Interview with Joanne Nell - Author or Mrs Winterbottom Takes a Gap Year

Interview with Joanna Nell - Author or Mrs Winterbottom Takes a Gap Year

Release date: November 1st, 2023

Publisher: Hachette Australia

📚

“Joanna has a real gift of delivering joyously and profoundly her keen perceptions of human nature.” Cindy L Spear

See my full review here.

About the Author: Joanna Nell is a British-Australian writer, GP and advocate for positive ageing. She is the author of four bestselling novels The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village, The Last Voyage of Mrs Henry Parker, The Great Escape From Woodlands Nursing Home, and The Tea Ladies of St Jude's Hospital.

Joanna's short fiction has won numerous awards and been published in magazines, journals and short story anthologies including Award Winning Australian Writing. She has also written for The Sydney Morning Herald's Spectrum and Sunday Life magazines. 

She lives on Sydney's Northern Beaches with her husband and an aged Labrador. She also enjoys occasional visits from her adult children.

🧳

INTERVIEW

A warm welcome to author Joanna Nell as we discuss her new novel!

Please tell us about your new novel and the inspiration behind it?

In Mrs Winterbottom Takes a Gap Year we meet Heather and her husband Alan, both GPs, who have lived and worked together for forty years. The time has come for them to hang up their stethoscopes for good and enjoy a new life of leisure. But on their first morning of retirement, it becomes clear that they want very different things from this exciting new chapter of their lives. Heather dreams of adventure. She wants to leave their claustrophobic village behind and sail around the Greek Islands, while Alan’s idea of a perfect retirement is a little closer to home. He dreams of growing his own vegetables. When neither wants to compromise, Heather sets off for Greece alone on the gap year she never had – a gap year from her life, her career, and from her husband. Can their marriage survive the separation, or will it be a case of out of sight, out of mind?

The novel was inspired by a conversation I had with my husband. We are both some years off pension age but he mentioned in passing that his vision for the perfect retirement would be to sell up, buy a big boat and sail off into the sunset. I agreed it sounded idyllic until I realised he was talking about selling the house I also live in! I’m more in favour of a treechange than a sea change, and although there’s still plenty of time for this conversation in our household, it struck me how little planning people potentially put into retirement (beyond the obvious financial side) compared to say a wedding.

Your book is set in two overseas locations. Sometimes in creating unique settings, authors take research trips. Did you go on any to help with the writing of this novel?

The first part of the novel is set in the fictional English village of Netherwood, and the second part on the Greek islands of Cephalonia and Ithaca. Netherwood is based on a real village in the beautiful New Forest region of southern England where I lived and worked as a GP for several years. I drew on my own experience of the intimacy of living and working in a small community which could often feel like living inside a goldfish bowl. 

I have visited Greece several times and I drew on the photos and observations I made in an old travel journal I kept while sailing around the Ionian in 1997. This includes a night in the tiny bay on Ithaca where one of the major scenes between Heather and her Greek friend Dennis takes place. Writers nowadays are fortunate in that we have access to the internet so we can travel virtually to almost anywhere in the world. I used Google Earth and YouTube videos to trace the exact route Heather would have taken up to the School of Homer.

I love how you utilise Homer’s The Odyssey in Mrs Winterbottom Takes a Gap Year. Could you explain how it fits so magnificently into your story?

My daughter was studying Ancient History and Classics at university when I started writing the book. There were copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey lying around and like Heather, having missed out on that part of a classical education in favour of studying sciences for medical school, I decided it wasn’t too late to read Homer. I was transfixed, but the feminist in me questioned why Penelope spent ten years weaving on her loom (and simultaneously fending off a house full of suitors) while she waited for her husband Odysseus to meander his way home at the end of the Trojan War. It seemed unfair that once again, the men in history had all the fun and adventure while the women were left behind. Then it struck me that Heather had been fighting a war of sorts against prejudice and sexism in her profession and was now attempting to rediscover her identity as a woman. Since the term ‘odyssey’ means ‘a journey of homecoming’, she had to leave home and that meant facing many of the perils and temptations that Odysseus had to contend with on his return journey (minus the many-headed monsters!).

Speaking of books, if you could give one as a gift to a friend, which book would you choose and how do you hope it would help them?

Does my younger self count as a friend? If I could sit down with ten-year-old Joanna, I would get her to read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. To understand that she was an introvert rather than inferior, antisocial or unlikeable would have saved a lot of heartache and self-doubt later on. If only she could have embraced her personality type and exploited its attributes – as a deep thinker, a natural observer, a listener and a creative – she might have realised her dream of becoming a writer long before she turned fifty!

Your novel addresses retirement. Name at least two problems your characters face and how they deal with the challenges (without giving too much away).

Although Heather has been looking forward to retirement and can’t wait to leave behind the stress and long hours her job entails, she finds it much harder to let go of her profession than she’d anticipated. Apart from the guilt of ‘abandoning’ her patients as she sees it, being a doctor is so much part of her identity – as it is for many doctors including myself – that without medicine in her life, she wonders deep down who she really is. To discover another side of herself, Heather needs to travel to where nobody knows her as Dr Winterbottom.

For Alan, whose GP father died at his desk before he’d had the chance to retire, it is his sudden awareness of his own mortality, and wanting to atone for past mistakes that are stopping him from enjoying his newfound freedom. To move forwards, he needs to forgive himself and let go of the past.

In describing Mr & Mrs Winterbottom, please provide three words each.

Mrs Winterbottom: pragmatic, unfulfilled, under-appreciated

Mr Winterbottom: nostalgic, misunderstood, and if you ask Heather, exasperating.

Which character do you admire the most in your current novel and why?

Esme, the retired headmistress of the local primary school and Heather’s friend is a character I admire and one that probably deserves her own novel! She devoted her entire life to teaching despite never having children of her own. She found love later in life with Aubrey, only for him to die weeks short of retirement. Although she’d been alone for most of her life, she has remained sociable and loves company. She teaches Heather about Ancient Greece and introduces her to Homer’s epic poetry. I love Esme’s honesty in sharing her regrets, and the naughty streak that encourages Heather to ‘do a Shirley Valentine’.

How do you decide on the names of your characters? The surname Winterbottom is an unusual one. Is there any story behind the name and why you chose it?

I don’t really have a system. Sometimes the characters appear complete with their name, other times my protagonist might have a different first name in each draft, chopping and changing until it feels right. I’m not sure where the name Winterbottom came from, other than it’s an English name, and sounds slightly preposterous! I was sure my publisher would object to the number of letters on the book cover, but she loved it, so Mr and Mrs Winterbottom it was.

If you were a Greek dessert, which one would you be and why?

I’d be good, old traditional baklava: golden and wrinkly on the outside; sweet and a bit nutty on the inside, with just a hint of something spicy deep down.

Are you planning or working on a new novel and, if so, can you share a little about it?

I am writing a new novel but I’m keeping this one under wraps for the time being. It’s very early in the creative process when it could easily take off in another direction completely. The one thing I will say is that my protagonist will be a man this time.

We wish Joanna much success on her new novel as it hits the book waves Nov 1st!

Find Joanna @

Website

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram