A Conversation with Adele Parks
Celebrating Our Beautiful Mess
Today we are thrilled to bring you a conversation with one of the UK’s most celebrated authors, the Sunday Times #1 bestselling Adele Parks, as she marks a remarkable milestone with the release of her 25th novel in 25 years. Having sold over 6-million copies—and with her work translated into 31 languages—Adele continues to captivate readers worldwide. An ambassador of the National Literacy Trust and the Reading Agency, two charities that promote literacy in the UK, Adele was awarded an MBE in 2022 by His Majesty King Charles III in recognition of her significant contributions to literature.
Our Beautiful Mess, released in the US today (Tues Feb 10) by Park Row, is an explosive and deeply emotional family drama that explores the lengths a mother will go to protect her family, even if it risks exposing her past. In this novel, which is perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell and Liane Moriarty, Adele brings back Connie Green, the protagonist from her beloved and celebrated debut novel, Playing Away. F&F’s Managing Director Meg Walker had the chance to talk to Adele about the challenges of returning to a character she created 25 years ago, as well as about her career as an author, her writing process, and her US tour which kicks off in the Boston area TONIGHT with our pal Hank Phillippi Ryan.
Please join us in wishing Adele a very happy US publication day, and in welcoming her to Friends & Fiction!
Our Beautiful Mess is an explosive and deeply emotional family drama in which you explore the lengths a mother will go to protect her family, even if it risks exposing her past. That’s just a tiny bit of what the book is about. Can you tell us more? And then, our favorite question here at Friends & Fiction, what’s it really about?
So Connie Green is the mother of three teen/young adult daughters, she’s happily married and living in Notting Hill, London, a very affluent part of town. So far, so fabulous. When we meet her, she’s giddy with excitement because her eldest two are coming home from university for the holidays and one of them is even bringing her boyfriend home for the first time. Connie is looking forward to a full house, one brimming with exuberance and young love. Yeah, she’s pretty naïve!
The moment Fran and new boyfriend Zac, walk up the path, Connie knows she’s heading for trouble. Zac is connected to a mistake Connie made in her past, one that threatened her marriage many years ago and now — if her secret comes out — it will threaten her entire family and destroy her carefully constructed perfection that she’s worked hard to achieve. But things quickly tumble from bad to worse as it transpires that Connie is not the only one with a secret to hide. Nearly everyone in her home is hiding something huge. One of the secrets is deadly and someone will pay the ultimate price.
What is it really about? Oh, so many things! It is about parental love of a child and what we owe the generation that’s coming up behind us. It’s about the fact that parents are people too, not invincible, most likely vulnerable; we have pasts and presents that our offspring might not imagine. It’s also about the dangerous consequences of not being able to find a way to be honest with those you love the most. Families expect a lot of one another — honesty, support, invincibility, moral perfection — and maybe that leaves us exposed, as it’s a high ideal to achieve.
What made you want to bring back Connie Green, the protagonist from Playing Away, 25 books later? Were there any challenges in returning to a character you had originally created so many books ago?
Mostly, I wanted to be with my old friend Connie. I owe her everything. When Playing Away was published, it became the bestselling debut of 2000, it spent weeks on the Sunday Times and Independent book charts. Besides selling bucketloads in the UK, it was translated into fourteen different languages, showing that the themes of the story were global not local. The success of that novel changed my life. I am eternally grateful to Connie and her dilemma — choosing between Lovely Luke Baker and Hot John Harding — as well as her four fabulous friends, who resonated so firmly with hundreds of thousands of readers worldwide. I would not have the career I do if it was not for her mistakes, her hopeful nature but hopeless discipline, her idealism, her strength, her resilience, her humor. She’s lived somewhere deep inside of me for a long time, and I knew I’d want to give her another chance to step into the spotlight to show how she’s grown, changed, continued to be challenged. There was another part of her story to tell. Connie as not just a wife, friend or lover, but Connie the mother, the warrior.
I was however boxed in by geographical and biographical details set in the past books!
Where did the original spark of the idea for Our Beautiful Mess come from?
For a while, I had been quietly wondering whether Connie’s story was complete or not. I wanted to know how she was getting along, but couldn’t work out if it was just an indulgence returning to my favorite characters. Then there was a glorious moment, a few years ago, when I was doing a promotional event and a reader enthused to me about her great passion for Connie, John, Luke and Connie’s friends. She’s read them in Playing Away, Young Wives Tales and Lies Lies Lies. Although all three of those books were written to be independent standalone novels, this particular fan had loved piecing the ‘Connie Universe’ together. She was so vibrant and invested but the exciting thing for me was she was very young; she had not been born when I started my career. Her energy was extraordinary. My writing, my themes and characters were very important to her; in fact, she said they were her favorite books. Something magical just whooshed through my mind. I revealed to her that I was harboring an idea to bring Connie back; she lit up. We started to spit ball ideas about how Conne might come back again. I shared my plot idea and she literally begged me to write it. How could I say no?!
