Steve Thomas:Josie and Emlyn, welcome to the podcast.
Josie Lloyd: Thank you ever so much!
Emlyn Rees: Thank you for having us on!
Steve Thomas: Before we dive into the book we always like to start with library talk, so what kind of relationship have libraries played in your lives, like when you were young, as parents, as writers now?
Josie Lloyd: Well, for me, growing up, when I was little, the library was a huge part of our lives. We used to go every single week and take out loads of books. We used to do lots of events in the library. And actually my very first published work, Steve, was in Chelmsford Library in the UK when we had to do a competition about the Queen. It was the Silver Jubilee.
Emlyn Rees: What year was this?
Josie Lloyd: It was 1977. It was the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and we had to write poems and my poem got selected to be put up in the library. And I honestly have to say it’s still one of my proudest moments.
Steve Thomas: Can you recite the poem from memory?
Josie Lloyd: No, I’m not going to. It is too embarrassing.
Emlyn Rees: She can recite it! I know what the refrain is. The refrain is essentially, “Have you seen the queen? I have.” And it keep, it keeps going a lot. It is kind of a humble brag poem.
Josie Lloyd: It’s a bit of a humble brag poem, but I was very enthusiastic but very excited to see it. And actually, you know, that whole thing about being able to get a wide access to books and I think reading, I think the reason I’m a writer is because I love reading so much.
And that was a bug that was instilled in us as children, but also because back then we had, and I think this is something that’s really missing now, certainly for our kids, we had a really boring childhood, magically so, because it made us into creative people because we had to amuse ourselves…
Emlyn Rees: …with books…
Josie Lloyd: with books, with cards, with games, with going outside because there was nothing else to do. That escapism in a book was just magical.
Emlyn Rees: I think certainly, you know, we’ve been married for 25 years now, and we have three daughters who are nearly all grown up, nearly all leaving the nest, but for us, libraries when they were kids, it’s that fantastic thing of you absolutely reengage as a family space.
Again, Brighton Library is superb, that’s the Jubilee Library here. It’s got so many events going on, events for kids and stuff, so we very much reengaged then. We’ve also, because there’s two of us working at home, it’s a fantastic place to work. When we’re working, sometimes, certainly towards the end of a book, it’s really nice to escape each other a little bit, and the perfect place to do that is to go down the library, get a bit of peace and quiet, and also just to find your own creative space. And it’s a essential thing. There’s a band, I’m very fond of, a Welsh band, we’re both Welsh, called the Manic Street Preachers and there’s this brilliant quote they’ve got, which is ” libraries gave us power.” And it’s talking about the miners, it is talking about Welsh history and it’s talking about how this is the receptacle that allows people to move socially, to move politically, to sort of find themselves.
So yeah, they’re key, and use your library.
Josie Lloyd: Yeah, absolutely. And as authors, they’ve been lifeblood to us because we’ve done a lot of library tours with our books and actually, there is nothing finer as an author than going and meeting engaged readers. And it doesn’t matter if there’s two of them or there’s 20 or 200 of them. Actually, the whole point of writing a book is, if you’ve written a book and one person loves it, then your job is done. You know, if loads of people love it, brilliant, but actually your job is to just communicate. And actually when you meet engaged people in a library, you always learn something new and always get a different perspective and actually they always ask really interesting questions….
Emlyn Rees: And it’s not remote. It’s that thing of escaping the remoteness of Amazon, even a bookstore, you’re not there when somebody buys your book. You can’t chat to them about it. So it’s that wonderful moment. It’s a space for engagement and yeah, they still work.
Steve Thomas: And I imagine it’s fun when you can go to the shelf yourself and see your book on the shelf next to all these other authors that you know and love.
Josie Lloyd: What I love the most, what I really love the most, is going to a library and seeing my book and seeing that it’s been.
Emlyn Rees: When it’s on a trolley!
Josie Lloyd: Well, when it’s on a trolley, but it’s when it’s been borrowed loads and loads of times. The best book in the world is a battered library book.
Steve Thomas: In the old days when we were growing up, you could see all those little stamps on the back so you could see how many times it had been checked out. Now you don’t know that for sure from looking at it, but yeah.
This book really connected with me ’cause I’ve also been married 25 years. Our anniversary was last year, and we’ve got a couple kids, so I really connected with a lot of stuff in the book.
