first I thought, I don’t think I want to read this, but it’s so clever because it strikes this balance between terrifying horror and being absolutely hilarious.
Some more reading favorites
I won’t give the plot away, but there are little things in it which are just so funny. Like she’s driving around this town trying to find out if there’s anyone else anywhere and to get some food, and she still can’t bring herself not to indicate when she needs to turn at a junction. All these little things, little touches like that, it’s very funny if you try not to think too hard about what’s going on.
In her book COVID-19 is just a warmup for the real thing, and the real virus is called 6DM which stands for six days max, which is what you’ve got left if you catch this virus. I think it’s just come out here in New Zealand so treat with caution, but it’s a terrific read, very good.
Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time – a classic still celebrated today
Jenny Wheeler: It strikes me as amazing, excuse me for saying so, that a traditional publisher could get a book out that quickly.
Olivia Hayfield: Yes, it’s quite an achievement. I’m not sure if it’s out in the UK yet – yes, she only launched it last week, I think, in the UK.
Jenny Wheeler: She must have written it fairly fast too.
Olivia Hayfield: She probably did. She’s on Twitter and she’s very funny as well.
Jenny Wheeler: At this stage in your career, if you were doing it all over again, would you follow exactly the same pathways?
Olivia Hayfield: Yes, I think I would. Looking back, as I say, I’ve had an awful lot of luck. I’ve been working in the book world, in publishing, for a long, long time now and I’m always aware of how lucky I am, because I love books. I’ve always loved books, I’ve always loved writing, and here I am reading and writing, and that’s my life.
What Olivia might do differently
I might have started writing and submitting a little bit earlier, but to be honest, when I was working fulltime and bringing up two children, I couldn’t find the time to write. I honestly don’t know how people do when they’ve got small children, how they find time to write.
I started writing my first children’s novel when my children were probably about 12 and 8. Only then did feel I had the space and the time to sit down and write, so no, I don’t think I would do anything particularly different.
Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned that children’s novel, the last one. Did it have the ending you wanted in terms of finding the agent or getting somebody interested in it?
Olivia Hayfield: No. What happened in the end was it had been sitting on publishers’ desks for a while and my daughter that I mentioned before, she’s 20 now, and she’s really good at art. I had been keeping an eye on her and thinking it would be nice to have some illustrations in this book.
I have self-published books before, so I was watching her thinking, is she ready yet? Finally, she suddenly developed this wonderful style in the last year or two and I said, how do you fancy illustrating this book for me? It’s a novel, so half a dozen illustrations or so. She has been doing those and I’m going to self-publish it with these illustrations.
A children’s story next
I’ve got the distributor all lined up and I’m doing the storylines tour of the South Island later in the year. This book is set in Fiordland and it’s got a very strong conservation theme. There is lots of stuff about New Zealand birds in there so I’m going to use that as an excuse to talk about the importance of conservation and habitat and all this kind of thing.
Kakapo chicks – the world’s largest flightless nocturnal parrot – inspired Sue Copsey’s latest children’s book
I’m going to give all the proceeds to the Kakapo Recovery Team, so it’s not a money-making thing at all. It’s a pet project, if you like. I’m really enjoying it and it’s such a pleasure to work with my daughter on it as well. It’s just a fun thing, that’s all.
Jenny Wheeler: What age group is it aimed at?
Olivia Hayfield: It would be 7-11.
Jenny Wheeler: Sounds lovely. We are starting to run out of time, so what’s next for Olivia as the writer. What have you got on your desk for the next 12 months, new projects under development?
Projects under development
Olivia Hayfield: I’ve finished writing the Richard III novel. I cracked that one in no time because once I start writing, I’m like a demon. I wrote a lot of it in the second lockdown we had last year in September, around that time.
Because I had a two-book deal for the other two, I wasn’t sure whether the publishers would go for it because Richard III isn’t such a glamorous figure, he’s not so well known, but I’m delighted to say that we got an offer for it, so that’s being hammered out at the moment.
The next stage – my editor in London who is brilliant, but she’s tough and she tends to like a lot of rewriting until she’s happy. I foresee a lot of that going on in the next few months. At the same time, I’ll be thinking about who to tackle next, whether I continue with the Tudors or do something completely different.
Finding famous little known women
I’ve been reading up around some other figures like King Arthur and Robin Hood – people that I might be able to tell their stories in the modern day. There are some amazing women in history, but they’re less well known, so it’s finding people that are known, telling their stories and finding those characters that leap out of the history books.
