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Jane Green has eighteen New York Times best sellers and ten million in sales in the woman’s fiction genre with several books picked up by film and TV. Her latest Sister Stardust is her first foray into biographical fiction, telling the story of international jet-setter Talitha Getty, wife of mega rich heir Paul Getty, and their rock and roll life in Marrakesh in the sixties.
Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler. And on Binge Reading today, Jane talks about her fascination for Talitha Getty, the woman who had everything and lost it all, and offers some fascinating insights into where she sees popular fiction going in the next few years.
As usual, we’ve got great books to give away this week historical books featuring strong female leaders. I’ve got Sadie’s bow in there. The first in my new trilogy home at last,
Why not download that and read it in time for the release of Susannah’s Secret book two in the series before Christmas.
You’ll find all the details on the show notes for this episode. At the joys of binge reading dot. dot com
And remember, if you enjoy what you hear, add review of the show on your favorite podcast site so others can hear about us too.
Links to things mentioned in the show:
The Beach House, Jane Green: https://www.amazon.com/Beach-House-Jane-Green/dp/0452295386
Mary Jane: Jessica Anya Blau: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54870208-mary-jane
Hippies: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1967/09/the-flowering-of-the-hippies/306619/
Summer of Love: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2007/may/27/escape
Haight Ashbury: https://thehauntghosttours.com/blog/tips-for-visiting-haight-ashbury-neighborhood/
Sister Stardust Spotify playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3Fmk66fV8bBaAtTDx2LzaJ?si=wQXWe4OfQhmpKvcnLzfFxA
Straight Talking: Jane Green; https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Talking-Novel-Jane-Green/dp/0767915593
High Fidelity, Nick Hornby: https://www.amazon.com/High-Fidelity-Nick-Hornby/dp/1573225517
Bridget Jones Diary, Helen Fielding: https://www.amazon.com/Bridget-Joness-Diary-Helen-Fielding/dp/014028009X
Rainbow Girl, Jane Green story in podcast form: https://www.janegreen.com/2022/10/rainbow-girl-a-new-audio-drama-set-in-the-rock-star-world-of-1979-available-now/
Emerald Audio: https://emeraldaudio.net/podcasts/rainbow-girl/
Jane Green; The lifestyle brand: https://www.janegreen.com/figless-manor/
Good Assassins Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6TUFsoI45qbWNEZF2Wb5pr
Root of Evil podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5pi39okDAFEW9h9d3iA9Z1
Jean Hanff Korelitz: The Plot; https://www.amazon.com/Plot-Jean-Hanff-Korelitz/dp/125079076X
Jean Hanff Korelitz: The Latevomer; https://www.amazon.com/Latecomer-Jean-Hanff-Korelitz/dp/1250790794
A M Homes: The Unfolding; https://www.amazon.com/Unfolding-Novel-M-Homes/dp/0735225354
A M Homes: May We Be Forgiven: https://www.amazon.com/May-We-Be-Forgiven-Novel/dp/014750970X
Where to find Jane online:
Website: www.janegreen.com
Facebook: facebook.com authorJane Green
Instagram: @Janegreenauthor
Podcasts: Emerald Audio: https://emeraldaudio.net/podcasts/rainbow-girl/
Introducing author Jane Green
Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Jane. Hello there, Jane, and welcome to the show. It’s wonderful to have you with us.
Jane Green: Hi, Jenny. It’s great to be. here
Jenny Wheeler: You’re a top woman’s fiction author. There’s no disputing that you’ve got eighteen New York Times best sellers and 10 million books in print. But this latest book is just a slight change in direction for you. It’s still very much women’s fiction, but it is bio fiction. It’s based on a real person and that person is Talitha Getty, one of the Paul Getty wives.
And it’s based in Marrakesh in the late sixties. Now, what attracted you to this story and to slightly change in your direction?
Jane Green: Actually to slightly change in your direction?
I joined a new publisher, Harper Collins, and I was all set to write a sequel to The Beach House, and then out of nowhere, my new editor suddenly said, Jane, have you ever thought of doing historical fiction? And I immediately thought of World War II books because I know a ton of authors who write World War II books.