Josie Lloyd: You know, Steve, it’s just, it was really interesting about what you said because I think lots of stories, particularly kind of romance stories, the book ends at the kiss, the realization, the moment that you know, ” Will you marry me? I’ve realized you are the one!”, and actually, as you and I know, the real stuff, the real magic happens after that. And yet there aren’t that many stories about long term love. There’s lots about second chances in midlife. But we wanted to be in support of those of us slogging it out in the long-term relationships.
Emlyn Rees: And I think with You & Me that what we wanted to do with the book above all else was to find a way to tell a long-term relationship, but we didn’t wanna do it in a linear way. I mean, there were definitely some echoes for us. We’d been married 25 years. Our kids were leaving home. We suddenly had a lot to say about this stage of life.
But we wanted to find a fun, comical way of going in, which is why we kind of hit upon this silly idea of Adam and Jules having this big row. They’re kind of stuck where they are in life and they’ve started to look back and they’re full of regrets. And luckily at that point I like, this is the great thing about fiction, one of them happens to find a time machine in their shed. So they get to go back, travel back, revisit all these parts of their, their life. And so for us it was, it was just a fun way of sort of getting into, essentially talking about the meat of a long-term relationship, the ups and downs, the high times, the low times, and what makes something good and what makes something worth fighting for.
Josie Lloyd: Yeah. But it was also very much about the what ifs. We’ve got lots of what ifs. What if we’d done something differently? What if we’d made that decision? Would that have made us richer, happier? Would it have made us more healthy? Would it have made us more fulfilled? You know, I think at this stage of life, we’re in our fifties, I think it is a very reflective kind of stage of life so we really wanted to drill down into that, and actually, in a lot of ways it was a bit like free marriage counseling. I mean, quite honestly, because we did have to kind of really talk about that. And actually we really had a look at nostalgia and how we kind of all get nostalgic, but actually it’s quite dangerous. We got out all of our old videotapes.
Emlyn Rees: We did it in lockdown. We did that thing of those sort of bored hours when you’re trying to work, you’re trying to make a living. But also there are those staring at the wall hours when you’re wondering if this is over. And yeah, we dug out all the old Sony tapes, went through it and you put your finger on it, you suddenly went, “It’s weird. I thought this would make me kind of happy.” And there there’s a kind of sweet poison effect to it as well because you start comparing your youth with who you are now and all, and we wanted to really dive into that as well.
Josie Lloyd: And also, do you know what, I’m the worst filmer of all time. I’ve never been more frustrated with a film director in my life. I was like, why am I looking at this inanimate baby? I should be looking at my beautiful mum who’s no longer with us and my dad and our friends, and why am I just bossily commanding my child to sing a song or something? It’s awful. And I was like, I really honestly hated myself. I was like, I’m terrible. I did all the wrong things. So yeah, it’s a poison chalice looking back and it can stop you looking forward.
Emlyn Rees: And it could have been in the middle of an exhausting day. It’s that whole thing, but what these things are really useful for and also music, certainly. So in You & Me, the device they use for traveling back in time is the mix tapes they’ve given to each other over the years. They find out that when they put them in the old machine. It takes them back to the moment these mix tapes were handed over. And the lovely thing for us in the same way as looking at these sort of Sony tapes, we sort of put a playlist together as we were writing the books, and it really took us back to all those moments. It’s amazing how putting a old Talking Heads song on can whip you back to the year it was out. So we were doing that, having a lot of fun, the positive side of nostalgia.
Josie Lloyd: Yes. And actually we were lying in bed going, “Oh my God, we haven’t put that song on! We haven’t put that song on!” The curation of the playlist was so much fun. And we named the chapters after certain songs, so it would really locate people in time. And we wanted to try and find ones that were kind of universal, that meant something to us, but also we felt that would be universal, might resonate. So yeah, it’s been really fun. It’s that whole thing about when you hear music. For me, I can often, I can’t remember what I was wearing, I can’t remember where I was, I can’t remember who I was with, but I can remember a sort of atmosphere. Sort of an atmosphere of a time, and it’s really intangible and so we were trying to kind of really get into that when we were writing that, and I hope that, so it’s really fun writing a book with a music score attached.
Emlyn Rees: But it helped us remember the vibe of that time, whatever the year was we were trying to go back to in these flashbacks, the music was definitely the kind of catapult that fired our minds there, I think, for the writing.
