Gill Paul – Of Love & Betrayal

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Gill Paul’s latest book, Jackie and Maria, takes two of the world’s most glamorous and privileged women of their time – Jackie Kennedy Onassis and opera star Maria Callas – and offers us a novel about their love of the same man. A man who also happened to be the world’s richest man at that time, Aristotle Onassis.  It’s tagged ‘First comes love, then comes betrayal’ and it’s an addictive read that offers a front-row seat to an infamous rivalry as well as the opportunity to hobnob vicariously with the rich and famous. What’s not to like?

We’re delighted to be giving away three e-book copies of Jackie and Maria to three lucky readers. Enter the draw on The Joys of Binge Reading website or our Facebook page to win a copy of this fascinating read.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

• How a social media post inspired a book
• Two divas in love with the same man
• The secrets Ari kept from Jackie
• Fractured family relationships on both sides
• The next challenge for Gill
• How the pandemic is affecting work

Where to find Gill Paul: 

Website: gillpaul.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gill.paul.16

 Twitter: @GillPaulAuthor

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gill.paul1/

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny Wheeler: But now, here’s Gill.

Hello there, Gill and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Introducing Gill Paul

Gill Paul: Jenny, thank you so much for inviting me back again. It’s lovely to speak to you.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it is the second time we talked and it’s a real pleasure. We got you back because this book you’ve just published, your latest book, is a fascinating one. It’s on a topic that will appeal to many people. But first of all, let’s just clarify. It’s got two different titles, depending on which part of the world you’re reading it in. Tell us about that. Why has it got two titles and where does each one apply?

Gill Paul: It’s so complicated. It’s called Jackie and Maria in the United States and Canada, but my UK publishers decided that the two names weren’t recognizable enough for the British market, so they came up with this other title, The Second Marriage, and that’s the title it will have In Australia and New Zealand as well.

But I do get readers contacting me saying, I’ve read Jackie and Maria, where can I buy The Second Marriage and I have to explain. I hope nobody buys the same book twice.

Jenny Wheeler: It is a bit confusing, but a lot of the publishers do that. I find it a bit unbelievable that the names Jackie and Maria wouldn’t have much resonance in the UK, but there we are. I think we know who you are talking about – Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Maria Callas.

Gill Paul: That’s right.

First comes love, then betrayal

Jenny Wheeler: The tagline for the book is a great one – ‘First comes love, then comes betrayal’. At their time these were the most famous and wealthy women in the world, perhaps. What inspired you to tackle them as a subject?

Gill Paul: It was a reader in Athens who got in touch with me. Her name’s Barbara Douka and she wrote to me on Twitter and said why don’t you write about Maria Callas and Onassis and Jackie Kennedy? Immediately I thought, wow, why didn’t I think of that? It’s such a great story, I don’t know of it having been done in fiction. They are two women I admired from the start and the way their stories come together in this strange, difficult love affair in which they became rivals for the same man is just perfect for a novel. I could see the whole novel in my head right away.

I was so grateful to Barbara by the way. If any of your listeners want to write to me with an idea for a novel I might write, it is the best gift you can give to a novelist and I’ll dedicate the book to you if I use your idea.

The darkness in sunny lives

Jenny Wheeler: Have you met Barbara since then?

Gill Paul: We haven’t met. We’re just social media friends, but I desperately want to go to Athens and meet her. It would be lovely.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. As we’ve said, the two most admired and privileged women in the world, you get this funny feeling of, I wouldn’t want to use the word curse, but they both had very black fate around their lives. I wonder if it’s a bit like Icarus trying to fly too high to the sun. Do you feel there’s an element of that in their stories?

Gill Paul: Maria Callas never wanted to be famous. It was her mother that pushed her to be a singer. Maria wanted to get married, to have children and to be a good Greek housewife, but she was pushed into the music and once she started getting all the reviews, obviously that’s kind of addictive and it’s lovely to have people saying that you’re the greatest soprano that ever lived, which lots of opera experts say about her.