Your books are known for their unexpected twists. Do you have the twists plotted out ahead of time, or do they arise as you write? In other words, are you a plotter or a pantser?
I’m a plotter, in so much as I always know the ending of my book. I was once told that each word would work harder if I knew where I was heading, and that has been my experience. I want my books to be surprising, challenging and possibly even unguessable but I also want them to be logical and ultimately satisfying. That only comes if the reader feels the end was right and fitting (it can be that and still be surprising). I don’t like novels that have unrealistic endings. They feel like a cheat. All that said, I don’t overly plot every single beat. I let my mind wander during the process, but rest assured, I’ll always take you where I originally planned.
Our Beautiful Mess gives readers perspectives from two generations of the same family. What were the challenges of writing from these different perspectives? What was the most fun?
It really was genuine fun to write two generations. It’s one of the most exciting things about being an author, we train ourselves to think from multiple points of view. It’s true of readers too; that’s why readers tend to be empathetic souls! I believe that writing (and reading) is about connections. In fact, in life in general I think we’d do well to concentrate less on what divides us and think more about what unites us. We hear a lot about generational divides; there’s a lot of talk about Generation This versus Generation That. I wanted to investigate what each generation could learn from the other. How strong they might be if they buddied up!
Of course, as I’m not a Gen Z. I had the challenge of presenting language accurately. I wanted my younger characters to authentically speak the way Gen Z do, I did not want to make that awful cringey mistake of using vocab that they wouldn’t use or use it incorrectly and not hit the context. I had my son and some of his friends tone-check my prose.
In the spirit of examining what connects us, it was interesting to me to discover that the problems each generation face are the same; we are eternally concerned about how we present, our careers, our relationships, our sexuality and sexual health, it’s just each generation thinks and articulates differently about those issues. Gen Xers would have said we were concerned about our looks, jobs, boyfriends and getting pregnant. Same issues, different words.
Speaking of family dynamics, your books often touch on themes of motherhood and the lengths a parent will go to protect a child. What draws you to these particular themes?
It’s very much a personal exploration and a matter of processing experience. When my son was born, I like many mums promised him he would be my priority forever. I’m a very firm believer in the fact that if you chose to bring a child on to the planet then you owe them all the support you can give. I think that’s the accountability and privilege of being a parent. It’s your responsibility to them, but also to society.
When my son was just eleven months old, I unexpectedly found myself a single mother. This had not been the plan. I had been married for five years and in the relationship for three before getting married. I thought I had found my life partner. I had envisioned a life with four children, lots of noise and bustle, I thought I was secure. Isn’t there a saying “Tell God your plans and he laughs”? After my husband left, I had to decide how to respond to the shock and pain. I realized it was my job to offer my son the same security I’d originally planned for him, despite the fact I’d be doing so on my own. That said, I didn’t want to smother my child with my undivided attention — no kid needs that! I’ve spent his lifetime battling my inert sense to over-protect. I think a lot of my stories stress test the mothering boundaries so I can find a path. My son has grown and is an adult now, an impressive one. I’m so proud of him.
You’re celebrating 25 years as a published author with this, your 25th, book. So much has changed in the publishing business over the past two-and-a-half decades. What have been your biggest joys and challenges as a writer as you look back over this time?
You are absolutely right, so much has changed! When I started out, writing and publishing novels was rather quiet and private. The author had a level of remote mystique. Our work was generally only presented in physical paper form (although sometimes there were cassettes for audio books, you needed about ten of them for a novel). Now authors are much more publicly accessible, largely through social media, but also events (which in fact I love, it makes the profession less of a lonely one); now, there are multiple ways to consume books (physical, ebook and audio) and books tend to be marketed in genre and aggressively curated; exportability and discoverability isn’t left to chance.
Importantly, the one thing that hasn’t changed for me throughout my career is that it is always ultimately about the writing. For years, I’ve had the very great joy of being able to sit at my desk and make up stories and characters that matter to readers. I feel so lucky for that constant and opportunity.
I imagine you’ve learned a lot about yourself and your craft with 25 books under your belt. What’s your best bit of writing advice? What tips might you give to someone just starting out their writing career?
My writing advice is to write regularly and because you love it, write for the joy, write because you can’t not. If you do that, you are a winner, irrespective of agent hunts, book deals, book sales, chart positions etc. I have lots more tips on my ‘contact me’ page on my website.
I also did a TEDx Talk which highlights the skills I believe are worth honing as a writer – not least, resilience!
You are deeply involved with several charities in the UK that promote literacy. Tell us why this kind of advocacy is so important to you.
