In time for Valentine’s Day, Josie Silver has released her hotly anticipated new novel – One Night on the Island – that follows the 2019 release of One Day in December. Here, we interview Josie about the success of her last release, her love of rom coms and just what she wanted to achieve with One Night on the Island.
Congratulations on One Night on the Island! I’m not sure how you managed to top the plot for One Day in December, but you did just that. How did the writing process for this novel compare to your others?
Well, it was written against the backdrop of Covid, which certainly changed the logistics of how I work on a day-to-day basis. I had a writing studio installed at the bottom of the garden just before the pandemic kicked in, and it became more of a teenage classroom for a while with both of our sons suddenly at home. Like parents all around the world I found myself suddenly juggling a lot more balls than normal – amateur teacher, full-time mum, and mentally stressed out by generalised uncertainty and anxiety. Writing went out of the window for a while back there, I just couldn’t settle enough to be productive. Thankfully things shifted subtly as time went on – I turned back to writing as a form of escape from all the tough stuff going on around me.
The initial spark for One night on the Island was certainly drawn from the lock-down experience, two people thrown together under one roof, but beyond that I made a conscious effort to avoid any other direct parallels or specific pandemic references. I for one don’t want to read about it once (if!) it’s ever a distant memory!
Once I was back into a writing routine again I really looked forward to my daily visits to Salvation Island. It became my go-to place for mental sanctuary; walking the hills and shores with Mack, drinking coffee on the porch steps at Otter Lodge with Cleo, curling up in an overstuffed armchair at the knitting circle. It was cathartic for me, and hopefully it will offer similar respite to readers too.
A main thread running through the novel is the idea of being at one with yourself – Cleo escapes London in order to achieve that. Was any of that impacted by the pandemic and our own retreats to simpler lives and in so doing, discovering more about ourselves?
I guess it was, to some extent – everything in my head was inevitably viewed through the pandemic lens. We were all stripping our lives back and thinking about what was truly essential, and Cleo finds herself unexpectedly doing exactly that too. She’d become immersed in her busy, fast-paced London life and lost sight of what was genuinely important. Relocating to the isolation of Salvation Island gives her the chance to breathe deeply and listen to her gut, and to reconnect with someone she’d inadvertently side-lined – herself. We’ve seen echoes of that all across society during the pandemic, haven’t we? People re-evaluating their home lives, changing careers, relocating their families. We’ve all had a sharp lesson in not taking stability for granted and in not putting things off, and Cleo experiences much the same thing. She discovers that the life she thought she loved wasn’t serving her as well as she believed it to be. Being removed from the situation allows her to see that there are other ways to live, and other, more simple ways to feel truly content.
Mack similarly undergoes his own transformative experience on Slanu that a lot of people will be all too familiar with. As someone who herself is happily married, how difficult was it to write that kind of painful journey to acceptance?
Mack has my whole heart, he really goes through the emotional wringer during his time on the island. He’s at his emotional rock-bottom when he arrives, and the last thing he wants or needs is more complications in his life. He’s profoundly lonely and all of the certainties in his life have been pulled from beneath him, leaving him floundering as both a man and a father. All of his nuts and bolts have been loosened, he needs putting back together carefully so as not to be forever broken. I think we can all relate to elements of Mack’s situation – most of us have had our hearts broken and our trust tested at some point. His time on the island is transformative, and not only because of Cleo. He has ancestral connections to Salvation, and feels very nourished and held by the simplicity of the land and the kindness of its people. They fold him into the community and give him somewhere safe to lay out the pieces of his life and works out which bits still belong in his future.
The sense of community that Cleo experiences is so pivotal to her journey, in discovering real friendship. How important was that to have as a backdrop woven throughout Cleo’s story (particularly in comparing her London life and friendship to that on Slanu)?
The residents of the island play a huge part in Cleo’s journey. She grew up as the much-loved baby of her family, and in London she’s surrounded by a revolving door of colleagues and friends. Spending time on the island allows her to see how her London friendships have been based on convenience more than real connection, and opens her eyes to what true friendship and sisterhood looks like. I think she needed that – she was living her life at surface level, surrounded by white noise. The pulsing beat of London, the roar of city life always in her ears. The community on the island come as a complete surprise; their love and loyalty, their shared experience, the sense of being part of a family, of sorts. She finds a rich seam of colourful humanity who open her eyes, and her heart, to so much more than she anticipated.
Cleo’s struggles with dating are something very familiar to many. How important was it to remove her from that setting and those disappointments in order to find Mack?
Well, she gets paid to write a dating column, so relentlessly throwing her hat in the romance ring is something she’s super familiar with in London. It also means she’s endured more bad dates and disappointments than she otherwise might have, and the cumulative effect of those experiences have definitely left her with a jaded been there, done that attitude to dating. Had she met Mack in a London bar or park, would she have had the same disappointing experience? Quite possibly! She’d become stuck in a groundhog day dating nightmare, so stepping out of that situation was probably essential to her being able to look at things, and people, in a different light. Being thrown together with Mack is the last thing she, or he for that matter, wants. There is no expectation of romance on either side, or even of liking each other enough to make civil conversation. It could be that the lack of expectation frees Cleo up to be more herself than she’s usually able to.
You clearly love love stories, but write with so many fresh perspectives and humour. How do you keep it fresh and not fall into cliches and tropes?
I do love love stories, both written and on screen. Cut me through the middle and you’d see romance written through me like a stick of seaside rock! I’m actually quite fond of the usual tropes, I especially like to see them when they’re told in new, inventive ways. I love to include a big cast of secondary characters and subplots in my stories, family and friends bring the main characters to life on the page as we see them interact as sisters, grandchildren, parents and friends. Real communities are made up of a mix of ages, cultures and attitudes, and there’s always room for a couple of really funny characters for people to lighten the mood! Female relationships often feature strongly in my books. I’m drawn to writing sisters and friends – the knitting circle scenes in One Night on the Island were amongst my favourite to write. I love the loyalty and ease between them, the kind of sisterhood that can only happen after years of tangled lives and shared experiences. They know each really well, and it comes out as a shorthand kind of love.
Did you struggle with wrapping up the ending happily, given a lot of the message of the book was around Cleo’s self-coupling?
It was never going to be a cookie-cutter ending. Mack’s life back in Boston is full and complicated, and the more time Cleo spends on the island the more she unravels and her priorities shift. She becomes very rooted, while at the same time learning to love and prioritise herself, to listen to her gut and trust her instincts. Tempting as it would be to tie everything up neatly with a bow, I don’t think it would have been true to the story. My aim was to leave readers feeling hope and positivity for Cleo and Mack. Fingers crossed, anyway!
