The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Invisible Girl: A Novel by Lisa Jewell Interview

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

Invisible Girl: A Novel by Lisa Jewell Interview Owen Pick’s life is falling apart. In his thirties and living in his aunt’s spare bedroom, he has just been suspended from his job as a teacher after accusations of sexual misconduct—accusations he strongly denies. Searching for professional advice online, he is inadvertently sucked into the dark world of incel forums, where he meets a charismatic and mysterious figure. Across the street from Owen lives the Fours family, headed by mom Cate, a physiotherapist, and dad Roan, a child psychologist. But the Fours family have a bad feeling about their neighbor Owen. He’s a bit creepy and their teenaged daughter swears he followed her home from the train station one night. Meanwhile, young Saffyre Maddox spent three years as a patient of Roan Fours. Feeling abandoned when their therapy ends, she searches for other ways to maintain her connection with him, following him in the shadows and learning more than she wanted to know about Roan and his family. Then, on Valentine’s night, Saffyre disappears—and the last person to see her alive is Owen Pick. With evocative, vivid, and unputdownable prose and plenty of disturbing twists and turns, Jewell’s latest thriller is another “haunting, atmospheric, stay-up-way-too-late read” (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author).

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check that out you can also go to facebook.com for us the re the chris voss show there's a bunch of groups on there too on the chris voss show you can take and follow as well thousands tens of thousands of people over there in those groups check them out you can interact with them etc etc today we have a most stupendous brilliant author author on. Oh my God, she's written 18 novels. I'm still working on trying to get my first book. She's done 18 novels. And yeah, she's got her newest book we're going to be talking about today. The newest book is called Invisible Girl.

And it's by the author, the renowned author, I should say, 18 books, Lisa Jewell. She's the number one New York Times bestselling author of 18 novels, including The Family Upstairs and Then She Was Gone, as well as Watching You and I Found You. Her novels have sold more than 4.5 million, we'll go ahead and make that emphasis, copies internationally. So somebody likes reading her books, and her work has been translated into 25 languages. So people all over the world love this author. Lisa lives in London with her husband and her two daughters. Welcome to the show, Lisa.

How are you? I'm very, very good good indeed how are you doing good good good good and you're coming to us from london this morning uh yes i am i'm in north london um it's actually evening time here so it's dark yeah how's how's london these days it's dark of course as always i'm sure we do have some sunshine in london uh we had loads in fact we had loads over the summer thank god did you really ever a summer you wanted sunshine it was this summer um yeah it's fine here we're just about to go into our second lockdown tomorrow so oh that's right my husband and i are going to go out for our last dinner our last supper tonight before

they lock all the restaurants up and board board everything up again uh yeah so it's the end of the fun for a while but uh yeah it's all good really you know i have friends in australia and they they've beaten their last case and they're clean so i know but for how long they've got to let somebody in again eventually i guess they're doing really good and there's like one or two cases that pop up i'm not sure how how, but therein lies it is. So you've written this amazing novel, Invisible Girl, a novel. Let's give people your plugs so people can go to your dot coms and know where to find the book to purchase as well first. Yes.

So my website is lisajewelbooks.com. I am very active on Instagram at Lisa JewelelUK and on Twitter at LisaJewelUK and I have a Facebook page as well called Lisa Jewel. So there you go. You can find me in all those places. There you go. There you go. So you've written 18 novels and I imagine the 18 includes this one.

What made you want to write an 18th one? The contract that I'd signed with my publishers in which I promised to write an 18th one uh well the contract that i'd signed with my publishers in which i promised to write them which was actually on the contract called book 18 uh before it even had a title um yeah i mean i'm a book a year writer i've been writing a book a year for 21 years now so it's not quite a book a year but you know what i mean um and yes so invisible girl i could tell you a little bit about how how it came to me sure because no book obviously comes to an author as a fully formed thing it always comes as some tiny little shred of something that doesn't mean anything to anybody else but as a weird author

with a weird author's brain you kind of see some potential in it to grow sort of a 350 page novel from it um and in the case of this book um I was walking through a snowstorm in London just across the street from where I live about two winters ago and through the snow and it was 3 30 so all the schools had just come out there was kids everywhere throwing snowballs chucking snowballs at each other and through all of this and the yummy mummies trailing in the wake of these children um this guy was trying to just get down the road um to go to wherever he wanted to go and And he just had this air about him. He looked lost.