Steve Thomas: Of course, the drama of the book is not so much, “Oh, we’re gonna go back and just kind of experience this,” it’s that they start to get that temptation “Oh, I could actually change things.” And they start with small things that they don’t tell each other about. Like, the funny one is, you know, “I’m gonna teach him to keep the toilet seat down early instead of trying to fight it my whole life.”
Emlyn Rees: Nothing autobiographical in that!
Josie Lloyd: Nothing too biographical. Nothing to see here, Steve.
Steve Thomas: I grew up with a mom and sister, so I learned it early on. My wife didn’t have to teach me later, but stuff like that then later on, of course, the temptation gets bigger for larger things in their lives that they think have gone bad. It’s like what you said, that’s all those what ifs, but you don’t think about the ripple effect of that. One of them early on is that their son had an accident at one point, and so they’re tempted over and over again, “Oh, we could go back and fix that, but that would mess up what he is now. And like, our mistakes make us who we are as much as our successes. So it’s hard.
Josie Lloyd: And I think that was a really important point because actually what they have to realize and what end up with is that they have to realize that there is no such perfect life for them. There isn’t a perfect life. There isn’t a perfect version of Adam and Jules. So it’s about them learning to love what they already have
Emlyn Rees: And that things don’t have to be perfect.
Josie Lloyd: Yeah.
Emlyn Rees: And chasing perfection is a kind of, yeah, it’s a fool’s quest. They learn a lot of things, but I think, I think.
Josie Lloyd: So that’s a really, really good question because that was something that was really fun to play with. They’ve seen Back to the Future. They know that there is going to be a consequence, but one of the things that they have to learn during this book is that there is no such thing as perfect. There isn’t a scenario in which there is, everything is gonna turn out fine. There’s gonna be consequences to everything. There’s no such thing as a perfect life. There isn’t a perfect version of Adam and Jules. Life has ups and downs, good and bad, and they have to learn to accept that their perfect is probably what they already had.
Emlyn Rees: That’s true sort of morally and ethically, but my wicked head on the other side also says that because there were two of us writing it, it was really fun once we realized that they were both traveling back in time separately. When one of them changed something and they come back, the other person, the other character doesn’t know that the world was end ever any different.
So we’ve got this fabulous thing, it’s kind of not a time travel book, it’s more a multiverse book where each time they’re changed something in the past, they’re creating a new timeline, and what that involved was a lot of fun as authors, ’cause we got to throw surprises at each other, but also it was a kind of gift that kept giving comically because one person is in the know, one character is in the know, the other character isn’t. But for the reader, the fun bit is you get to see it all. You are getting to see this, their misunderstandings, their mess ups, you are the only person who gets to see that is the reader. And we just had so much fun.
Josie Lloyd: It was so fun. And actually, once we got that structure, because we wrote as you said, we wrote it in alternate chapters so there was a Jules chapter, then an Adam chapter. When we handed over the chapters to each other, it was quite fun to try and surprise each other as everyone says, and kind of shock each other. And we’d be like, “I wasn’t expecting you to do that,” even though we had planned it out. And actually we have a writing group here in Brighton and quite a lot of them screenwriters, and they said, “Whatever you do,” when we told them the idea, they said, “No, you’re mad. Don’t do a time travel, but don’t do a multiple. You are crazy. Don’t do it!” And then they said, “Well, whatever you do, you’ve gotta plan it but also you have to stick to your rules.” So here on the dining room table, we got a big bit of lining paper and lots of Sharpies and we just did an enormous timeline and plan. But even so, when we divvied up the action into chapters, we still had quite a lot of room to surprise each other. So it was fun. It was a really fun writing process.
Steve Thomas: There are times at first, they’re kind of just going from the earliest to the beginning, but then there are a couple of them where they go back before something else, and so like, well now they’ve changed that before that was changed and yeah, it starts to get complicated, but you do write it clearly enough that you understand it. But I can see in the writing process how that would be really complicated to keep track of.
Emlyn Rees: You’re right. The chronology was a nightmare to a point. I can remember getting halfway through and kind of almost feeling my brain was breaking. And we love the arts. We love music, we love writing. We liked English at school. We were not the kids who the physics and chemistry teachers were suggesting went on to Stanford or anywhere like that.
