DAVID GLYNN
FIVE BILLION SOLD THE AMAZING FACTS BEHIND THE FICTION
FIVE BILLION SOLD THE AMAZING FACTS BEHIND THE FICTION DAVID GLYNN
“TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION, BUT IT IS BECAUSE FICTION IS OBLIGED TO STICK TO POSSIBILITIES; TRUTH ISN’T.” — MARK TWAIN
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION How Do You Write a Bestseller?
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1930s to 1940s AGATHA CHRISTIE Death on the Nile ~ 1937
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MICKEY SPILLANE I, The Jury ~ 1947
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HARD VS SOFT A Brief History of the Paperback
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1950s CATHERINE COOKSON Kate Hannigan ~ 1950
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IAN FLEMING Casino Royale ~ 1953
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JOHN D. MACDONALD Your Favourite Writer’s Favourite Writer
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LOUIS L’AMOUR Hondo ~ 1953
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J. R. R. TOLKIEN The Lord of the Rings ~ 1954
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GRACE METALIOUS Peyton Place ~ 1956
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1960s HAROLD ROBBINS The Carpetbaggers ~ 1961
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WILBUR SMITH When the Lion Feeds ~ 1964
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JACQUELINE SUSANN Valley of the Dolls ~ 1966
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JACKIE COLLINS The World is Full of Married Men ~ 1968
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1970s SIDNEY SHELDON The Other Side of Midnight ~ 1973
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ANNE RICE Interview With the Vampire ~ 1976
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BLOOD-SUCKING GOOD! A Short History of Vampire Novels
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DANIELLE STEEL Passion’s Promise ~ 1977
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COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH The Thorn Birds ~ 1977
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JEFFREY ARCHER Kane and Abel ~ 1979
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1980s ROBERT LUDLUM The Bourne Identity ~ 1980
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FICTION FACTORIES Graphomania Made Profitable
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TERRY PRATCHETT The Colour of Magic ~ 1983
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NORA ROBERTS Playing the Odds ~ 1985
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FEMININE PEAKS A Short History of the Romance Novel
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STEPHEN KING It ~ 1986
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DEAN KOONTZ Watchers ~ 1987
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1990s MICHAEL CRICHTON Jurassic Park ~ 1990
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JOHN GRISHAM The Firm ~ 1991
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JAMES PATTERSON Along Came a Spider ~ 1993
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TOM CLANCY The Man Who Wasn’t There
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PATRICIA CORNWELL Cause of Death ~ 1996
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LEE CHILD Killing Floor ~ 1997
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THRILLER! A Short History of Suspense
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2000s DAN BROWN The Da Vinci Code ~ 2003
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THE LIST Why The New York Times Defines the ‘Bestseller’
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STEPHENIE MEYER Twilight ~ 2005
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J. K. ROWLING Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ~ 2007
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STIEG LARSSON The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ~ 2008
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Get to Know Your Favourite Character
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Bibliography
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Picture Credits
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Introduction How do you write a bestseller?
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he truth is, no one really knows. Certainly the authors don’t. “Fiction writers, present company included,” wrote one, “don’t
