Interview down by facts and real people, the story came pretty easily. It was great fun creating all the characters, so while I’d say thirty percent is rooted in reality, this should most definitely be treated as a work of fiction. You mention catharsis – how traumatic was the whole experience of seeing everything you’d work for suddenly swept from underfoot? Hugely. I created reasons as to why and how it happened in the book, but in real life I remain none the wiser. Never did I think that I could lose a company I’d spent twenty years building overnight. Genuinely, it was seriously debilitating.
Inspired by true events, long-term American expat and entrepreneur John Lynch talks about his debut novel, The Ark…
WI: What motivated you to pick up the pen in the first place? JL: I think I’m quite a three-dimensional person, so although I’ve been running my own business, Lynka, for nearly 30-years now, writing was always something of a passion – I used to be a regular columnist for the Warsaw Business Journal and a British clothing magazine, so it was never the case that I suddenly woke up one day and decided on writing a book. It was a dream of mine years ago, and finally the right story came to me.
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Warsaw Insider | NOVEMBER 2021
The Ark is based on true events – but what does that mean. How much is truth, how much is fiction? The skeleton of the story, that is how a private equity fund tried to take over my business, well that actually happened. During the battle to rescue my firm I started taking copious notes – mainly for legal reasons. Later, partly as a sort of catharsis, I began writing the experience up. Honestly though, it just didn’t work so instead I found myself taking the factual concept and fictionalizing it. Once I did that, and once I found myself not tied
After being blindsided like this, how do you pick yourself up? First of all, I learned never to let a crisis takeover your life. At first, I thought I’d end up having a heart attack. In a twist of fate, though, right in the midst of my crisis, I was invited to a small, private meeting with the Dalai Lama in Prague and it ended up completely changing my perspective. After, I took an utterly new approach. “If I lose everything, then I’ll just start again”. I calmed down a lot and realized the value of manipulating my own emotions. I’ve always been an optimist, so when I realized
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THE ARK
How does Poland come out in all of this? What happened to me was incredibly rare, and in a no way should either my book or my personal experience be seen as an indictment on this country. If anything, it was a validation of the rule of law here. Yes, the wheels moved tremendously slowly, but truth prevailed. Never was there a hint of corruption from the Polish judges.