One sought fame, the other did not

But once she met Onassis, she would have quite happily stepped off the opera circuit and just looked after him and been his wife. That’s all she wanted. I don’t think she did chase fame in that way, it came to her. I mean, she did have an extraordinary voice, so that helped it to come to her.

But with Jackie Kennedy, I think she did want a more interesting life. She’d been engaged before John F. Kennedy, she was engaged to a man called John Husted, a stockbroker, and when she looked at the life she would have with him, it seemed too prescribed.

She would have to live in one area and have her country house on the coast and have the exact right number of children and bring them up in the exact way. He was part of a dynasty with a very strong mother and she could see her life mapped out and she didn’t want that. She wanted a more exciting, glamorous life. She wanted to be useful in some way.

Burning with a fierce ambition

And along comes this at the time congressman, John F. Kennedy, with fierce ambition, burning ambition, and she could see that she could really play a role in his life. I think she loved being on the international stage. She didn’t love the invasion of privacy that came with it – all the photographers snapping her whenever she went out and describing her hairstyle and her clothes. But you could say that she sought fame a little bit more than Maria did.

 But in absolutely no way did she deserve what happened to her. Dallas was the most huge, shocking, traumatic event for the world, but imagine what it’s like to be her, which is what I had to do in writing about her, to try and think what it felt like to be sitting next to your husband as he was shot in the head in a car in Dallas.

Jenny Wheeler: Then of course she lost Bobby as well. You can understand why she might have almost been in post-traumatic stress when she was starting to consider Onassis as a possibility. You give the impression in the book that the relationship that each of those women had with Ari Onassis was quite different.

Greek soul and trophy wives

The impression comes through that Maria and Ari were pretty much soulmates. They shared that Greek soul whereas with Jackie it was quite a different thing. Is that fair comment?

Gill Paul: I think so. There’s a lot to be said for the fact that Ari and Maria had the shared Greek heritage. They spoke the same first language, they liked the same food, they had the same outlook on the world from both being Greek, whereas Jackie had very little in common with them.

She was a huge reader, Ari didn’t read books. Jackie loved the arts, and Maria used to make Ari come along and listen to her in the opera but he didn’t enjoy it particularly. He wasn’t particularly creative in that way. But with Maria, they had this whole Greek enjoyment of life.

It’s very hard to understand what Jackie married him for. She had so many other men pursuing her after John died. She had very well qualified men who liked the arts, who had enough money, but Ari came along, as you say, at a time when she was totally shaken by Bobby’s assassination and four months later she married Ari for safety. She thought his money could buy her safety.

An international protector

Jenny Wheeler: She really wanted an international protector didn’t she because you mentioned that there was even some suggestion from the FBI or her security men that some of these nutters were aiming to try and kill her children.

Gill Paul: Yes. The number of death threats against her and her children skyrocketed after Bobby’s assassination. It’s just unthinkable. She said to friends, they’re killing Kennedy’s. My children are Kennedy’s. It must have been terrifying for her, but she hadn’t thought it through. She hadn’t thought through what she was marrying Ari for.

She hadn’t decided where the children were going to be schooled. Maybe when she married him she thought, we can live in Greece, but within two months she was back living in New York again because that’s where her children belonged. That’s where their friends were. That’s where they were established in school.

So not that much changed about her life in that sense, but she had a lot more spending money.

Desperate rivals for the same man

Jenny Wheeler: They did become desperate rivals for the same man, but I got the impression from the book that when Jackie married Ari, he led her to believe that Maria was completely a thing of the past. I think Jackie probably believed that at the beginning, did she?

Gill Paul: I don’t know what she believed. I don’t know if it would have mattered that much to her in the state she was in when she accepted his proposal. It was common knowledge that he’d been with Maria for nine years. They were pictured in the papers the previous November – I mentioned this in the novel – when they came out of a nightclub and reporters were shouting at them, when are you two going to get married and Ari replied, you’re too late, we’re already married.

Jackie would have seen these stories in the paper. I don’t think she was thinking about Maria at all. When Ari proposed and she thought she could see safety, she accepted. She also wasn’t thinking about the fact that her sister Lee had wanted to marry Onassis as well.