He looked lonely. He looked disappointed. He looked like he had some repressed anger. He looked like the kind of guy that gives women the creeps a little bit. He wasn't a bad looking guy. There was just something about him that just made me feel uncomfortable for him um and I just had this moment of just thinking I'd really like to understand what it feels like to be a guy like that to go through your days just trying your best to be a decent person

wishing that you could have a girlfriend wishing that you could have a social life and friends to go to the pub with but for some reason that just never happens for you um so that was the moment where I just thought that's what my want my next book to be about I want it to be about this guy I don't know what's going to happen to him yet I don't know what the setting for this book is going to be but it's going to be about him um so I started with him and I gave him the name Owen Pick and I made him into a 33 year old he's a single guy he's in fact he's a virgin and he bless his heart he's living with his aunt in her spare bedroom on a single bed with a lumpy mattress and his aunt doesn't really like him very much she keeps all the doors in her apartment locked so he can't get into any of the other rooms in the apartment. She doesn't let him put the heating on so his room's always cold.

And when we are first introduced to Owen in the first opening chapters he has just been suspended from his job as a college lecturer because two of his students have complained about his behaviour at the college disco, the Christmas disco. So he comes home from work um feeling feeling feeling furious because he knows he didn't do anything wrong and that these girls are just picking on him um so it really follows him um as he kind of descends down this black hole of of and anger and finds himself in an incel forum. And I will probably have to explain what an incel forum is because I'd assumed when I wrote about this topic that most people knew what it was and knew what incels were. But I've been surprised by how many people don't actually know what an incel is. An incel is a self-identified involuntary celibate, i.e. a man,

a heterosexual man, who would like to be sleeping with women and is unable to form relationships or sleep with women for reasons unknown to them, but they put it down to social injustice. And they spend a lot of time in forums online talking in quite violent terms about women and there's a lot of misogyny that goes on and things that most people really wouldn't want to party to or think about or read or know was happening so that's Owen so I'm saying the book is about Owen but actually the book is called Invisible Girl so there's clearly other people in this book I was gonna ask I'm like there's there's a guy more to it than that yeah so what I wanted to do with Owen was have him be seen by other people because that's the interesting thing is

to be Owen and to see the world from his point of view but also to see him as other people see him um so there's a character called Kate who's a physiotherapist and she lives across the street from Owen with her husband Rowan who's a child psychologist and their two teenage children and they've only just moved into their apartment and shortly after they move in her teenage daughter claims that Owen has followed her home from the tube station and was being really creepy and weird um there are also a load of sex attacks happening in the very local area um and kate because her daughter claims to have been followed home by owen suspects owen very strongly of having something to do with these sex attacks um because owen sadly gives kate the creeps as owen gives everybody the

creeps um and then the invisible girl herself is a former patient of kate's husband rowan who's i mentioned as a child psychologist and um she um was having therapy with uh rowan from the ages of 12 to 15 he then signs her off and says you're cured she'd come to him because she was self-harming because something terrible happened to her when she was 10 years old um and she feels very much that she has not been cured that he has not got to the nub of what it is that's been making her so unhappy and she starts following him around and hiding in the building site across the street and just watching him and finding out that Rowan has some secrets of his own and the story really takes off when Saffron is who is the name of the which is the name of the invisible girl Saffron Maddox goes missing from outside Rowan's house at midnight on Valentine's Day

and Owen Pitt who lives opposite is the last person to see her alive and everybody suspects it was him who had something to do with her abduction so that in a very very large large nutshell there it is there you go um this is kind of an interesting story a guy who creeps women out just by you know he just has that creep factor it sounds like you described my tinder profile um oh stop oh it does actually go on to tinder halfway through the book but that's that's a spoiler so we won't go too far down there this is an interesting topic to talk about incels uh i've been just enamored with i'm not enamored maybe that's not the correct word that sounded kind of weird i i've been just struck and just like what the hell's going on here with incels ever since i