But I have spent my whole life slightly obsessed with this woman Talitha Getty after seeing a photograph of her when I was a teenager. She was Incredibly beautiful and very glamorous. And she was crouching on a rooftop in Marrakesh, in this beautiful embroidered caftan. And I said to him historical fiction? Do the sixties count?
A historic story set in the Swinging Sixties
And because he’s 12 years old, he said yes. And so I thought I really would love to know more about this woman, because she was a muse of Yves St Laurent. She was married to the son of the richest man in the world. She was best friends with the Rolling Stones. And yet she died very tragically, very young of a heroin overdose.
And there’s very little written about her. So her whole life was something of a mystery. So this gave me the opportunity to do a deep dive and really find out about,
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Now, as you say, historical fiction definitely does now start in the 1960s, which were some us who were in their teens in the 1960s seems a bit strange, but it does. And World War II books must almost be reaching their peak because they’ve been popular for so long now, and quite a number of people have chosen this niche of sixties and particularly music related fiction.
I’m thinking of people like Taylor Jenkins Read who did, I can’t even remember the book now, but the one
Jane Green: Yes, Daisy Jones and the Six. Taylor Jenkins Read and then Malibu Rising and Jessica Anya Blau did Mary Jane. There’ve been lots of books about the sixties, but interestingly, they’ve been very, Americans, so they’re very much Laurel Canyon or Malibu, obviously, as you can hear from my accent, I am not I am American.
The Sixties were different in Europe
I’m a naturalized American, but I was born and brought up in London and I was born in the sixties, but my. Vision of the sixties, my version of the sixties, the stories that I grew up hearing from my parents were all London based and so the European sixties was very different.
In America, it was all the hippies and Summer of Love and Woodstock and Haight Ashbury and San Francisco. Whereas in Europe it was much more, the influences came from India and Asia and North Africa particularly. So it was a very different kind of sixties, and of course you had London bursting into color and becoming the epicenter of the psychedelic sixties with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who were the gods of that time?
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Now as we’ve mentioned the Rolling Stones feature quite prominently in it, and I. wonder if you prepared a playlist for the book, as you’ve mentioned a lot of music in it. You obviously have done a lot of research into the music of the Rolling Stones and the sixties generally. Did you love that part of it?
Jane Green: Yeah, it was huge fun. Actually I made a soundtrack, which is in fact available on Spotify. So if you go onto Spotify and put in Sister Stardust under playlists, you’ll find the Sister Stardust playlist, which is actually all the music that I listened to while I was writing this to keep me in the mood.
A 60s and 70s playlist for the book
And it’s really music from 1966 to 1971, and it’s specifically the music that was in the charts in England and also music that I know that Talitha Getty was listening to at that time. She really liked Dolly Parton, I found that sort of fascinating and unexpected.
Jenny Wheeler: So how do you know that she was listening to that music? Did you manage to get hold of letters or diaries or some very personal reference point for knowing that?
Jane Green: I did speak to a couple of people who were very close with her, although most people didn’t want to revisit the past. It was really hard getting people to talk. I also think because she died so young and so tragically, and her husband was somehow culpable in her death. But I think the family closed ranks, which is why I think there is so little known about her.
So I had to come at it sideways, and I made lists and lists of anybody who might have come into contact with her, or anybody who was ever photographed with her or mentioned with her. And then I read everything about them, and it was really like searching for a needle in a haystack. And every now and then, I’d stumble upon a paragraph or a page and sometimes a few pages in somebody else’s book, and it was just glorious.
Talitha Getty’s tragic end
And it took almost a year. And by the end of that research I really felt that I had a very good sense of who she was.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Tell us a little bit about the circumstances of her death. She had been clean of the heroin, she claimed for quite a period of time, but then she went back to visit her husband and very suddenly died of an overdose. He basically fled out of the jurisdiction so he escaped really being questioned on it, didn’t he? Tell us a bit about that.
Jane Green: I there are a few accounts of her death her last couple of years, she had a baby in 1968, which brought thyroid problems that she was struggling with. She was struggling with terrible depression. Not that you’d ever know. because actually I think really, the thing with Talitha is she was brought up in the Dutch East Indies in the prison camps after the Japanese invaded and.
And it was terribly traumatic because the guards would torture the children. And I think she carried that trauma with her and her drug of choice was really people she couldn’t bear to be on her own. And she always surrounded herself with people and parties, so you wouldn’t necessarily have known.