It’s a sad and scary fact that across the UK, fewer children, young people and adults are enjoying reading. That is something my mum might describe as a crying shame. Why? Because reading matters. It helps shape how we think, learn, reason and make sense of the world. People who are not reading have fewer opportunities, gaps in confidence and their education and, frankly, less fun! The frustrating thing is, reading is not a limited resource, nor do you have to be a member of a secret or selective club to access the perks. We can all get more of this brilliant commodity, a gift that improves lives. So I spend a lot of time pointing that out to anyone who will listen!
I don’t need to convince anyone here about the virtues of reading, but it’s surprising how many people are unaware that reading builds empathy. We all get one life, but reading allows us access to hundreds or even thousands of others as it helps us to understand others’ points of view. So, reading builds connections, brings people closer together, actually powers communities. Reading obviously supports learning. I was born in Teesside, NE England. Not an area that is known for its opportunities. However, I was lucky enough to have great access to libraries and books were always scattered around our home. Don’t imagine Charles Dickens or any of the classics, think Jilly Cooper and sagas. Entertaining books that boosted confidence and were a powerful tool for relaxation and mental wellbeing. I read everything I could — books that were meant for me, and those that certainly were not (think Flowers in the Attic). I read comics, the radio times, the back of a cereal packet. Every time I came across a word I didn’t know, one I hadn’t heard in conversation in my day-to-day life, I looked it up. That way I expanded my vocabulary which, I’ve come to realize, was the single most self-empowering act of my life. Because someone with a decent vocabulary is seriously powerful.
I believe reading is a basic human right that ought to be available to everyone. I want to see all children given equal choices and chances through reading. I want to see them being excited, involved and inspired by books! I understand that when someone is struggling to feed their family, it may not even occur to them to consider their child’s access to books. However, I believe it is essential. We know from our research that children who read in their free time feel happier, more relaxed, and have better outcomes later in life. That’s what every parent wants for their child. Reading is the way to break the poverty trap and access better opportunities.
I see you’ve got a US book our coming up. Can you tell us where our community might be able to meet up with you on the road? And how can we connect with you online?
I am so excited to be coming to the States to talk about Our Beautiful Mess. I can’t wait to meet new readers. Please, please do come along! I promise we’ll have a fun evening. I’m being hosted by some incredible booksellers and other generous, brilliant authors. If I’m not coming to your area, do ask your local bookseller to invite me next year. And, in the meantime, please share my tour details with anyone you know.
Tuesday February 10, 6:30PM-8PM
AN UNLIKELY STORY
111 South St, Plainville, MA
In conversation with Hank Phillippi Ryan
Buy Tickets
Wednesday February 11, 6:30PM - 8PM
BEAVERDALE BOOKS
Franklin Event Center
4801 Franklin Ave, Des Moines, IA
In conversation with Heather Gudenkauf
Buy Tickets
Thursday February 12, (my birthday!), 6:30PM - 8PM EST
OXFORD EXCHANGE
420 W Kennedy Blvd, Tampa, FL
In conversation with Lisa Unger
Buy Tickets
To contact me online I’m at:
Website: www.adeleparks.com
Instagram: @adele_parks
Facebook: @OfficialAdeleParks
I manage all my own social media, so you really are talking to me!
About the Author
Adele Parks was born in Teesside, North East England. Her first novel, Playing Away, was published in 2000, and since then she’s had seventeen international bestsellers, translated into twenty-six languages. She’s been an ambassador for The Reading Agency and a judge for the Costa Book Awards, and is a keen supporter of The National Literary Trust. She’s lived in Italy, Botswana, and London, and is now settled in Guildford, Surrey, with her husband, son, and cat.
About the Book
“Adele Parks consistently writes banger after banger, and Our Beautiful Mess might just be her best yet. Addictive and brilliant.”
—Lisa Jewell, #1 New York Times bestselling author
#1 bestseller Adele Parks returns with an explosive and deeply emotional family drama that explores the lengths a mother will go to protect her family, even if it risks exposing her past. Perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell and Liane Moriarty.
Connie can’t wait to have all her daughters back home for Christmas. It’s not just the excitement of the girls being together under one roof; uni student Fran is bringing a new boyfriend to stay. The empty nest will once again be full of friends, family and young love. Yet from the moment she sees Zac, Connie feels a deep unease. Zac reminds her of the worst mistake she has ever made: a man whose charm and good looks nearly destroyed her marriage. Then, Fran announces she’s pregnant.
Reeling from Fran’s news and terrified that her past might threaten her family’s future, Connie desperately tries to navigate a path forward. But there’s a much greater menace looming, because she’s not the only one who has something to hide. Someone in the house has another devastating secret. A deception which will put everyone Connie loves in shocking danger, and one of them will pay the ultimate price.
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