understand very much about what they do – not why it works when it’s good, nor why it doesn’t when it’s bad.” The person who made this remarkable statement was none other than Stephen King, in the 2010 edition of his memoir On Writing. (King, remember, is a man who has sold upward of 350 million books.) Which, if you think about it, is a little like an aircraft engineer saying, “We don’t know how those planes stay up in the air, but boy, it’s lucky for us they do!” But there must be more to it than just luck, surely. The writers whose stories are told in this book have sold, by any reasonable estimate, around five billion copies of their books. None has sold fewer than 50 million, and one has sold 40 times that number. Five billion. It is a phenomenal number. Yet, in the end, it is useful only as a measure of something far more important. Stories. It is our stories that connect us as people: they inspire, frighten, enlighten and entertain us. They tell us that we are not alone. They remind us that at heart we are all the same, just as they illustrate that each of us is different. They give us comfort. They offer us hope. And, perhaps most importantly of all, they give us something to do when we’re riding on a bus, or waiting for the doctor to see us. This is why the writers whose lives are examined in this book have been so successful. They tell stories that people in their millions and
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Five Billion Sold
tens of millions want to read, and they manage somehow to do this time and again. So we assume that there must be something special about them, some quality they possess, some secret understanding that gives them this ability. And where else can we look for clues to the person behind the work, if not in the story of their life? “One of my strongest opinions is that investigation of an author’s biography is an entirely vain and false approach to his works,” J. R. R. Tolkien (250 million) once said. In marked contrast to Tolkien, Sidney Sheldon (400 million) wrote in his memoir that all it takes to make a writer is “paper and a pen and a dysfunctional family.” Yet it is equally absurd to practice that sort of Freudian reductionism, the boiling of writers down to a sort of thick psychological sludge of childhood misery, from which the only escape was through the door of the imagination, via the written word. So who is right? The one who has sold the most books? The simple fact of the matter is that it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that we are interested. We are interested in the box of old horror and science fiction paperbacks (once belonging to his father) that Stephen King found in an aunt’s garage when he was twelve. We are interested in Terry Pratchett’s metaphorical paintbox. In Stieg Larsson’s all-consuming passion for justice, and Stephenie Meyer’s dream of vampires. We are interested, ultimately, in the people behind the stories: where they came from, what formed them, and how they acquired this singular ability to create such successful fictions. So here are the remarkable stories of 30 of the world’s bestselling authors, from Agatha Christie to Stieg Larsson. And though these stories don’t tell us how to write a bestseller, they do something of far greater value. They tell us who wrote the books we love.
Introduction
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AGATHA CHRISTIE DEATH ON THE NILE 1937
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WO HUNDRED AND FIFTY PAGES INTO HER 500-PAGE autobiography and Agatha Christie has only just got to the time when she sent the manuscript of her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, to a publisher. She was 26 years old. Over the next 60 years she would write more than 90 other books. These would go on to sell, according to the Guinness Book of Records, more than two billion copies, making her the bestselling – and therefore, we must presume, the most widely read – novelist the world has ever known. It is this fact that makes reading her Autobiography vaguely disconcerting. We have come to believe that the people who achieve the greatest success are those who want it the most. We imagine
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NAME: Agatha Christie
they must be obsessed. Driven. So it is PSEUDONYMS: Mary Westacott, somewhat surprising to read Christie’s Christie Mallowan claim, on page 430, when she is 40 years BORN: Agatha Miller, old, that “As a sideline, I wrote books. I Torquay, England, 1890 never approached my writing by dubbing WRITING METHOD: Typewriter it with the grand name of ‘career’. I would FIRST PUBLICATION: 1920 have thought it ridiculous.” CAREER HIGHLIGHT: Death on Maybe she was being disingenuous, or the Nile, Fontana, 1937 just plain modest. Because she must have NOVELS: 72 known by then that she well and truly had a ESTIMATED SALES: 2 billion ‘career’. Two years previously, her agent had FURTHER INFORMATION: Janet negotiated with her American publishers Morgan, Agatha Christie: for an advance of $2,500 each for two of her A Biography, Collins, 1984 works; he had also sold the rights to publish a DIED: 1976 first edition of 4,000 copies of another of her books in Finnish, for the princely sum of £15. Her work was now being published in Austria, Hungary and Canada. In England she was already famous. She had a OPPOSITE: Agatha Christie, aged 16, at a career. She just didn’t care to admit it. finishing school in Paris in “I am sure there can be nothing more soul-destroying in life,” 1906. She had been sent Christie