The Getty family closed ranks
But they separated she and her husband after she had the baby and he was living in Rome and she went back to their wonderful house in Chelsea, in, in London, in Cheyne Walk. And the story that I have heard that feels like it’s the most likely is that she was clean. Heroin was never a big problem for her anyway.
It was really her husband, Paul, who was the heroin addict. Alcohol was much more her thing. She knew that she loved him, but I think she also knew that he would destroy her. She flew to Rome to serve him with divorce papers, but one version of the story is that she tried to seduce him and he rejected her. She then went into a bedroom in his apartment and took a huge heroin over.
And at the time was so deep in his addiction that he didn’t know. And that’s the thing that he was an addict and he was struggling himself. There were people in and out the apartment all night long, and he kept looking in on her and thought she was sleeping, when in fact she was dying.
And by the time they realized it, was too late. But yes, Italy at the time had a mandatory ten year sentence for possession of heroin, so he left and never returned, as far as I know.
Opening closed doors on family life
Jenny Wheeler: Very sad. The rest of your work very much deals with family issues, people struggling with life’s challenges, and I’m thinking of a recent one, The Sunshine Sisters, about a narcissistic mother who has alienated her three daughters.
As she faces a serious illness at the end of her life, she has this urge to call on them for help and try and get the family all rallied together again. And it’s a wonderful way to start a story. And a lot of your stories have been those kinds of stories, haven’t they?
Jane Green: Yeah I’m really in human nature and why we do the things we do. And I’m interested in the dark sides and also this whole concept of not knowing what goes on behind closed doors and that we so often think that other people have easier, better. I don’t know, more lavish or whatever it is, but better lives than we do.
And actually we never know. So I quite like opening those closed doors taking a look at what’s really going on. And it’s often quite dark and quite difficult and traumatic. And I like helping my protagonists overcome adversity and overcome the challenges of their childhood to carve out some version of a peaceful life for themselves.
Jane’s serendipitous author’s start
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic look 10 million books sold. New York Times best sellers. How did you get started on this road?
Jane Green: I was a journalist and I was working for the Daily Express in the UK and a friend of mine out of nowhere wrote a book and suddenly phoned me up one night to say that she had a publishing deal.
And I remember thinking hang on. She’s not even a writer, she’s not historian. I’m a writer.
If she can do it, I can do it. And I just thought I’m gonna do this as well. And I, My first book was called Straight Talking, and at the time, I’d just read Nick Hornby’s book, High Fidelity, and it was a book that seemed to be the story of every single 30 something man I knew.
And I thought no one’s doing this for women, so I’m going to do, I’m gonna write about my life and my girlfriends.
Of course, little did I know that Helen Fielding was. sitting in a flat in Ladbroke Grove about mile up the road from me writing Bridget Jones’ diary. But I was very lucky because that book was such a huge success that my first book came out about three months later and the press seized upon this and said, Oh, this is new genre. This is Chicklit.
Welcome to the world of ‘chick-lit’
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. You knew which way the wind was blowing.
Jane Green: Yeah. Exactly. I was very lucky. Wish I knew, well actually, I think I do know which way the wind is blowing. Which isn’t necessarily great for books, but storytelling will continue.
Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely. Storytelling will, and that leads us back to your historical fiction. Do you think you’ll do any more historical fiction?
Jane Green: I actually have, interestingly, a podcast coming out on October the 13th, which is a scripted fiction series and it’s set in 1979. And it’s a standalone, but you don’t have to have read Sister Stardust to enjoy this,. A rock star couple who featured in Sister Stardust.
It’s about Eddie Albright and Lissy Hillary who now have a son and they live in Sleepy Hollow, New York and. It’s 1979, so it’s Studio 54 and disco. but it’s absolute chaos. And Lissy is diving into drugs and black magic and it all ends in a terrible tragedy. And that’s called Rainbow Girl.
And actually that’s on amazon.com/rainbow Girl or wherever you listen to podcast. You can follow it.
A Rainbow Girl sequel on podcast series
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. And how many episodes?