So this is us operating at the absolute edge of our ability, but also in the knowledge that the book is not a science book. It’s a fun book and we just wanted to keep the science light enough to make the plot fun, to allow us, again, just to focus in on the family and to look at the dynamics between a long-term relationship, a husband and wife and their kids and to just focus in on that really.
Steve Thomas: We talked about that a little bit before we started recording, I think of the, how you needed to focus in on the family ’cause there’s all kinds of ways you could spiral out and it works for the book perfectly. I didn’t even think about it until after I read it. They didn’t try to go change world events. It’s not like they were going back to, I don’t know, something 20 years ago, “Oh, we stopped 9/11 from happening!” They’re not trying to do that. They’re just wanting to visit their old memories and coming back and then it starts small and it just gets bigger. And there’s also the element of addiction into it of once they get into it, they feel like they can’t stop.
Josie Lloyd: And also it’s something that they share together. So unwittingly it does throw them together into a secret, into that…
Emlyn Rees: Domestic conspiracy!
Josie Lloyd: And in that way that when you are sort of first falling in love, you have this kind of secret together and you have this secret world, this is what they create in this kind of time travel bubble where they are doing something that’s very secret just to them and they can’t tell anyone else ’cause they know that nobody else is gonna believe them. But they also know that they have to keep it on the quiet and they have to just keep it between themselves and in order to do this, they set down rules that they’re gonna trust each other.
Emlyn Rees: They’re not gonna affect the kids.
Josie Lloyd: But then they find, they both find themselves breaking the rules that they’ve laid out together. So it was quite interesting exploring that betrayal and how that feels, that they’re holding this kind of secretive world.
Emlyn Rees: Yeah. And some of the things they end up in inadvertently doing, some of the chains of events they set off, they are consequential, they’re worse than, even say, an infidelity in a marriage. They’re just these big things because yeah, they lose each other, they lose the truth and stuff.
But coming back to what you say, you are totally right about with this kind of book, it can go anywhere and at the beginning, one of the longer chats we had about this was what are we focused on? We have to rein it in at some point. I write thrillers sometimes. So for me, I was exactly on what you were saying. I was going, my first thing. I’m just sort of going, well, they could go back, we can go anywhere with this and we can make this as crazy as we like. They can do anything. So it was a really fun discussion sort of going, “What is our sand pit?” And I’ve never had to do that in a novel before: these are the parameters of what we are gonna play with within this book, these are the subjects we’re gonna look at, even though we’ve got a time machine. It’s kind of counterintuitive.
Josie Lloyd: Which makes them very selfish actually. Because, you know, you would be quite selfish, you would use it for your own means. And so they use it for vanity, for financial reasons, for satisfaction, for all sorts of things, but there was a lot that landed up on the cutting room floor because originally Adam was gonna go and back and save his parents but of course that had consequences. But because there’s two of us writing and we want it to flow really quickly, and it’s a romantic comedy, so you just really want it to be a fast read. There wasn’t enough space and wasn’t enough time. So we had to be quite brutal in the edit. And the edit was brutal. I mean, the first draft was a, was like a honeymoon, but the edit was hard.
Steve Thomas: And what was the structure of how you all handled working together with that? Was it, you worked out the basic outline together and then like, were you writing the Jules chapters and you were writing the Adam chapters? How did that all work?
Emlyn Rees: Yeah, that’s strictly how it worked. So it is kind of like that game of consequences where you’re folding a paper over, one of you draws the head, one of you draws the… the chapters evolve like that until you get the whole book. There are some joys to this and there are some pitfalls to this.
So one of the joys is, I think if you spoke to any writer, the worst thing about writing is risking giving somebody your work, but it’s also waiting for feedback. The great thing about collaborating with somebody on a novel is you’re getting instant feedback. So when Jo wrote a Jules chapter from her point of view, she’s giving it to me. I’m reading it there, and then, and then I’m giving feedback on it and then I’m off. So I’m now writing my bit ’cause we wanted it to be a very reactive kind of book, like a conversation is between two people. We wanted to keep that sort of dynamism, that toing and froing going between the genders, between the couple. Then of course there’s the pitfall, which is Jo, who’s a very fast writer, is now waiting for me, who’s a very slow writer for two weeks for me to do my chapter.
Josie Lloyd: And I’m pacing around!