believe it was a san bernardino killer yeah but we had here in america who brought incels out and everyone was like what the f you know and um and i've watched them and even young young males that i know that are reaching like 16 to 20 that are like still virgins at 20 like yeah i'm some of them are my family i'm still trying to figure them out and they're just they didn't have any drive to get driver's licenses yes uh they didn't have any like for me and maybe their parents just make it too comfortable at home but for me chasing girls started i think at like 10 or 11 and we used to call up girls on those you know back then we i don't know what you guys had if you guys had these in london but we had uh we had party calls on on rural phones so you would share yeah yeah yeah and so you could get a bunch of girls on it was kind of like a group chat and you'd have a bunch of guy friends on you just talk stupid you had no idea what you're

doing just talking stupid stuff you know you're interested in girls but you don't know why you just don't know what to do with them either but you're just you're learning you're learning on the job in a way aren't you you're working out as you go along and i and i do yeah i don't know what it is and this is you know you mentioned that and actually i hadn't been thinking about that when i wrote about owen but i have thought about that in terms of like you you say, other guys I see around. I haven't got sons. I've got daughters, but my friend's teenage sons. And I just think, wow, this is really strange.

This is a really weird phenomenon. And I don't know. You know, there's a theory that it's to do with how much porn they've been able to access. I don't really know. I've never studied it that deeply, but it's really interesting to me, the psychology of it. And a lot of them seem to come from this younger era. And it may be the porn and their access to internet. It may be because they don't have strong male role models who've said, you know, you need to do this.

I think a lot of it's just convenience too. A lot of the kids are spoiled. And so their parents, like, I remember asking a bunch of them, I'm like, why don't you have a driver's license? Like, I could not wait. a lot of the kids are spoiled and so their parent like i remember asking a bunch of them like why don't you have a driver's license like i could not wait i was gonna murder somebody get my driver's license at 16 yeah yeah you wanted to you wanted that ticket yeah but my my parents were good people but they made home life such a hell just i mean you're just you're a teenager you don't want to be around your parents i mean they're not cool having said that my husband who's 55 so very much of an older generation his parents

really really let him and his brother do whatever they wanted and they didn't my husband didn't leave home till he was 31 good for you but in that period of time he had plenty of girlfriends and traveled the world and did all these sorts of things as well. And he had a driver's license. I mean, I loved women and chased girls. Like, I just don't get it. Like, from the time I hit puberty and finally learned, okay, oh, this is girls. Yeah.

Yeah. I was after them and chasing them. And then what kills me about some of these incs is they spend so much time in those forums and you're just like you know if you put this amount of time into learning to talk to women and yeah and how to engage them uh you know i even i had to get a book on how to better date women and how to have conversations with them and talk to them well you're actually very much describing owen pick's narrative arc in the book and i can't go into too much detail because it's kind of a spoiler but that is very much he he gets through an incredibly low point he meets this incel in a pub in london who attempts to radicalize him and

get him to do something unthinkable in the in the name of their cause. And it's kind of a turning point. And I had kind of known with Owen that I was going to put him in this situation. I was going to get him to meet someone who would try and radicalise him. And I didn't know until I was writing it whether he would become radicalised or not, or whether he would have that moment, like you just said, of just thinking, hold on, instead of spending all this time talking to sad, angry men in a forum, how about I go on Tinder and see if there's someone there who might actually just like me for myself, if I can just drop all this anger and all this weirdness

I've been carrying around with me for various reasons. So yeah, that is kind of the arc that owen goes on a story of secrets and injustices invisible girl evaluates how we look in the wrong places for the bad people and how real predators walk among us in plain sight uh you know it is interesting i've seen the creep factor go on. Like one of the things I always had with in the companies that I own, we'd have to write people up for sexual harassment. And I would usually as a CEO be deemed with that job because it was sensitive and, and it was an issue and I had to deal with it powerfully. And so I would usually be the one who would sit down and write up the sexual harassment thing. And a lot of times, 90% of the time arm around her and she didn't complain