Jane Green: There are six half hour episodes and we have a full cast of actors. And it’s really exciting cuz it’s a new way of telling stories and I am passionate about podcasts, so thank you very much for inviting me to be on your show. And I think that we are all so busy now
I find it much harder to set aside the time to watch TV show or read a book, whereas podcasts accompany me wherever I go and whatever I do, if I’m cleaning, if I’m walking, if I’m driving, if I’m ironing, I’m always listening to podcasts and we are bringing fiction to podcasts, female driven fiction to podcasts.
Jenny Wheeler: When you say we, who? Who is doing it with you?
Jane Green: Ah, so I have actually been brought in to partner on running a podcast network called Emerald Audio.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh wow.
Jane Green: I’ve taken my writers cap off for a while and I’m back in business and And finding and producing these fantastic fiction series, a bit like the old fashioned radio plays that we grew up with that serialized and it’s lovely and I’m having a blast.
A lifestyle brand at the Mouse House
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. That does actually morph beautifully into I was going to ask you about your lifestyle brand because I guess as your life moved on, you start with the chicklet, but now you’re very much a family person with a family and you’ve got a following as a lifestyle brand. In your own right with your cooking and your gardening, and you’ve got a wonderful entry in your on your website about your home, which you call Figless Manor and explain why it’s called Figless Manor.
Tell us how all of that evolved.
Jane Green: [00:16:00] Well, I think I’m just a natural nester. I’m really a homebody. I don’t like leaving my house, and that means that wherever I live, I have to create something that is not only very beautiful because I, I do a bit of. Bit of beauty around me, but also very warm and cozy. I’m all about the cozy and in fact, Fless Manor was a house that we built a few years ago, but now we are in the mouse house.
All our homes have ridiculous names cuz they make me laugh. But the Mouse House is called The Mouse House because it’s just teeny tiny. We are in a teeny tiny little beach cottage. But because I don’t like leaving my home very much, what I do is I gather the people I love in my home and I feed them and I feed them the kinds of.
Natural home maker turned influencer
Food that makes them feel nurtured and safe and loved. And honestly, I’m not trying to be an influencer, but over the years, I’ve posted all these pictures on Instagram and I’ve ended up with. I don’t know, a huge number of followers who like the way I live and I’m quite outspoken as well.
I was born with the honesty gene. And so I’m quite I’m quite authentic and I’m not afraid to also discuss aging and the things that I’m going through that I’m thinking about and reading about and writing about, whether it’s like letting my gray hair come in, which I did two years ago.
And also how I wrote a piece last week in the Daily Mail about how having gray hair is so fascinating. I expected to be invisible to men, but I didn’t expect to be invisible to women. And what’s happened during Covid is we’ve had this huge surge of young, I call them the yummy mummies, all the yummy mummies from New York City who are all kind of 29 to 31.
A new world of ‘yummy mummies’
They’re babies really. And they’ve all moved to town and I feel like before I turned gray, I’d still get a once over in a restaurant. I’d still get a ‘Oh, she’s cool.’ Or ‘oh what’s she wearing?’ What are her boots? Now they don’t even see me. I may as well be wearing Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak.
So I wrote a piece about that last week because I’m just fascinated by all of.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you? Do you mind?
Jane Green: Sometimes I do, but I also absolutely adore getting older I’m 54 and this is my favorite decade yet. I’m loving my fifties because of the freedom it gives you . When I turned 50, I spent so much of my life feeling that I wasn’t good enough and trying very hard to fit in.
And actually when I turned 50, I remember so clearly thinking, You’ve got to figure this out, Jane. Now you are 50.
Figure out who the hell are you and what kind of life do you want to lead? And I realized that not only do I not fit in. I don’t want to fit in. Actually, I spent all those years like buying the clothes that everybody else wore and trying so hard and now I’m like, God, I love wearing my kind of funky flares and my ridiculous clothes, and I like standing out and I love the sixties and the seventies, and I’d much rather be in something vintage.
Falling in love with Marrakesh
And I’m passionate about Morocco and also I don’t feel the need to please anybody anymore, and I don’t really care. If you don’t like me, it’s fine. Go do your thing. So I find it very liberating. I’m really loving this decade.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. And just looking back to Marrakesh, and I was going to ask you if you went to Marrakesh to research Sister Stardust. I gather because you love Morocco. Perhaps you did. That was one of the exceptions you’re happy to make from getting away from home.