Two timing sisters

Lee had had an affair with him earlier on in the sixties and was desperate to get his ring on her finger. I think it was the money that Lee was after rather than anything else. And Jackie didn’t tell her that she was dating him. She didn’t tell her that she was planning to marry him. She got Ari to ring and tell her own sister that they were getting married in a couple of days’ time. It says a lot about their relationship as sisters really.

Jenny Wheeler: And it does say a lot about the way Jackie operated. You could sympathize with Lee feeling a bit betrayed there.

Gill Paul: Absolutely.

Jenny Wheeler: Why do you think Ari didn’t marry Maria when he had many chances?

Gill Paul: Because he had her already. He had never wanted to get divorced from his first wife. He would quite happily have stayed with Tina, kept all his marriage and his children’s inheritance in one place and then had affairs with whoever he wanted to have affairs with.

Onassis never wanted a divorce

But when he got together with Maria Callas it was so public and Tina was so humiliated that she left him. In fact for the first few months he was desperately trying to save that marriage, trying to make her come back because he didn’t want to give away half his fortune or whatever percentage it was.

So when Maria came along, he really didn’t want to get married again and risk that breaking up and giving away more of his fortune. I mean, he was very generous to Maria, but, as I make clear in the novel, I don’t think she was ever after him for his money. I think she absolutely loved him with all the passion of her opera singer’s heart.

It wasn’t about money for her. I have seen her in interviews with Barbara Walters later on in the 1970s. Barbara asked, why didn’t you marry and she said, oh, I didn’t want to marry. But I think she was just being proud then. I think she really would have liked to be his wife, the one who looked after him as he went into old age.

Memento mori

Jenny Wheeler: The other thing that struck me as I was reading it was that they all died relatively young which is so tragic. I don’t think any of them quite made 70. Was Ari 69?

Gill Paul: He was 71, I think. Maria was only 53 when she died of a heart attack which they think was brought on because she was using sleeping pills and tranquilizers, Valium and Xanax and lots of drugs that had just come out in the sixties and people didn’t know what effect they had at the time.

It hadn’t been fully explored and I think she was using a bit too carelessly. She was getting them prescribed by different doctors. She got her sister in Athens to send her boxes when it became difficult to get them in Paris. That obviously put a huge strain on her heart. She died, very sadly at 53.

Jackie died at the age of 64 of Hodgkin’s but I can’t believe that it didn’t have something to do with her lifelong smoking habits. She’d started smoking when she was 15 as a way to keep her weight down and she was a lifelong smoker.

Tragic loss of two sons

She’s very careful not to be photographed smoking. If you google Jackie Kennedy smoking, you can find the odd picture here and there, but she kept it very secret. That can’t have helped because otherwise she was a very fit, active woman.

Then of course all their children had terrible, sad ends. When Ari’s son died and Jackie’s son died in small plane crashes, it’s such a weird coincidence, but in both cases, I don’t think it’s any curse of the Kennedys that magazine journalists talked about at the time. In the case of Ari ‘s son, it was a clear mechanical failure of a part that had been replaced in the plane the day before.

With Jackie’s son, he just wasn’t experienced enough as a pilot flying in the conditions he was flying in. A fog came down as he was flying from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard and what he should have done is to fly instruments only and trust the instruments in the plane rather than trying to get a visual context of where he was, and he wasn’t experienced enough to do it.

He was looking out the window they reckon, trying to steady the plane that way and he went into a dive that he couldn’t come out of. That’s what the air crash investigators decided. Very sad.

Struck down after his son’s death

Jenny Wheeler: You do get a feeling with Ari that he lost his will to live after Alexander died. It had a huge impact on his life.

Gill Paul: Absolutely. Any bereavement has a huge impact on the immune system in the body and it was after Alexander died that Ari was diagnosed with something called Myasthenia gravis which is an autoimmune disease that causes muscle weakness. Myasthenia gravis could be brought on by stressful events in your life so there’s a direct connection there physically, but also I think emotionally, mentally, psychologically, he just didn’t have that drive anymore.