so i figured it was fine for me and exactly and so uh i kind of identified with some of what you've written in the book and in that way of of because i would have to talk to him and they wouldn't be able to understand there's so many things that owen does in the book that if somebody else did it nobody would misread it or think anything bad of him um you know there's there's moments at the beginning what he actually gets um suspended from his job for is sweating on girls at the school disco oh wow you know um which if he was like sexy hot teacher that all the girls had a crush on they would probably be like oh he sweated on me um because it's creepy creepy oh and pick it's just straight to the to the principal to complain about being harassed um and yeah there

are so many things he does that are just they're just like a tiny degree off a tiny degree off he's not going around doing bad things but because of the way he presents it and like you say that unawareness of his own creep factor he thinks he can get away with behaving in a certain way and he can't and it's it's really sad it is really really sad but being that it's a novel written by a novelist he has an arc so worth reading just to find out if i don't know yeah exactly so um without giving away the ending you can dodge this question if you want uh what do you hope maybe readers take away from the book if that doesn't give away the ending yeah well it yeah i mean it is it's clearly as you said it's a book about injustices um and it it it's really

hard to talk about because as much as during the book you're never you're pretty sure that owen hasn't done the thing that he's being accused of doing the possibility is still there because he's such a he's sort of guy who could do it and i never want the reader to lose sight of the fact that he is the sort of guy who could do it. But because we're seeing things from his perspective, you kind of know he didn't. But you've got a question mark the whole time. And I suppose that's just that's just the thing to take away from it is, you know, why do we form these prejudices against people? What is it about people that makes gives us these these really visceral responses um and yeah just uh and and also on the other side of the street you've got the fours family you've got rowan kate and their

two teenage children and you can make the same wrong assumptions about them that they are your classic middle class professional family and everything must be fabulous for them and everything must be good in their lives and they're good people a physiotherapist and a psychologist yeah child psychologist they must be good people um so you can make the wrong assumptions about people in that way as well so it is just about questioning the way you assume things about people it is interesting how we do that i was watching uh there was a video that I saw this morning, actually. It was a paralyzed pool jumping, that's not the right word, diving, a diving instructor who had been like this huge diving instructor and instructed a lot of people and helped

them to become like, you know, divers. I don't know if Olympic, but you know, people, extraordinary, uh, talent. And he gotten a cancer that had, uh, made him paralyzed, um, down his left side. And so he can't walk very well. He can do anything, but once a year, every year on his birthday, he goes up and does a dive. And it was interesting to watch because at first, when I saw him in his state that he's in, unfortunately with being paralyzed, my brain went, ooh, that's awful bad. And I thought in my head, you can't think of people that way because he's a human being. There's still a functioning brain in his head. His motor skills are not working. You can't evaluate people that way. And then I started thinking, you know what's interesting

is I formed this perception. Why do I form that perception? And, you know, I think some of it comes from our DNA. We look at people and we evaluate them in our life. We evaluate whether babies are healthy or whether they're not. I think there's something kind of in us. But unfortunately, we go down some bad roads, which is an interesting place that you took this book on people's evaluations or perceptions and why they form and how they can be malformed. everybody assumes that her life must be good just because she's pretty and nobody looks beneath the surface of her of her physical attractiveness to to find out if there's something painful inside her um so yeah it works it works in so many different ways and i think yeah you're probably

right it probably is in our dna because you know basically the the reason why people find people attractive is because the features that attractive people have signify good health and good genetics. So therefore, you don't need to worry about them because that person is in good health and has good genetics. And that's why you'd want to make babies with someone who's physically attractive, because then you'll have healthy babies with good genetics etc etc so yeah it is in our dna but we we've evolved beyond that point now um we should be able to override those instinctive feelings we have that are buried in our in in our genetics and you know dig a little deeper with people to find out what's really going on after uh black lives matter came out i did an experiment and i started everywhere anytime i left the house and went to like the store or something i would look at faces especially people from minorities and i would i would i would be very conscious at looking at them and go okay so what did you just assume there buddy

and uh and then i would think why did you make that choice and does that person look violent does that person look angry does he look like he's dangerous of course we do that for not only what you mentioned for breeding but we do it for you know is this person approaching your safety yes a danger to me um so do the characters that were in invisible girl do they come to you at once fully formed or did they develop over time? Well, yeah, I mean,