Jane Green: Yes, we did, we went to Morocco. My parents actually are there, pretty much every winter and finally we managed to get out and go and see them. We just had the most wonderful time. I knew I was going to love it.
I loved it long before I visited and I also understood as soon as I walked through the gates into the old city and the smells, and it’s like this feast for the senses, the smells and the sites and the spices and it’s very raw and it felt to me like the most alive place I’d ever been.
What Jane is reading and listening to
And so I really understood how the Gettys lived this incredibly hedonistic, exotic life in the late sixties, there. It just all made sense.
Jenny Wheeler: That sounds great. Turning away from talking about the books a little bit and your life too, your taste in books, because this is the binge reading podcast.
Are you a binge reader or have you been a binge reader? And when you get the time, what do you like to read now? And also I’d like to tell us some of the podcasts you listen to because it sounds like you are quite an aficionado of podcasts.
Jane Green: Yes. What are some of my favorites? I listened to a fascinating one recently called Good Assassins, The Butcher of Latvia, which is based on a true story of a Nazi war criminal that was hiding in South America except he was an aviation war hero before the war.
Good Assassins a favorite podcast
And his narcissism, because his ego wouldn’t let him hide quietly, meant he ended up giving an interview to a South America magazine that he didn’t realize at the time was the most widely distributed magazine in South America,
Of course it fell straight into the hands of the Mossad in Israel, who immediately dispatched an agent to go and assassinate him. And it’s the most fantastic story, really satisfying and brilliantly done.
What else have I really enjoyed? There’s my favorite. I do love a bit of true crime. . And I really love this one called The Root of Evil, which was actually produced by Cadence 13.
The people who founded Cadence 13 are my partners now. And it’s a very dark and twisted tale about one of Hollywood’s Most famous unsolved murders, they call it the Black Dahlia murder of a woman who was found cut in half in the 1940s.
And it’s fascinating, very dark and twisted, but I loved it. And in terms of books, I have spent my whole life being a huge reader. I was a child who didn’t fit in. I became a writer because I was a reader. I would lose myself in books for hours and have done my whole life. But I will say throughout Covid I found my attention span is so much less and I was diving into TV shows instead,
Books Jane Green adores
And it’s still mortifyingly hard for me to get back. There are writers that I adore, Jean Hanff Korelitz is one who wrote The Plot last year, now has The Latecomer. A M Homes I absolutely adore.
May We Be Forgiven is one of my favorites. She has a new book out called The Unfolding. But I’ve gotta be honest I’m finding it hard to read in the way that I used.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you have any idea why that might be? Obviously it’s not just Covid,
Jane Green: I think it’s our attention span. I think with, we spent all our lives on screens
Jenny Wheeler: Yes.
Jane Green: I find my days now that I’m running a podcast network. I’ve gone from being by myself all day for days and days, weeks on end. And I quite love being by myself. I’ve gone from that to being on back to back Zoom calls all day long.
It’s just meetings, zoom meetings. And then you checking on email and then you are checking on social media and it’s this constant whirr of activity. And I think our brains are being rewired, and our attention spans are much shorter.
The amazing growth in audio audience
And it’s why I’m so interested in bringing stories to the podcast world because I think the future really is in audio. Sadly. I also look, publishing is so hard now. It’s so difficult. It is. When I first started, which was 27 years ago. My only job was to write the best book I could possibly write and then go out on tour and sell it in as best a way I could.
Now my job is to write that book to sell it, still that. And also to be my own marketing director, to run all my own social media accounts, to be do my own publicity, to call in every contact I have, to set up my own book tours, to buy swag for Bookstagram influencers… In the run up just to the launch of Sister Stardust I was working 19, 20 hour days.
I was exhausted. I was demoralized. I cried almost every day and I just thought how can you be creative when you are work? You can’t create when you are expected to do everything, and that’s what your life is. Now, perhaps it’s different for the millennials and for younger people.
How publishing is changing
When that’s all you know, perhaps that’s fine. But I come from a very different world and there was absolutely nothing fun about this. you go to your publisher and you say, Look, would you just pay for the, And they say, No, we’re already over budget. And you just go, Why am I doing this for 10, 15% of every book working the way I’m working?