Jenny Wheeler: I interviewed a writer a couple of weeks ago. In America, as you probably are aware, March is Women’s History month, which should be quite good for you as well. Allison Pataki made a specialty of finding these undervalued women in history and writing books about them.
Women’s History Month 2021 on The Joys of Binge Reading
The most recent one she did was about Napoleon’s first love. He nearly married her and then met Josephine, and she was history, but she ended up having a very interesting life.
She’s made a thing about digging out those women and giving them a whole new life, which is an interesting approach as well.
Olivia Hayfield: Yes, you have to look quite hard to find them because history books are mostly written by men. The women were always these background figures, sitting at home sewing shirts and what have you. But there are some remarkable figures. Eleanor of Aquitaine is another one, Katherine Swinford, and Margaret Beaufort – she’s in my latest one, she was an incredible woman. They are there if you look.
The ‘princes in the tower’ disgrace
Jenny Wheeler: Flicking back to Richard III for a moment, probably most people do know him as unfortunately associated with the death of the princes in the tower. Without giving anything away, did you find some interesting things out about him to make him more likable?
Olivia Hayfield: Oh, yes, as you never imagined him before. When I was thinking about who to do next, I had lunch in London with a friend who told me about this book I absolutely had to read called The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.
It’s about a detective in the 1950s who is bedridden, and he’s looking at this portrait of Richard III and he thinks to himself, that doesn’t look like the face of an evil child murderer to me. So, as a detective, he sets out to explore this whole mystery of the princes in the tower, and he comes to quite a different conclusion.
Plantagenets & Tudors ‘bad press’
Of course the Tudors, Henry VII and Henry VIII, saw the Plantagenets as enormous threats. They were still there in the background and they were both always fearing rebellion, so they set out to trash the whole Plantagenet legacy and Richard III got most of that.
Richard III – Good King or villain? Pic – from a portrait by an unknown artist – was it subtly changed by the Tudors to make him look careworn?
There are things like – the most famous portrait of Richard, they added in a hump to make him look more deformed and they put frown lines on his face to make him look more evil. They completely trashed his memory. If you look into Richard, he was a very interesting character, and he was much loved in the North, which he ruled during his brother’s reign.
The evidence around what happened to the princes in the tower is all a bit shaky.
There are other people who might have been involved. What did he have to gain by their deaths? There are all sorts of questions, and there is a whole cohort of people out there called Ricardians who are devoted to rehabilitating his memory. I joined Facebook groups called things like ‘Richard III was innocent’ and watched all these conversations to hear what they had to say, and then drew my own conclusions and wrote the story.
There was a crooked man . . .
Jenny Wheeler: Has that one got a title yet?
Olivia Hayfield: It’s interesting you should say that, because I called it Hunch because it’s a whodunnit and it’s about Richard III. I thought this was quite clever, but the publishers don’t like it. I think they don’t want me drawing attention to the deformity, so at the moment it’s called Olivia Hayfield book three untitled.
I did think about the nursery rhyme ‘there was a crooked man’ because I thought that had a bit of an Agatha Christie vibe to it and Richard was known as Crookback. I threw that one into the mix and I’m waiting to hear back. Or possibly The Lost Boys. We’ll see.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you enjoy hearing from your readers and where can they find you online or where can they find you generally?
Where to find Olivia (Sue) online
Olivia Hayfield: I’m always at home. I have a website and there’s a contact form on there, or Sue Copsey has a website and there’s an email address on there. I really love hearing from readers, I think all authors do. We are shut in our caves, solitary little figures, and if a little email pops in saying, I just want to tell you how much I loved your book, that is so marvelous, so uplifting.
I would say to readers, never think you’re stalking or being weird. We absolutely love to connect with readers. We can’t connect with them at festivals at the moment because they’re not happening, so online is absolutely great.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. We will put links to all of those places in the show notes for this episode so you can find them all online for evermore. We will make sure those go in.
Olivia Hayfield: Thank you.
Jenny Wheeler: Thanks Olivia so much for your time. It’s been fantastic talking and I’m sure when the Richard III book comes out, we’ll do a revisit.
Olivia Hayfield: It’s been really nice talking to someone who gets the books. Thank you so much.
If you enjoyed Olivia’s dual time line trickery you might also enjoy Nicola Upson’s mysteries centered on 1930s writer Josephine Tey – author of The Daughter of Time mentioned by Olivia in her chat.
LISTEN TO NICOLA ON JOSEPHINE TEY
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