clearly he was already in my head long time before I sat down to write the book. But so that's how I tend to always start with one person who I want to write about. But then I can never tell a story from one point of view. I always need to find out I need to see what's happening from multiple points of view so that I can because I don't plan my novels so that I can see what's happening as it's happening um and I also jump around in time

frames and what have you sometimes as well um and sometimes I have a third person voice and a first person voice as is the case in Invisible Girl so I had Owen and then I knew that I wanted him to be seen by someone and I just had this idea of this sort of unhappily married woman again who on the surface looks like she's got everything she's got the handsome successful husband the two children the beautiful apartment um and yeah so Kate came to me as I started writing the book as the person who I thought if someone's going to see Owen they should be living opposite Owen that's the best place to see him um and Saffron came really late in the day actually because I hadn't planned to

write her into the story it had just been it was going to be just this playoff between Kate and Owen and their prejudices and assumptions about each other. And then I just wrote this throwaway line about Kate going through her husband's private documents about his patients and finding the paperwork about this young girl called Safran Maddox and realising immediately that she shouldn't have been looking at it but as I wrote her name and what she was being treated for I suddenly had all these questions spiral into my head of like Saffron Maddox she sounds really interesting and she was a patient of Rowan's what must that have been like what was her therapy like why was she there what happened to her when she was 10 years old why was she self-harming where does she live what does she therapy like? Why was she there? What happened to her when she was 10 years old? Why was she self-harming? Where does she live? What does she look like?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I suddenly had this head full of questions about her. So I thought the best thing to do is start writing her. So I immediately went to the next chapter and introduced her as the third character. So then I had my trio of people all sort of circling the same issue and the same story in the same location. Some readers might like this. Where's the location of the book set in?

Oh, yeah. Readers might like this. It's interesting because most of my novels are set in London. Every now and then I get bored of London and set my novels somewhere completely different, usually in fictional places because I can't be bothered to go and travel and research the area and I'm just too worried that if I set a novel somewhere where I've never lived that I'm going to get it all wrong and I'm going to get complaints from people who actually live there that I've done it wrong um but this one is set in um a really beautiful area of North London it's not far from where I live it's only about a 20 minute walk from where I live but it's like another universe I live on the side of a massive great big highway um

kind of you know crisscross streets what have you um it's called hampstead and it's a it's a it's an old london village london was originally lots and lots of tiny villages um that all got connected as the motor car developed. And it's just this beautiful rambling village with cobbled streets and churches. And there's the Hampstead Heath, which is like two square miles of just green open wild space. Yeah. So that's where it's set and it's beautiful. It's a really, really beautiful area. And it was fun to write about and it's sort of i always have house envy when i walk around there and i look at the mansions i'm seeing how the hell do people afford to live here i don't understand

so it was fun to be able to set some something there in that location that's interesting so um with the incel community how did you go researching the incel community? I mean, I kind of didn't like yourself, like you said, you know, when you found out about it, you were immediately fascinated. And I'm assuming that if you ever see a headline or read it or there's a documentary, you would probably make a beeline for it and think that's going to be interesting because I find that whole concept fascinating. And it was the same for me. I'd already, you know, there was a very famous article that went viral online a couple of years ago called The Rage of the Incels by Gia Tolentino, an American journalist who spent lots of time on incel forums she infiltrated them anonymously spent lots of time and came back with the with with the shocking truth about what happens on these forums and then there was a documentary on netflix uh earlier in the year uh called uh i can't remember but it was

about incels and uh so yeah anytime there's something out there, I'll read it because it's dark and it's peculiar and it's unsettling. And I love anything that's dark and peculiar and unsettling. So I didn't have to do any research. It was already in my head kind of primed and ready to go. The only thing I did do was to go on to Wikipedia just to because there's a lot of terminology. You know, most online communities have their own terminology, their own language um which I wasn't familiar with so I did go on to Wikipedia and just familiarize myself with the special short shorthand um and the terminology that they use um but no apart from that I didn't have to get my hands dirty myself I'm not sure I I mean I probably could have stomached it but I also I'm I'm terrible