No way. There’s what’s the point? What’s the point?
Jenny Wheeler: The model is broken, I think, isn’t it? The business model? Yeah.
Jane Green: unless you are in the 1%. And you know what? I spent years in the 1% and it was glorious. And I am still I’m very fortunate in that I have this huge brand name, but my sales through a number of missteps that I have made primarily, changing agents and just being with wrong agents.
But I’ve watched my numbers sink and it’s too hard. I’ve had the glory and I don’t see how I do it these days given how publishing is being run. So I’m delighted to have moved into the podcast world now. If I had another story that I was desperate to tell, would I write another book?
The ‘wild west’ of podcasts
Possibly. Look I have a novel right now that I adore. I think it’s one of the best novels I’ve ever written, but I wouldn’t give it to a publisher right now because I don’t believe that they publish it properly.
Jenny Wheeler: Would you self publish? You obviously have considered that.
Jane Green: I have but I think I think at this point I’d rather bring it out as some kind of an audio, maybe an audio book
Jenny Wheeler: I was just going to ask you about audio books actually, because I find myself that I listen to a lot more audio these days. Partly it’s just very tiring to try and read at night as well. If you’ve had a busy day and you’re trying to read at night, you just fall asleep over the book, even if it’s a good one.
Whereas with the audio, it seemed easier to just keep going with the story.
Jane Green: Yeah. audio books are growing enormously and that’s the thing. We’re all moving to audio, whether it’s audio books, whether it’s podcast, but, that is where the world is moving. And I honestly think you don’t realize how demoralizing it is or how hard it is to have no support from a publisher.
The fun of working with a team again
Cause you get used to it, after a while it becomes your new normal and you just think, this is the way it is now. But actually having made the jump into the podcast world, it’s like the wild west out there. But it’s so exciting cause nobody quite knows what they’re doing.
And I’ve got a team, 22 people who come from Apple and Spotify who have very deep roots in the industry, are enormously experienced and they’re supportive. And so I can say, Look, I’ve got this brilliant idea for a story, for a series. And they go, Okay, outline it. And then suddenly it’s being made.
And we’re attaching a script writer. And then I’ve got a marketing team and I have PR people and I have those teams of support that I used to have in publishing. I have, again in the podcast world.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Fabulous. There’s one question I like to ask everyone, and it seems in the light of what we’ve just been discussing, that it’s particularly relevant, looking back down the tunnel of time. Is there one thing about your creative career that you change if you could, although it seems to me like your flow just might be just exactly natural and right for the time, but, Is there anything you’d change?
Jane Green: Yeah, I am so happy with where I am right now. So in that sense, no, because everything needed to happen the way it did. It really, that door had to close in order for me to get out because they always paid me far too much money for me to leave. But actually I think the worst decision I made and the thing that I would change would be, what, 10 years ago?
Different ways agents work in US and UK
I’d had an agent in the UK who I’d had for, 20 years. I absolutely adored him, and we were a real partnership and there was complete transparency. If ever he had a phone call that I wasn’t in on, he’d phone me up afterwards and, Say, this is that, what do you think? And we’d figure it out together and I’d call him up with ideas for all kinds of other side hustles and he’d make it happen.
10 years ago, I thought I’m now living in America. I am an American. I’m never moving back to the UK permanently. I really ought to have an American agent. And also, at that time I hadn’t had a movie and I thought I really wanted a movie. And somebody introduced me to one of the big Hollywood agencies and they wooed me with, Oh, we’re gonna, we’re gonna make so many movies and TV shows, and duh da.
And I really didn’t want to leave my agent, but I thought, No, I, this is the right thing for my career. And actually, what I didn’t understand at the time, and I’ve now had a number of different agents, over the years in America. And they all share this in common. They agent very differently in America than they do in the UK.
In the UK it’s a partnership. In America, you’re infantalized and you are handled. You are seen as the talent and you are handled and there’s this sort of terrible fear of transparency or bad news
‘Leave it to us’ the message
And I also think they want to keep you out of the business side because otherwise I think they worry that they wouldn’t get their percentages.
I went from having a partner and running my own career to being treated like a child and not being listened to at all. The last decade I’ve been quite powerless over my career. And that’s the thing that, that I would change.