Emlyn Rees: There are more and more cups of tea coming, the caffeine’s being thrown at me by the end of it. So there’s this going on, and then I get my fabulous feedback. And then I’m about to relax and think, you know, I’m looking at fishing rods online and then Jo, ’cause she’s so fast, two, three days later, her chapter’s done. It’s all these kind of mad imbalances you get. But the best bit about it is, it does mean you kind of whip each other along. It’s a fast way of writing ’cause there is a competitiveness to it and there’s a guilt to it. If you haven’t done your work, you can’t have a day off.
Steve Thomas: Where did the idea initially come for this book?
Josie Lloyd: We met many years ago when we had first written our first novels and Emlyn was working in the agency, my literary agency, and we first met each other and we went to the pub.
Emlyn Rees: 1997. We’re going back.
Josie Lloyd: We went to the pub, and we were discussing our lives. We were both in our twenties. We were both single. He was the only writer that I knew, so we were having this sort of thing. We’re trying to write, I was trying to be a waitress and copyright and he was working in an agency whilst trying to write at night. And we became sort of confidants and friends.
Emlyn Rees: Jo’s being modest, she was a brilliant writer of the backs of cereal packets.
Josie Lloyd: I was. It’s not my calling.
Emlyn Rees: More people at breakfast have read Jo’s work than she has any idea!
Josie Lloyd: Honestly, not my calling. Anyway so we landed up going to the pub and we and then Emlyn rang me up the next day because he said, ” We should write this down. Do you fancy writing a novel with me?” And we didn’t know each other very well. And he rang me up from work and said, “Do you fancy giving it a go?”
Emlyn Rees: Because we had such a fun evening talking about being single.
Josie Lloyd: And more the boy’s point of view and the girl’s point of view. So I said “Yes!” So he went away and wrote the chapter of a book.
Emlyn Rees: There’s this guy called Jack.
Josie Lloyd: He put all his stories in, all the juicy gossip of a singleton in London in his twenties.
Emlyn Rees: I remember none of it.
Josie Lloyd: And he took the chapter to the point where this boy Jack taps a girl on the shoulder in a nightclub, and says, “Hi, I am Jack and you are…” and it was a dot, dot dot. Anyway, this is so long ago, Steve. This is before emails, right? So he printed it out and I cycled into town and I got the chapter and I went to a cafe and I roared with laughter. I thought it was absolutely hilarious. So I rolled up my sleeves and wrote Amy.
So we had these two chapters and we didn’t know what to do with them, and we gave them to the agents. The agents said, “Stop, don’t do anything else. We wanna read these.” Of course we had this, ” He can’t read her mind. She can’t read his, but you can read both” was the kind of tagline that we’d come up with. And then the agents took these two chapters and sold the book. There was a big book auction, so we suddenly were thrown together as writing partners, and we didn’t really know each other that well. All our friends were going, ” Hang on, what’s going on?” We had no plot. We didn’t know what we were doing, so we had these two chapters. So then we had to write this romcom about this couple that jump into bed together and then deal with the fallout.
Emlyn Rees: We did have a plot. The plot literally went as far as “two people who’ve met in a club.”
Josie Lloyd: That was it.
Emlyn Rees: That was it.
Josie Lloyd: That was it.
Emlyn Rees: There was no page attached to the chapters going, “And this is what happens next.”
Josie Lloyd: So we then had to get a writing process together where Emlyn would write the chapter.
Emlyn Rees: And we were in separate parts of London. We weren’t together romantically at this point.
Josie Lloyd: So he had to print out the chapter, so it had to be word perfect. So we got into a habit of making sure that we didn’t give scrappy work to each other. It had to be as good as it could be before we got the feedback.
Emlyn Rees: I think we were showing off to each other. This is my really terrible chat up line. “Will you write a book with me?”
Josie Lloyd: When it works…
Emlyn Rees: I was working on my chapters very hard then and very fast to make ’em as funny as possible to make.
Josie Lloyd: But it was kind of very confessional, like the way in which You & Me and You & Me and You & Me is, it was a real kind of like, look at 20 somethings in the wild. So fast forward all these years later and it’s 25 years since Come Together came out, 25 years since we’ve been married, and we were like “Right. If we’re gonna do it, we wanna do it now and say what we wanna say about this stage of life.” And also, as Emlyn says, it took us 25 years to get more jokes.
Emlyn Rees: It is funny though, the only sort of two honest books I think I’ve ever written, like I say, I’ve written thrillers, Jo’s written historical sort of romances and stuff. But I think this is very much us, sort of in the same way Come Together, our first book was. You & Me is very much us talking about this life stage and we did want to be as honest as possible.