once I start kind of researching things I just get so easily sucked down for hours and hours and hours um you know like this whole thing that happened with the Wayfair the Wayfair conspiracy they said that they were child trafficking in these cabinets that they were selling on Wayfair I thought that doesn't sound right I'd like to find out more about that i ended up spending three hours just in these weird forums and these weird chat rooms with all these conspiracy theorists um so for me it's probably best just to keep away from doing research because it just sucks up so much of my time the insult community i'm sorry guys spend less time in the community and just go talk to girls and absolutely it's a numbers game you know read owen pick story if there's any insults

read owen pick story and uh yeah be inspired like a couple of them like i asked a girl out once and she said no i'm scarred for life and you're like dude yeah keep asking i know there seems to be some entitlement to it too and like i said it's a lot of these spoiled kids that everything is given to them their parents you know seem to take care of them and everything you know i i see they're not getting their driver's license and i'm like why don't you ever drive this they're like because mom and dad are are my chauffeurs they'll drive me anywhere i want so i don't need a car and i'm like they don't even go out so why do they need to drive because they just spend the whole time in their bedrooms i mean they'll live at home forever because their parents made my parents were good people but they made life at home a living hell yeah so i wanted

to get the hell out i mean i think most of us from that generation were like we're out of here man yes absolutely get me out the door so uh pretty interesting um on your novels uh you usually involve plenty of drama but you made a big transition from contemporary affection to suspense recently what inspired your transition and was this the goal that you were trying to go across um yeah so I've been writing since I started writing my first novel in 1995 uh in my 20s and that was purely because of where I was at that point in my life how young I was I'd just gone into a new relationship and I was madly in love and life I just spent you know as a pre-children spent my whole life in the pub blah blah blah

ended up writing this really lovely romantic comedy about flatmates in South London having curry and getting stoned and all that sort of business um and so that was called Ralph's Party and that came that was published in the UK in 1999 and was a massive bestseller so that was called Ralph's Party and that came that was published in the UK in 1999 and was a massive bestseller so that was my debut novel and it went straight to top of charts and it was a bit of a phenomenon and of course once you've delivered a bestseller to your publishers they kind of would like some more of the same so even though that wasn't necessarily my own kind of you know that's that's not the sort of genre I read in I've always enjoyed dark darker books real life crime um thrillers um suspense what have you um I just

that's what I did so for sort of six six or so my first six or so books were all these kind of like contemporary romance but with like edge and you know yeah people took drugs and swore and all that sort of business um and then I kind of got older I had a couple of kids went into my 30s couldn't keep writing those books anymore and actually luckily for me at about the same time as I started wanting to do more than just write about cute relationships um my sales dropped off a bit and that for a writer who's been selling quite a high level with quite high profile with quite an it was a really good opportunity for me to start experimenting a little bit and seeing if I could you know just sort of move distance myself slightly

without anybody throwing their hands up in horror and saying no no no we want more of the cute romances um so I started writing more um kind of family dramas I suppose families with dark secrets at their hearts um that sort of thing so So that was the next, I guess, five or six novels were more in that genre. And then I think it must have been about my 12th novel. I killed one of my characters, kind of because I was bored. Halfway through the novel, I was bored. And I went back and wrote a prologue in which I killed one of the main characters. And then she was dead. And then I thought, thought okay now I'm going to have to try and explain to the reader why she died and who

killed her and once you've done that once you've done that there's no turning back really so ever since then all of my novels have involved some sort of you know deadly peril for my characters and yeah they're not crime my novels are not crime novels I keep my police as far away from crime scenes as I possibly can because I don't know anything about police procedure I don't have detectives in my books apart from very much in the background. I let my characters do all the detective work in my books. So, yeah, and here I find myself with my 18th novel. And I appear to be a psychological thriller writer. I didn't ever deliberately set out to do that, but I've been lucky enough in my career, the way it's unfolded i've found

myself in this position because this is my favorite genre i'm writing books in my favorite genre there you go to do well this is awesome you've been very successful at it uh is is uh do you have a favorite book out of any ones that you've uh taken written i have my own books? Yeah, so I've got, I'd say from my romance period there's a book called Vince and Joy, which I absolutely love. It's kind of like a

it's a bit of a sliding doors thing about a couple who just miss each other and then keep missing each other and then they finally get together at the end, but it's I've got a really big soft spot for it. And then from the family dramas there's a book called the house we grew up in which is about a mother with four children who has obsessive compulsive hoarding disorder uh and the impact that has on her family and then they have to go to the house after she's died and get rid of her hoard and blah blah blah you can you can imagine the rest um and then they have to go to the house after she's died and get rid of her hoard and blah, blah, blah. You can imagine the rest.