Because I love the business side of it. I really do. And that’s also part of the joy of running a network. It’s not just that I’m creating stories. I’m running a network and I’m back in business and I’m reminded, oh my God, I actually am quite good at this. For the last 10 years I thought I was terrible because that was the sort of messaging from the agent.
You don’t know what you are doing, Jane. You are the talent. Leave it to us. And meanwhile, they’re doing nothing. And what’s also interesting, I’m now talking to agents who are representing talent and it is so clear to me how so often they, they screw it up. Then the person that ends up suffering is the author.
Jane’s goals for next twelve months
Jenny Wheeler: Yeah. It has been mentioned on your website that you’ve had a number of books that are under development for either TV or film. Have any of those come to fruition or look like coming to fruition?
Jane Green: A few years ago I had three of them turned into movies for Lifetime. But I think that’s it for now. I think all the options are now are now out. So nothing right now.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s been wonderful talking. I know that you’ve given us a very good idea about what your future 12 months are going to look like, but perhaps I could ask you, what would like to see achieved by the end of this next 12 month period.
Jane Green: Oh goodness.
Jenny Wheeler: Just in your career, where you are.
Where to find Jane Green online
Jane Green: I think that I would love to have at least one and hopefully three huge hit podcasts. And I would hope as well that within 12 months, I would hope to have made at least six major podcast series.
And I would hope that some of them have been picked up for film and TV. That would be my dream.
Jenny Wheeler: Wonderful. Do you enjoy interacting with your audience wherever they might be, and how can people find you?
Jane Green: I absolutely love it. I’m not always great at it. I do try, I try very hard. I love my most favorite of all is live. I love events. I love meeting my readers live. I’m on facebook.com author, Jane Green, and II’m very active on Instagram and there I’m Jane Green author, and you can follow all my adventures with books, podcasts, gray Hair, Cats, cooking and decorating houses.
Authors with Facebook book chats
Jenny Wheeler: Now, you haven’t mentioned the Jane Green Book Club. Just tell us a little bit about that.
Jane Green: That’s cuz I’m not very good. This is the problem with being quite mercurial is I often have great ideas and I start them and then I get distracted and forget about them. But yes, on Facebook there is the Jane Green Book Club, but I really these days I am not so active on that, but it was lovely when I first started it and I’d bring authors and have live chats with them.
Now, I will say there are other people doing it brilliantly. Adrianna Trigiani is on Facebook and she does fantastic book chats. Wade Ross does fantastic book chats for women. Mary Kay Andrews, Patty Callahan. Kristen Harmel have Friends in Fiction on Facebook and they have tons of authors on.
So there are lots and lots of people doing it. So I feel like I can happily pass the baton.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. And are you live anywhere then on Facebook?
Appearing live always a joy
Jane Green: Am I live? What do you mean?
Jenny Wheeler: Do you have live meetings with your readers and listeners?
Jane Green: I sometimes do Instagram lives, but you know what, I’m much better with a partner. I always find it a bit weird talking to camera by yourself, but, people often ask to interview me and do an Instagram live, which I’ll happily do. But it’s quite hard to, for me to just look at a screen and chat.
Jenny Wheeler: Lovely, Jane. Look you’ve been a fantastic guest to have on the show. Wonderful. The way that you’ve shared your life, you have been transparent with us is just in the way that you’ve been talking about. Just wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you so much.
Jane Green: Thank you so much, Jenny.
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Next week on Binge Reading
Next week on The Joys of Binge Reading: . We’ve got an Encore episode. That’s one of our authors. who’s been on the show before talking about their latest book. And next week it’s Jillian Cantor. She was last on the show in July, 2021 talking about Half Life, the Marie Curie story.
Now she’s back with another change of pace .with a book that Kate Quinn has described as Jillian beautifully recrafts an American classic and places the woman of the great Gatsby center stage.
That’s Beautiful Little Fools when the female characters of The Great Gatsby take over the story and tell it from their point of view. T
Next week on binge reading. Remember now, if you enjoy what you hear, add a review to the show on your favorite podcast site. So others will hear about [00:36:00] us too. That’s it for today. Thanks for being here and see you next week. Happy reading.