Before Alexander died, he’d been trying to make this huge deal with the Greek government to control shipping of oil supplies for the world, basically. After Alexander died, he let it slip away. He let the businesses go. He didn’t have the appetite for it anymore.

Novelists license at play

Jenny Wheeler: There’s a thread in the story, I hope I’m not giving anything away for people, but Ari and Maria did conceive a child together who obviously unfortunately did not live to full term. Is that a historical fact or is it speculation?

Gill Paul: That was a rumor at the time. There was a child called Omero who was born in that hospital and a rumor sprang up that it had been Maria Callas and Onassis’s child. They didn’t ever comment on that. I don’t think it was. Certainly Maria’s first husband said she was gynecologically incapable of carrying children so I don’t think that’s true. I wish Maria could have had a child. That fantastic voice – it would have been great to have that passed on.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. You make a very nice thread in the novel with that story. It’s woven into it very nicely.

Jackie and Maria never met

Gill Paul: I had to mention it because if you Google them, it’s there. People will have heard of it, so I had to refer to it somehow. And I liked the fact that when Onassis left Maria for Jackie Kennedy, Jackie had a son the age that Maria’s son would have been. It just increased the poignancy.

Jenny Wheeler: You have Jackie at one point very late in the story, after Ari died, saying to Maria, “he clearly should have married you, not me.” That’s a novelist’s license, is it?

Gill Paul: It is. I’m writing about these two amazing women who I admire immensely and, as far as we know, they never met in real life. But as a novelist I couldn’t have these two women, the two strands – I tell the story alternately from Maria’s point of view and Jackie’s point of view – they had to meet at some point. So I have made their paths overlap a couple of times in the novel. That last meeting, when Jackie said he should have married you, is speculation. Would she have said that? I don’t know. I just thought it would have been a nice thing for her to say so that’s why I put it in.

A secret plan for divorce

Jenny Wheeler: The other disclosure for me was, and I think this is historical, that Onassis had been secretly planning to divorce her. In fact, within two years of the marriage he was starting to do sneaky things to try and disengage. That’s pretty amazing too. She didn’t know anything about that.

Gill Paul: No. The deal in marrying Jackie Kennedy didn’t work out for him the way he’d hoped it would. You have to go back to the 1950s when he was arrested in the States and fingerprinted and put in jail overnight with, he said, a load of criminals, over some irregularities with his shipping empires and some ships he bought from the American government after the war.

In the end in 1955, he pled guilty to a minor charge of flying a ship under the wrong flag and paid a fine. But he was so furious with America at the time and so humiliated by this, that he took all his businesses off to Europe. He closed down his shipbuilding in the States, he closed his offices and he moved back to Europe.

‘Jackie Marries Blank Cheque’

That really stuck in his craw. He wanted to get back into the American market but more than that, he wanted to win their approval and admiration and he thought by marrying their grieving widow, John F Kennedy’s widow, he would get the kind of respect in the States that he felt was his due.

Instead, because he was 23 years older and came along and whisked her away so quickly, the American press was hostile. There were headlines like Jackie Marries Blank Check. All the stories were portraying him as this sad sugar daddy type, so it completely went the opposite to the effect that he’d been hoping to have. Instead of getting respect, he was a laughingstock in some ways.

Also, he had a wife who was living on the other side of the Atlantic from him because he had to be based in Europe for his businesses most of the time and she stayed in New York, except for coming to spend her summers in Greece. And she was hugely expensive. He gave her this massive allowance per month and still she was sending more bills to his Olympic Airways office.

How a wife should be

When he went back to Maria he realized, this is what a wife should be like. I don’t think I’m giving too much away about the story to say that he did resume his affair with Maria after marriage and was very close to her. They resumed their closeness.

So this marriage was not working for Ari and yes, he was trying to divorce her, but it was moving very slowly because as we’ve seen, his money meant a lot to him and he didn’t want to give away too much of it in any divorce settlement.

Jenny Wheeler: Did he achieve his goal in the end? She still got a pretty good settlement, didn’t she?

Gill Paul: She did. In fact it was Christina Onassis, his daughter, who really fought her in the end to limit the amount she got. I think she walked away with 26 million which she invested really wisely and was set up for life basically.