wrote in her autobiography, “than to persist in trying to do to Mrs Dryden’s school to study piano and singing. a thing that you want desperately to do well, and to know you are at the best second-rate.” Only it was not writing she was talking about. She had cherished a fantasy of being an opera singer, continued with regular lessons and performance, only to be told, at 18, that her voice would never be strong enough. “So,” she wrote, putting the matter to rest, “let us take it from there.” §§§ She was born as Agatha Miller into another time, another world. Her father Frederick, though an American, was the stereotypical Victorian gentleman. After breakfast, he walked to his club. Then he came home for lunch. After lunch he went back to his club to play 11
GRACE METALIOUS PEYTON PLACE 1956
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HE RUMOUR – FOR IN A SMALL TOWN THERE ARE ALWAYS rumours – was that Grace Metalious did not actually write Peyton Place. She could barely string two sentences together, they said; she was too busy getting drunk, they said. Or fornicating. But the truth was they just didn’t much like Grace Metalious in Gilmanton, New Hampshire (population 800). Because she had written a book that stripped away the respectable veneer that overlaid their lives, exposing the hypocrisy beneath. As Grace herself famously put it, “To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture. But if you go beneath that picture, it’s like turning over a rock with your foot – all kinds of strange things crawl out. Everybody who lives in town knows what’s going on –
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NAME: Grace Metalious
there are no secrets – but they don’t want BORN: Grace DeRepentigny, outsiders to know.” Manchester, New Hampshire, This was Metalious’ great sin. It would 1924 be compounded by an even greater one WRITING METHOD: Typewriter – popularity. More than 12 million people FIRST PUBLICATION: 1956 bought a copy of Peyton Place, and millions CAREER HIGHLIGHT: Peyton more read it. It was the first genuine Place, Julian Messner Inc., blockbuster, and for a decade or more it 1956 reigned as the bestselling novel of the NOVELS: 4 20th century. ESTIMATED SALES: 50 million Which is quite remarkable, if we FURTHER INFORMATION: Emily remember what people had to go through Toth, Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious, to get a copy. It was banned in Canada, Doubleday, 1981 Australia and South Africa on the grounds DIED: 1964 that it was “indecent”. There were certain cities in America where you could not buy it, and in some places where you could, the very people who were selling it were trying to discourage its OPPOSITE: Peyton Place author Grace Metalious purchase. “I don’t know why you would want to read it,” one often defended herself bookseller’s advertisement read, “but we are willing to sell it at against her critics. She $3.95.” Wealthy communities that measured their refinement once said: “If I’m a lousy writer, then an awful lot of by the kind of books they kept in the town library took pride people have lousy taste.” in banishing it. Still, you could always find a copy of Peyton Place, if you persevered. Often the best place to look, if you were a curious adolescent, was under your parents’ bed, or in the back of a cupboard. It was not the kind of book that respectable people had on display – it was far too “racy”, which meant it acknowledged that people did in fact have sex, and then went on to describe various sexual encounters in what was, for the time, graphic detail. There were other sins, too, that Peyton Place catalogued – drunkenness, abortion, incest and murder – and in many quarters this was simply too much, in that it revealed “a complete debasement of taste and a fascination with the filthy, rotten side of life that are the earmarks of the collapse of civilisation.” 81
WILBUR SMITH WHEN THE LION FEEDS 1964
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E SHOT HIS FIRST LION AT THE AGE OF THIRTEEN. MOMENTS later, he shot his second. After that, he lost count. But he only ever shot two elephants – it was a melancholy thing, he would say, “like shooting an old man.” The elephant population does not get off quite so lightly in Wilbur Smith’s fictions – the twin protagonists of When the Lion Feeds (1964), Sean and Garrick Courtney, are forced to despatch a quantity of unfortunate pachyderms as the men strive to rebuild their shattered fortunes. The descriptive power of these hunting scenes, like much of Smith’s writing, utilises a remarkable visual sensibility to place the reader firmly amongst the action, and it is plain that the author is
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NAME: Wilbur Smith
