The Diary of a Debut | 15th, 16th and 17th January 2011

(Not) having sex with a rugby team, and Harry Potter

Hopes and Doubts — The Diary of a Debut

My first book, Before I Go to Sleep, first came out in April 2011. I’d completely forgotten that in the January of that year I started keeping a journal to chronicle things as they happened.

My entries were sporadic, and some intensely personal. (The next few for example). Some of it too personal to share, so I guess I was writing it purely for myself.

(PS I’m now less of a grump about Harry Potter, too. Though more of one about their author).

To read the whole thing, and future entries, please consider becoming a paying reader-supporter. You’ll get all my posts, and access to the entire archive. I try to provide good value, and though there’s something for everyone, the juice is below the line.

Click below for a FLASH SALE of 80% off the price of a subscription!

But hurry, this offer is available for ONE DAY only!

From a blog Lehane wrote for Powell’s bookstore

15th January 2011

Email of the day from [my publicist]. Apparently Nigella Lawson was lunching with a female friend (Who? Brix?) who began eulogising Before I Go to Sleep. Nigella asked her PA to ring Transworld to get a copy. How exciting!

16th January 2011

Hungover morning. I can cope with the pain, but not the mental anguish I put myself through. What did I do? What did I say? Did I misbehave? There’s still a disconnect between the behaviour I admire in others, or think is fun, or acceptable at least, and myself. The self-flagellation, is exhausting. But it’s the memory loss that bothers me - the hours during which, for all I know, I had unprotected sex with an entire rugby team.

Anyway, during the evening we watched Random Harvest - a forties film about a soldier who suffers amnesia, escapes from the asylum, meets a girl, begins a new life, then is involved in a car accident that restores his early memories but erases all those from the preceding two years. Very good (in that black and white, vintage-years-of-Hollywood-one-foot-on-the-floor-during-all-kissing-scenes kinda way). As N pointed out, there’s a real opportunity for Before...Sleep to be a multi layered movie - it could easily be film about how difficult it is for Christine’s family, for example, as well as how hard it is for her.

17th January 2011

A dreary, awful day - raining solidly and overcast. ‘Scientists’ have declared this day to be the most miserable in the year. January, so no longer Christmas, no money, it’s winter, people are well and truly back to work, resolutions have been abandoned, the promise of a new year, presumably, vanished already. I don’t know how much of that to believe but it’s certainly true that everyone who I saw seemed to be having a thoroughly miserable day, as did everyone posting on Facebook.

This afternoon I saw, for the first time, the American proof (ARC, they’re called over there - Advanced Reader Copy) of Before I Go to Sleep. It does look truly lovely. They’ve used one of Lehane’s two quotes (my favourite - the ‘... Memento on crystal meth...’ one) on the inside of the cover.

[…}

Back home Nic and I watched the first Harry Potter film. I was in a blockbuster mood, and it was available. I thought it was pretty shit, really. The kids can’t really act, the CGI looks painfully CG, the story is linear, and obvious, and unsubtle (‘Harry finds an invisibility cloak!’ then, in the next scene ‘Oh look! Harry needs an invisibility cloak!’ I mean, why not have him finding it, not knowing what it is, then finding himself needing to be invisible, not knowing how, and then ‘accidentally’ realising that the cloak he had... blah... blah... blah...) I wonder if the whole series of books is like that?

I don’t think I’m prepared to read them in order to find out, though...