Jenny Wheeler: You didn’t take the temptation of going on further to her relationship with Maurice Tempelsman because I see that he was the one who probably was mainly responsible for hugely growing that legacy she got from Onassis. She had a very happy relationship with him for the last decade of her life, didn’t she?

President – ‘the love of her life’

Gill Paul: Although from all I’ve read theirs was a companionship rather than a particularly passionate relationship. My impression is that John F. Kennedy was the great love of her life.

Jenny Wheeler: It would be hard to top that with all of the adrenalin drama that was involved, I guess.

You travel a lot to research your books, I know we’ve talked about this in the past.  What kind of travel did you have to do for this one, and also I’ve read somewhere that you said it took a lot longer to finish it than you’d first expected. Tell us a little about the process.

Gill Paul: The difficulty with Jackie and Maria/The Second Marriage is that I wanted to be very even handed in the way I treated the two women. That was very important to me. I didn’t want to be on one side or the other. I think a lot of readers will be coming to it already knowing about Jackie Kennedy, about the fact that she’d been married to the president who was shot. They have that knowledge and she gets automatic sympathy because of that.

Creating a fair account to both

Whereas Maria Callas, if you know anything about her at all, then you may have heard that she was quite a difficult demanding woman, called a diva by the newspapers at the time.

I wrote and rewrote the beginning chapters. It’s in the beginning of a book that readers make up their mind about characters, whether they like them or not, and I wrote and rewrote those chapters to try and get you to care about Maria as well as Jackie, and to care about what happens to both of them, to feel sympathy for both of them. That’s my goal in the book anyway.

In terms of research, I tend to do my location research after I’ve written the first draft because I’m not writing in huge detail about the location – just a few brush strokes to help you feel the atmosphere. The plot and the character are my main drivers and so I go to the locations usually after I’ve finished a first draft and then I can get a few details that will bring it to life, hopefully.

The magic of Skorpios

The most fun research trip I did for this one was to Skorpios, to Onassis’ private island in the Ionian Islands in Greece. What a hardship it was. So beautiful, just stunning. I’ve been to other Greek islands, I hadn’t been to the Ionians before and they’re much greener, they’re further north they’re all covered in trees, different kinds of deciduous trees and beautiful blue, sparkling water.

Skorpios is a private island that’s owned now by a Russian billionaire. We stayed in a nearby Island and hired a motorboat and my partner and I drove out there and went round a few times and a security guard came out in his boat and asked us to leave and he had a gun in his holster, so I thought, okay.

But then we drove round to the next bay. I really wanted to go with shore. We drove around to the next bay and I dived off the boat and swam ashore and I’ve got some photographs of me standing on the shore and I picked up a little acorn and a seashell. It was Jackie’s private beach, I later found out and I got them as souvenirs.

Jenny Wheeler: Very cool.

Gill Paul: Jackie was a big swimmer and I love swimming as well so I could see what she loved about being on that Island. The water is absolutely crystal clear, and you could swim quite easily from one bay to the next around there. There are really good routes that you could swim. I could see why she would love it and it’s stunning landscape.

Memories of Aristotle

But also in the Island that we were staying on, which is Lefkada, I wandered round Lefkada Town and I came across an old man who had a museum of the phonograph in his front room. He had a little sign up and he had a collection of rare recordings and so forth. He told me about a time when Maria and Aristotle came for dinner in Lefkada and she stood up and gave an impromptu concept and he’d been there. He had a couple of photographs. He said it was one of the fondest memories of his life.

Jenny Wheeler: How amazing.

Gill Paul: Little things like that. That didn’t make its way in the novel, but it was lovely to hear. They are local heroes. There’s a statue of Aristotle along the quay there and a lot of restaurants have a dish that was said to be his favorite dish, which is this enormous cholesterol-heavy thing of veal and pork and cheese and tomato. I ordered it one night and took a photograph of it and I thought I can’t actually eat that, it was so greasy. That was said to be his favorite meal. I had a lot of fun researching this one for sure.

Undeserved reputations

Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned sympathy and I wondered, did you feel more sympathy for one or the other and did that feeling change as you wrote the book?