writing from some degree of experience. BORN: Wilbur Smith, Yet there are parts of Smith’s early Kabwe, Zambia, 1933 biography that do not tally quite so neatly WRITING METHOD: Typewriter with subsequent claims. FIRST PUBLICATION: 1964 For example, “Elephant pee tastes CAREER HIGHLIGHT: When the foul,” Smith offers, in an article entitled Lion Feeds, Heinemann, 1964 ‘What I Know’, part of a series published NOVELS: 33 in the Guardian newspaper. “I’ve drunk it ESTIMATED SALES: 100 million by mistake, walking for three days after FURTHER INFORMATION: an elephant. You find a waterhole, but the www.wilbursmithbooks.com elephant’s got there before you and peed in it. Boy, can you taste it.” But even those of us with zero experience of the African savannah might see where that particular anecdote falls down.1 Earlier in that same article Smith also mentions his schooling. OPPOSITE: The author with a copy of his first novel, “At boarding school I would cry myself to sleep at night – but into When the Lion Feeds, in the pillow, because if you were caught blubbing you were an outcast. 1964. As a boy, Wilbur It taught me stoicism and to endure.” Smith was in awe of his strict father, who was Something here does not quite add up – was this the same boy obsessed with hunting who, all alone at age 13, had shot not one but two lionesses? It seems and would fly off in his somehow … unlikely. But as the saying goes, we should trust the Tiger Moth before dawn in search of game. tale, not the teller. And Wilbur Smith can certainly tell a tale. §§§ His father was an Englishman from Brighton who had made enough money to buy a 10,000 hectare cattle ranch in northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Here Wilbur was born, and here at the age of 18 months he was struck down by cerebral malaria – the doctor suggested that it would be better if the child died, for doubtless he would be permanently brain damaged should he recover. Young Wilbur was made of sterner stuff, and after 10 days of delerium he came through, with no signs of impairment. As a boy he lived a life that was in many regards paradaisical, adventuring 103
SIDNEY SHELDON THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT 1973
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F SIDNEY SHELDON HAD COMMITTED SUICIDE AT 17, AS HE TELLS us on the very first page of his memoir he was going to, the world would be a much poorer place. There would be no The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, no Hart to Hart and no Adventures of Drippy the Runaway Raindrop. On the other hand, the world would have a lot more paper, because there would be no Rage of Angels, no Bloodline, no The Other Side of Midnight. Sidney Sheldon’s 18 novels have sold over 400 million copies, putting him just outside the top ten all-time bestselling authors. Still it is hard to know whether this fact would have pleased him or not. Sidney had very high expectations. A few weeks after
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NAME: Sidney Sheldon
publication of his first novel, The Naked BORN: Sidney Schechtel, Face (1970), he was taken to meet the Chicago, Illinois, 1917 president of his publishing house, who had WRITING METHOD: Dictation good news – they had sold 17,000 copies, FIRST PUBLICATION: 1971 and were already into a second printing. CAREER HIGHLIGHT: The Other “I have a television show on the Side of Midnight, William air,” Sidney told him, “that’s watched by Morrow, 1973 20 million people every week. I’m really NOVELS: 18 not thrilled with selling 17,000 copies ESTIMATED SALES: 400 million of anything.” FURTHER INFORMATION: Sidney But Sidney was hooked. After four Sheldon, The Other Side decades of writing for film and television, of Me, Warner Books, 2005 which is first and foremost a collaborative DIED: 2007 process, the freedom of working without other people was intoxicating - he was going to write another novel whether it sold only 17,000 copies or not. A year later The Other Side of Midnight was complete, and again OPPOSITE: Sidney Sheldon novels have sold into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that there are no second acts in at least 180 countries American lives was proved not entirely accurate. At 56 years old worldwide. When asked Sidney Sheldon was now a novelist – and a ridiculously successful about this universal appeal, Sheldon replied: one. Yet in his 2005 memoir, The Other Side of Me, this second act “Perhaps it’s because the warrants exactly 10 pages. Sheldon may have had his greatest characters in my books success as a novelist, but his heart was always in Hollywood. are more than just ‘all good’ or ‘all bad.’ I try to
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give [them] an emotional dimensionality.”
All it takes to be a writer is a pen, some paper and – ideally – a dysfunctional family. And Sidney Schechtel’s family was as dysfunctional as any other. His parents Otto and Natalie (they insisted he use their first names because it made them feel younger) were mismatched from the start. But they were stuck with each other – Otto’s two brothers had married Natalie’s two sisters, and they were all tied up into one big, unhappy family. 137
Filming The Buster Keaton Story, 1956. From left to right: James Scott, Cecil B. DeMille, Buster Keaton, Sidney Sheldon (writer, co-producer and director) and Donald O’Connor.