And then I guess from the thrillers, well, you always kind of, I'm sure you know this from talking to writers, they always like their newest one best because it's the one that, you know, you're completely focused on it. It's your newest baby. It's all you talk about.

It's all you think about. So I shall say for now, Invisible Girl, but if you talk to me about my next think about so i shall say for now uh invisible girl but if you talk to me about my next one it'll be my next one do uh do you see this uh the characters in this novel continuing or is the next area what are you working on next definitely i'm definitely not going to revisit this one i've only ever written one sequel before and that was a sequel to my first novel rouse party which was called after the party and i wrote it because i thought my publishers would like it um which was a lesson lesson to myself is don't ever write a book that you think

somebody else will like only write a book that you think you will write like and i regretted writing that sequel and ever since i've said i'm never going to write another sequel but actually i will write a sequel to the book that came out before this which is called the family upstairs and I'm going to write that sequel because I want to write it not because I think anybody else wants me to write it and certainly with this I've got no interest in revisiting these characters they're finished they're they're they're gone and yeah I'm I'm kind of 70,000 words which is almost a whole book although it doesn't quite feel like it to me yet, which is a bit worrying, into my 19th novel. So my novel's only about 90,000 words.

So I should be really feeling like I'm coming to the end, but I've got this horrible feeling it's going to be a really big, fat book because I'm 70,000 words in and it still feels like it's the middle of the book. Wow. Maybe it'll be a magnum opus. Oh, yeah. God, I don't know. I'm not a fan of long books myself. So we'll see.

Maybe it will all suddenly come together in the next 20,000 words. And that is called The Night She Disappeared. And it's, again, it's another missing teenage girl, but a very different setting and a very different concept. And that comes out next year. Do you have something against teenage girls? that why they're always i honestly i just yeah and then then she was gone which is my big new york times bestseller the one that's been in in the in the top three for about six months or whatever um that's about a missing teenage girl as well. So I clearly do.

Maybe, I don't know, maybe it's being the mother of teenage girls. Maybe I'm just sort of living out my worst fears through my books. I don't know. The next one is not going to have any missing teenage girls in it, I promise. Well, you know, I don't know, maybe your fan base loves that. It creates an interesting suspense and drama. So that's what people tune in for. There you go

anything more we should know about invisible girl and what you're doing before we uh head off uh no i think um i think i gave a pretty pretty um complete pre-seat of it earlier on in our chat and we we talked about it at some length um but i would say that uh if you are the sort of reader who likes a book where the pages turn themselves and you there's a i always call these sorts of books a book you take into the kitchen with you i always think there's a certain kind of book if you take it into the kitchen with you then you know you've got a page turner. And this is, I think, a kitchen book. So, yeah, it might sound heavy going with all the incel factor and what have you, but it is actually a proper page turner.

Can't put it down there. So, yes, I would like to say that as well. So, Lisa, give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs and order the book. Yeah. So I am lisajewelbooks.com. I'm Lisa Jewel UK on Twitter and on Instagram. And Lisa Jewel, I have a page on Facebook as well. So those are the places that you can find me.

There you go. She's a number one New York Times bestselling author. Thanks for being on the show, Lisa. We certainly appreciate it. Well, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed our chat. It's been fantastic. I have as well. It's been wonderful to have you on. I'm sure our readers will really enjoy digging into your latest book and also your library. They should dig into that as well. Yeah. Good backlist. There you go. So check it out, guys. You can go to Amazon or wherever you get fine books are sold and order Lisa's book, Invisible Girl. And it sounds definitely interesting, exciting, and suspenseful.

So you want to check it out. You can also see the video version of this on youtube.com. Forchess Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button. It's free for an unlimited time. You want to grab it while that offer is still available. You can also go to goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. Follow me over there.

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