Gill Paul: I felt that Maria needed reassessment more than Jackie did, because so many biographies carry on this image of the difficult woman. I think it’s a feminist thing but when somebody calls a woman difficult and you look at the reasons, the reasons were for example, that she was so perfectionist about her craft.

If she had a concert due, she would ask the orchestra to stay and keep rehearsing until she was absolutely ready. Maybe that made her unpopular. There were little dramas with other opera singers at La Scala, around the world, that were blown up by the Press Office to get people to come to concerts. It was all manufactured, mostly.

The other thing with Maria is that her own mother spoke out against her. She gave an interview to a Time magazine journalist saying how difficult Maria was as a daughter. Then she wrote a memoir saying, bizarrely, that Maria had been in a car accident at the age of five and it had made her a really twisted bitter character, which there’s no evidence for at all.

Callas had a difficult family life

I thought, with mothers like that, who needs enemies? It’s horrible. She really got the short straw with families. So the more I read, the more I was disbelieving all these people saying that she was a difficult character. What I noticed, reading between the lines, was that she had a large, extremely loyal group of friends and that made me like her. That was the first step, I felt I was getting to know her.

With Jackie Kennedy. I came with far more preconceived ideas, so I wasn’t reassessing her quite so much but for myself, I wanted to answer the questions. Why did she stay with a man who was unfaithful to her on an industrial scale? I’m talking about John F. Kennedy. We now know that he was sleeping with everybody. That was one question, but also why did she marry Onassis when she had so many other choices there? What was she thinking of? She didn’t have anything in common with him. So I kept reading and forming my own picture until I thought I could understand it. Now I’m not saying this is the truth.

A desire to ‘not rock the boat’

I’ve written a novel, but I try to put myself into their shoes and see what it must have felt like to be them and come up with a version of them that feels emotionally true to me. I guess there’s a bit of my thinking in there as well. I’m definitely not saying I’ve got the right answer.

Jenny Wheeler: I think another of the Jackie books I read has even hinted that her sister Lee may have even dallied with JFK herself when he was Jackie’s husband. So not much loyalty on either side, was there?

Gill Paul: Lee’s first husband, Michael Canfield, claims he overheard her having sex with JFK in the next room but perhaps he was bitter because she did divorce him. One friend of Jackie’s said she knew about it at the time and with her icy cool decided not to rock the boat. Odd decisions.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. It is The Joys of Binge Reading so we want to quickly check back with you on what you might be reading now and anything you’ve got to recommend for us. What are you into at the moment?

What Gill is reading now

Gill Paul: I’ve been reading loads of historical fiction this summer because I’m a judge of the Historical Writers Association novel competition at the moment, which has been wonderful. I’ve been forced to read Ancient Roman, Greek, Medieval and all kinds of historical fiction that I wouldn’t normally pick up myself and discovered some wonderful books.

One of them I’d really like to mention – and by the way, the judges haven’t chosen the winner yet, but one of my favorites is by Sarah Leipciger and it’s called Coming Up for Air. She’s a Canadian author I’d never heard of before and her novel is set in three different time periods with different characters, different countries, which can be a difficult thing to do but I was quickly absorbed in each of the stories.

There’s one in 1890’s Paris as a young girl is about to jump off a bridge into the Seine at night and kill herself. There’s a toymaker in Norway in the 1950s living in the islands, a very tough lifestyle, very harsh. And then there’s a girl in 1980s-90’s Ottawa in Canada who has cystic fibrosis and every morning has to clear her lungs in order to stay alive.

A three-stranded story

It’s about breathing and swimming and drowning and that fine line between being alive and not being alive anymore. It’s a beautifully written book and the three plots, which are equally absorbing, come together in such a clever way. I can’t tell you how they come together, but it’s so clever. I love it.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve mentioned swimming a number of times and I know that when we talked last time you confessed how you swim year round in London in an open air pool in the park near you. Have you been able to continue with that through COVID?