We also wanted to be really lazy with the research. So everywhere in the book is set within two miles of the two windows we are looking out on now. The scenes where the pub breakups happen, where all these things go on the beach, the fun fair, the parks, everything in the book is kind of round here. And it’s funny, it is lovely talking to you today because we had our UK book launch last night, so we had a lot of, we live in Brighton on the south coast of England Sea, it is a seaside town. It’s the kind of place everybody from London on a hot day comes down to and eats fish and chips on the beach. It’s that kind of thing. But it was really funny doing readings last night at the launch because everybody was chuckling ’cause they’re all local and they’re not, they’re not laughing at the jokes. They’re like laughing at the fact that, “Oh, I’ve been to that pub. I know that.” So, yeah, there’s definitely quite a lot of us in the book. Us and our friends and sort of our family and family’s friends.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. I was gonna ask how much Adam and Jules are similar to you guys.
Josie Lloyd: I mean, I think that, well, I can’t cook terribly well.
Emlyn Rees: Your French is terrible.
Josie Lloyd: My French is terrible. I think there’s a lot about midlife and about how this stage of midlife feels to me and nostalgia feels to me, so I put a lot of authenticity into that. I mean, she’s not me. And obviously we haven’t found a time machine in our shed yet. Yeah, we don’t even have a shed anymore!
Emlyn Rees: But equally, they’re a couple who have had economic ups and downs, emotional ups and downs. We are very much a family like, and a couple like most people who’ve been together 25 years, we’ve had highs, we’ve had lows, we’ve had difficult times, and it’s been really lovely. It’s really odd. When you’re going through a bad time, if you’re going through a bad time in a marriage or even if you’re having a row, or something’s happening with your kids or something difficult is happening, at the time, it’s just the worst thing. We all know that, but it’s really odd if you look at your life in a chunk, in a 25 year chunk, you realize that, no matter how bad that thing is, it is part of you. It adds to who you are. It’s a weird thing to say, even if at the time it’s incredibly, it can be a negative thing, the whole becomes a positive thing. It’s your life so there’s a lot of us in there like that, I think.
Josie Lloyd: And it’s a real kind of celebration of long-term love, I think. We’re really proud of it, Steve. It’s just been a real labor of love and it’s really lovely to have our baby out in the world. We both feel very kind of like..
Emlyn Rees: Nervous.
Josie Lloyd: Nervous and protective, but it’s a very special book to us.
Steve Thomas: No, it’s great, and it sounds like it’s something that you couldn’t have written even before now. Like this is not a book you could’ve written 20 years ago.
Josie Lloyd: Not at all. No, not at all. No, not at all.
Emlyn Rees: Jo could. Jo’s a much better writer than me. She could have imagined all this, whereas I’m just better at actually using stuff I’ve seen.
Josie Lloyd: I think there is something magical about having two voices, about having two heads in a book. And I think I could write a male character, but. It wouldn’t have the authenticity of Adam and how you’ve written him.
Emlyn Rees: I think you can. You’re underselling yourself.
Josie Lloyd: Well, no, I think the power is in the fact that there’s two of us.
Steve Thomas: I mean, do you understand the importance of Star Wars figures in a boy’s life?
Josie Lloyd: I know. Well, this is the thing, it’s quite interesting because quite a lot of people, midlife people, do mention their Star Wars figurines. I was talking to somebody the other day and I said, “Oh, that features in my book!”
Emlyn Rees: It’s the same with records, all the CDs and stuff. The biggest trauma I ever had in my life was when I did get together with Jo and we started living together, sort of back when we were, I don’t know, 28. As I moved in, and I had so few possessions at the time. I had a car, a knackered car. I had a bag with some jumpers in it that I was kind of sneaking into Jo’s apartment, week after week.
Josie Lloyd: I got rid of those fast.
Emlyn Rees: And I had a massive black bin bag full of all my music, all my tapes from the eighties, all my CDs from the nineties. Jo’s apartment then was just by this Irish pub in Notting Hill and on St. Patrick’s Day, I parked my car there, and it got nicked with my music. And all that. So yeah, our Star Wars figures are important. Our music’s important. And you’re not throwing any of it out!