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Otto was a born screw-up, a creator of wild and fanciful financial schemes that were always going to be the big one, the one that would put them on easy street, and yet would always manage to fail. Natalie was a princess who had dreamed of marrying a prince. But she landed a failure instead – one whose proudest boast was that he had never read a book in his life. Five Billion Sold
So young Sidney’s shy, studious habits were disturbing to his father. “You’re going to ruin your eyes,” he would say. “Why can’t you be like your cousin? He plays football with the boys.” Sidney’s uncle put it even more bluntly: “Sidney reads too much. He’s going to come to a bad end.” But at 10 years old, Sidney entered a poetry competition, and won. Only his father, embarrassed that his son would most certainly be rejected, had appended an uncle’s name to the poem. So his first published work – along with the five-dollar cheque – was in someone else’s name. That was Otto – he was the kind of man who would buy a silver mine in Arizona, only to find that it was already played out. Which was exactly what he did. Then the family moved to Denver where one of the uncles had a successful stockbroking firm. Things were going well for a while, and Otto bought a house. At 13 years of age Sidney, after already having lived in a dozen places, finally had a home. Of course it wouldn’t last. The family moved back to Chicago, living in poverty as the Depression wore on. Shy, sensitive Sidney could see no end in sight, so he decided to create one. He stole sleeping pills from the drugstore where he worked as a delivery boy, and one Friday night when his parents were supposed to be going away for the weekend, he picked up his father’s bottle of bourbon and was about to swallow them. Otto walked in the room – he had forgotten something. Sidney’s father may have been a screw-up, but he was a good salesman. He sold his son a future, and talked him into carrying on. Don’t close the book too soon, he said, because you never know what’s on the next page. What was on the next page was straight out of a novel. Otto had got mixed up in a vending machine scam and been sent to the
Sidney’s uncle put it even more bluntly: “Sidney reads too much. He’s going to come to a bad end.” Sidney Sheldon
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J. K. ROWLING HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS 2007
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HERE WAS ONCE AN ORDINARY YOUNG WOMAN WHOSE LIFE might be summed up thus: Born in Chipping Sodbury. Went to school in Bristol and Chepstow then Exeter University. Mother dies. Young woman moves to Portugal. Marries and has a baby. Returns to Britain. Harry Potter. The end. The end, that is of the ordinary part (one article on the subject of this young woman is entitled ‘The Not Especially Fascinating Life So Far of J. K. Rowling’) and the beginning of the part where she becomes one of the richest self-made women in the world, whose income is second only to the stratospheric earnings of the American phenomena that is Oprah Winfrey. Not bad, we might say, for a girl from Chipping Sodbury, England.
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NAME: J. K. Rowling BORN: Joanne Rowling,
Yate, England, 1966
Her parents, Peter and Anne, met on a WRITING METHOD: Longhand train, in which they were both travelling FIRST PUBLICATION: 1997 to their naval posting in Scotland. But life CAREER HIGHLIGHT: Harry on the ocean waves was not for them. And Potter and the Deathly Anne was pregnant. So they got married Hallows, Bloomsbury, 2007 and moved to Yate. NOVELS: 7 Not Chipping Sodbury, as Ms Rowling ESTIMATED SALES: 400 million would later claim when discussing her FURTHER INFORMATION: Sean love of peculiar names, but Yate, which Smith, J. K. Rowling: A was a kind of poorer neighbour, some 16 Biography, Michael O’Mara Books, 2001 kilometres from the city of Bristol. It was in the hospital at Yate that the baby arrived, “fat and blonde” by her own later admission, and her parent’s named her simply Joanne. So far, so ordinary. At six she wrote her first story, called ‘Rabbit’. (Curiously – or OPPOSITE: J. K. Rowling’s seven Harry Potter novels not – Stephen King’s first story, written at about the same age, was (and movie adaptations) about a bunny called Mr Rabbit Trick.) But apart from that, Joanne’s continue to thrill children early childhood was uneventful and unremarkable. and adults alike. There’s even a website called JK When Joanne was nine and her sister Di seven, the family Rowling Fan, said to tell moved to a small village just outside of Chepstow, which is officially you “all about the person in Wales and beside the Forest of Dean, 12,000 hectares of ancient behind the magic.“ oaks, beeches and conifers, and steeped in myths and legends. They moved because their parents had fallen in love with an old stone cottage that was situated beside a church and had magnificent views down to the river Severn below. Beside the church was the school that the two girls would attend. So Joanne went to school. She joined the Brownies. She wrote another story, called ‘The Seven Cursed Diamonds’. She wore glasses, read books, daydreamed. She was, indeed, just an ordinary girl. But she didn’t want to be just ‘ordinary’. She had a compulsion to achieve, particularly academically, and her hand always had to go up first, her answers always had to be right. 327