Gill Paul: This it’s going to make me sound so spoiled, but the worst thing about lockdown for me was that my pond closed for four months while they figured out ways to make it COVID safe. It reopened in July and I’m going there every day at the moment, but we have to book a time slot and go in a very organized way now. So I haven’t got that spontaneity, I can’t just finish writing a chapter and think I’ll swim now. I missed it terribly while it was gone.

How the pandemic restricts work

Jenny Wheeler: Is COVID also restricting your research for your next book?

Gill Paul: Interestingly, lockdown was very helpful for my next book because I finished first draft back in January, but I wasn’t happy with it. I showed it to a few people and they said, oh yes, we really like it. I liked the middle and the ending, but I wasn’t convinced I had the right beginning.

This is my 10th novel, Jenny. You would think I’d know how to do it by now, but each novel has its own challenges and difficulties that it throws up. So during lockdown I tried it with six different beginnings and you can’t just change the beginning, you’ve then got to change it all the way through. I found the one I think is the best and I’ve sent it to my editor and now I’m waiting to get the edits back.

I think without lockdown it would have been very hard to get that total immersion and concentration that this book needed.

Gill’s next project

Jenny Wheeler: Can you tell us anything about that book?

Gill Paul: I will. In November 1922, the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in Egypt in the Valley of the Kings. When you look at the black and white photographs of the time, there’s Howard Carter the archaeologist, there’s Lord Carnarvon the sponsor of the dig and there’s a very short woman standing between them and her name is Lady Evelyn Herbert.

She was in fact the first person to crawl inside the tomb for 3,500 years and see the treasures inside. She’s been written out of history, and I love finding women who have been written out of history that I can write back in. I tell her story from two different points in her life – about how this discovery of the most amazing tomb ever discovered changed her life in particular. That will be coming out in Autumn 2021.

Jenny Wheeler: Have you got anything else on the go?

Gill Paul: You’re pushing me now. I do have a new idea that I’ve brainstormed with my American editor but I’m not at the stage where I’m able to divulge. You’ll be the first.

Finding Gill online

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. I know you’ve got a whole host of popular readers and you’re sold all over the world. Funnily enough, I was googling historical fiction on the amazon.com.au site today, seeing what different books might be selling in Australia from other countries and there you were, happily in the top 10.

Gill Paul: Really? I didn’t know that so that’s wonderful news. Thank you.

Jenny Wheeler: I think it was The Secret Wife actually.

Gill Paul: That’s so exciting.

Jenny Wheeler: All over the world. So where can readers reach you and how can they reach you?

Gill Paul: I’m very easy to reach and I love it when readers get in touch. I always reply. I’ve got a website with a contact button and that’s gillpaul.com. I’m on Facebook and Twitter as GillPaulAuthor and I’m on Instagram, on gill.paul1. I’d love to hear from any of your listeners who want to get in touch.

Jenny Wheeler: We’ll put all those links into the show notes for this episode so they will be up there for evermore as a permanent record online. People will be able to find it in another few months.

Gill Paul: Thank you so much. What great questions you came up with today.

Open for Book Club Zoom sessions

Jenny Wheeler: I did cheat a little bit because, as you well know, you’ve got some lovely stimulating questions at the back of the book for Book Clubs. Have you had Book Clubs coming and getting involved with it?

Gill Paul: I haven’t. It’s only just out in America and Britain. It comes out in Britain tomorrow, this is the day before the British pub date.

Jenny Wheeler: So it’s very new.

Gill Paul: I am happy to do Skype, FaceTime and Zoom calls to book groups if they want, if we could make the time difference work.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely because there were some really stimulating questions there. I did manage to find quite a few of my own but there were a few that got me thinking.

Lovely to catch up and thank you so much. All the best with your sales for this book.

Gill Paul: Thank you so much. All the best to you too.

Jenny Wheeler: Bye.

Gill Paul: Bye.

What’s Next?

If you enjoyed Jackie and Maria you may also enjoy Stephanie Barron’s Controversial History podcast interview about her book on the life of Jenny Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s American mother.

LISTEN TO STEPHANIE BARRON ON JOBR

Thanks To Our Technical Support:

The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at dcaudioservices@gmail.com or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with.

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