Steve Thomas: I still tease my mom about it that in a garage sale here, that she just sold like my big Millennium Falcon set that I had from, you know, ’82 or whatever, when the movies were still coming out…
Emlyn Rees: That made a noise, didn’t that, that have a light and a noise?
Steve Thomas: It did. It was big enough that the figures could sit in it even, I mean, so it was like big. Yeah.
Emlyn Rees: That was the mothership of toys. That must’ve been the best seller of some year.
Steve Thomas: It was, and it’s gone. Oh well. I need my mix tape to go back and get that.
Emlyn Rees: And this is the joke though. That’s the only thing you’d use that for!
Steve Thomas: Yep. Do you think if that was like a real thing, would you want to use something like that? Do you think you would be tempted in the same way as the characters are? Like, do you think you would be able to resist changing things?
Emlyn Rees: It’s funny, when we were doing the plot, what we said was, “Right, we’re not gonna have ’em changing world history. We’re not gonna have ’em doing this. So what we’re gonna answer on each time is, as we’re doing the plot, would I do this?” And even when we were thinking it’s wrong, but you know, I’d do it. So yes, I think the temptation is way too big. To know you’ve got a time machine in your garden shed that you can just go back with, ’cause they pretend they’re gonna go back and just be tourists and just experience these things, and they get more and more tempted because of course, it’s the power to do anything. I think there are very few, I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t do it, I don’t think.
Steve Thomas: Yeah.
Emlyn Rees: Maybe there’s some really good people out there who wouldn’t, or maybe just some really wise people out there.
Steve Thomas: And I do like that you do grapple with the fact that, you know, ’cause you’re doing it as a multiverse kind of thing where they’re creating a new universe every time they’re doing this, that if they create a universe they don’t like and they go back and fix it, there’s still a universe out there now with that person being miserable. So it’s like their fault that they have now this miserable person out there, but they do grapple with that and feel bad about that.
Emlyn Rees: Yeah, isn’t that hideous because that kind of occurred to us when we were plotting it and we were then going, actually, that’s a really hideous thought. Yeah, I think their transgressions start weighing on them more and more as they’re doing this. They realize that this is not necessarily a tool for good.
Josie Lloyd: But also it goes much wider than them. They realized very quickly that the smallest change can have huge repercussions, and then it’s not just them that they’ve affected, they’ve affected other people that they care about with disastrous consequences. And that makes it feel absolutely shocking.
Steve Thomas: There’s always regrets, and it’s like sometimes you just dig yourself into bigger and bigger holes.
Josie Lloyd: And that’s the thing, you can’t fix everything.
Emlyn Rees: And chasing perfection that doesn’t exist.
Steve Thomas: And acceptance I think is a big part of this book too, is that you just have to accept that those things happened and make it as part of your life and that’s who you are. And I do love that it’s, as we’ve said several times, it’s not a “falling in love” book, it’s a “staying in love” book.
Emlyn Rees: That’s a nice, nice way of putting it. Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it.
Steve Thomas: But I very much enjoyed it. Do you all have plans to write together again? I know you all both write separately, but do you have any plans for any future collaborations?
Josie Lloyd: Well, we hope so. We’ve loved it. We’ve really, really loved it.
Emlyn Rees: We haven’t written together, we haven’t written a novel together for 20 years, and we’ve been on really fun book journeys. I edit as well so I’ve been doing that kind of thing. Jo writes loads of books. She’s fantastic. I’m Jo’s biggest fan, basically.
Josie Lloyd: He’s my only fan!
Emlyn Rees: But it has been a lot of fun doing this together. So, yeah, I think if we can come up with an idea, or maybe wait another 25 years until we come up with some other jokes and another idea, I dunno. It’s hard to tell. This one, it definitely felt we had something to say, but I also feel like we’ve said it.
Steve Thomas: See what’s happening at the 50th anniversary.
Josie Lloyd: Yeah, exactly.
Emlyn Rees: Exactly.
Steve Thomas: All right. Well thank you both for coming on the podcast. I very much enjoyed it, and I hope listeners go out and get the book now that it’s gonna be coming out in the US here about when this episode is released so they can go out and get it and read it. Like I said, I was very much excited to read it just from the description and then you fulfilled it.
Josie Lloyd: I’m so thrilled you enjoyed it. And thank you ever so much for having us on the podcast.
Emlyn Rees: Really nice to meet you.
Circulating Ideas 