§§§ Tragedy, too, can hide itself for a while in seemingly ordinary events. Someone has difficulty lifting a teapot, falls down for no apparent reason, or gets pins and needles in their hand while playing the guitar. Then, at some point, a doctor is consulted, a diagnosis is made. Multiple sclerosis; a “galloping” form. Joanne was 15 when her mother’s disease was confirmed. Anne was thirty-five. Some days were good – she could do the ironing, hold a teacup – and other days not. And for a teenage girl, a parent’s illness can be something from which you need to escape as much as something you need to be able to handle. Joanne had made a friend, a new boy at school who owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, and in it the pair would head out into the wide world, to clubs and to discos, just to be somewhere else for a while. Indeed, the shy, rather plain girl seemed to have blossomed. In her last year at comprehensive (high) school she was head girl. Her work, particularly in English, showed such promise that it was decided she would seek a place at Oxford, to read modern languages. She sat the entrance test. She was rejected. Her headmaster claimed it was because she had attended a state school, whereas a girl from a private school who had applied at the same time was accepted even though her grades were poorer. Of course, there is nothing unusual there – elitism and classconsciousness have ever been a part of English life. So Joanne would go to university at Exeter instead, a mere two-hour drive from home, and even quicker by train. At university she did not shine, academically at least. She was a middle-of-the-road student, studying French rather than English, because that would be more useful in getting a job. Joanne told no one that she aspired to be a writer. Yet she had also blossomed from a plain, shy, spectacle-wearing girl to an attractive, shapely, flamboyant young woman. Her social life, suddenly, was just as important as her education, which she completed, receiving an average grade for her degree. 328
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Joanne moved to London, worked as a temporary secretary, and began to write a novel. Her boyfriend from university was living in Manchester, and after a while she decided that she would live there too. So one afternoon she was on a train back to London after a fruitless weekend of flat-hunting, gazing dreamily out of the window. She saw some cows, Friesians, standing forlornly in a field. And then, out of the blue, she had an idea – a train transporting a boy to a boarding school for wizards. Things had suddenly become a little less ordinary. §§§ Her mother died at the age of forty-five. Joanne’s relationship in Manchester was deteriorating. Since her epiphany on the train she had been making notes about her young wizard – she knew his name by now – which she kept in a shoebox. She also kept a few sentimental trinkets her mother had given her. But someone broke into her flat one day and stole them. It was, she believed, a sign. It was time to move on. She saw an advertisement for a job teaching English in Porto, Portugal. She had nothing really in the way of experience, but she applied anyway. Her fellow teachers were two other young women and the three worked and played together, going to cafés and nightclubs and becoming in the process firm friends. But they could see that for Joanne there was something missing. She wanted a boyfriend. She wanted love. She found it, in a bar, in the form of one Jorge Arantes, a Portuguese journalism student who spoke English very well and had read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, which was certainly unusual
And then, out of the blue, she had an idea – a train transporting a boy to a boarding school for wizards.
J. K. Rowling
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This still from the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (originally called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) shows Hermione, Ron and Harry at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry.
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for a macho Portuguese man. So they talked for a couple of hours or so, shared a kiss and exchanged telephone numbers. Just two days later he called her, and by that evening the pair had embarked upon a passionate affair. Passionate at first. Then tempestuous. Then violent. However, in the beginning they were most definitely in love. She moved in with his family. Jorge was away completing his national service when he proposed to her by mail. She accepted, even though they had already had one argument that was so heated a crowd of about a hundred people gathered, and police were sent to diffuse the Five Billion Sold
situation. In 1992 they married at a registry office. There was no honeymoon. Joanne fell pregnant again (she had already had one miscarriage) and a baby, Jessica, was born in 1993. The short marriage had already run into terminal problems. There was another argument. “I had to drag her out of the house at five in the morning and I admit I slapped her very hard in the street,” her ex-husband confessed later. So there she was, homeless, in a foreign city, with nothing but the clothes she stood up in, her four-month-old baby inside the house belonging to the man who had just thrown her out. Her friends rallied. Joanne returned the next day with two policemen who, though they could not act in any official capacity, had been convinced to accompany her. She asked her husband to give her the baby. Reluctantly, he did. Two weeks later Joanne and her daughter left Portugal, never to return. §§§ A desperate young woman, on her own with a young baby and no money, relying on government benefits for survival. As a story, it is all too common. And though Joanne managed to find an unfurnished one-room flat in a reasonable neighbourhood in Edinburgh, Scotland – the city she had chosen to go to on her return mainly because her sister lived there – there was nothing much to distinguish her from thousands of women in Britain, and indeed the millions around the world, who faced a similar predicament.
A desperate young woman, on her own with a young baby and no money, relying on government benefits for survival. J. K. Rowling
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