The Flatshare

Carrie Hope Fletcher interviews Beth O’Leary

Carrie: Hi! My name’s Carrie Hope Fletcher and you’re probably sick of my voice because you just listened to me read half the book as Tiffy, but here I am with Beth O’Leary who wrote the book, who wrote the lovely words that you’ve just listened to, and we’re going to have a little chat.

Beth: Hi, I’m Beth O’Leary, author of The Flatshare. I just got here and heard a little bit of Carrie being an amazing Tiffy, which is the weirdest and coolest experience.

Carrie: It’s the most terrifying thing because the only audiobooks I’ve ever done before are my own. I know what my voice sounds like, and it’s fine if I’m just reading my own words, but then all of a sudden when you’re asked to do someone else’s audiobook, there’s so much more pressure and you’re like ‘it needs to be perfect, I need to make sure I sound OK!’

Beth: Well, it is perfect!

Carrie: So, The Flatshare tells the story of Tiffy and Leon, who share a flat and more importantly a bed, but at different times of the day. What inspired you to come up with that idea of a love story?

Beth: The idea came to me when I’d just moved in with my boyfriend. He was a junior doctor just starting training and he was doing lots of long stretches, working nights. I was commuting up to London, so I was away for the whole day, and then I’d get home and he’d have just left — sometimes I’d even see him in the car going as I was coming up from the train. So there was always someone asleep in our bed, but we were never in there at the same time.

Carrie: Always passing ships.

Beth: I did start to notice things like Tiffy does with Leon, like the cups by the sink, or whether his trainers were out because he had a chance to go for a run, and all of those things got me thinking about how much you can find out about somebody when you’re sharing the same space but you’re not together. That was where the idea came from, and I thought, ‘Could you fall in love that way?’

Carrie: It is amazing when you’re reading the book because you don’t realise that they haven’t met yet. It takes them half the book to actually meet. You fool yourself into thinking that surely they’ve met because they’ve had all these conversations, but then you realise it’s all via Post-it notes.

Beth: It kept me going actually, I was really excited to write the scene when they meet. I knew exactly how I wanted it to go right from the start. Whenever I felt it wasn’t working, I thought, ‘Just keep going, and then you get to write the bit where they meet’.

Carrie: That was my favourite scene to read — obviously I’m only reading half the book as I’m only reading Tiffy’s side of it. I feel really lucky that I got the scene where they meet because that was one of the chapters that I got to read.

Beth: Leon gets the recovery scene, doesn’t he?

Carrie: He gets the aftermath of what happened. But I just loved that scene where they meet, it’s so brilliant and so funny.

Beth: Thank you. I knew I wanted them to meet in the flat because it felt like everything was circling around the flat so they had to meet there. I thought, ‘Are they just going to bump into each other in the hall? That’s not very interesting.’ But then I thought, ‘The bathroom … there’s a lot of comic potential in the bathroom.’

Carrie: It’s such a perfect meeting because, of course, through the whole book they want to meet, and there’s even a point where Tiffy’s trying to construct the meeting. It’s great that it’s so unexpected and so out of their hands, I think it’s the perfect way for Tiffy and Leon to meet. So, how hard was it to write Tiffy and Leon while you were still working?

Beth: I wrote the book almost entirely on my commute. I’d moved an hour out of London, so it meant I had an hour each way with my laptop and no excuse to do anything else because I was just sat there for that time. It worked really well for me having those intense little windows of time to do it. It was a little bit hard sometimes to switch off, especially at the end of the day, but I bought myself some noise-cancelling headphones, which are the best thing I’ve ever bought! I just flicked them on, and I had music I sometimes listened to, to get myself in the headspace. I guess because I was writing for fun, it never felt like something that was too hard, but it took a lot of time.

Carrie: I love a train journey for writing.

Beth: It’s so productive, isn’t it?

Carrie: Yeah, because you’ve got nothing else to do, and so many trains don’t have decent Wi-Fi, so you have no excuse but to just get on with something productive.

Beth: Yeah, it’s so true.

Carrie: You’ve mentioned that you listen to music and you have playlists to get into the different headspaces of both Tiffy and Leon when you’re writing their voices. Can you talk a bit about that?

Beth: Music was really useful. I think it helped me get into not necessarily the individual characters, but the mood of the book. The playlist for The Flatshare is full of folksy-pop, upbeat stuff, and once I was listening to it I was ‘back there’. I used it a lot when I was editing as well — I don’t know if you find this, but sometimes when I’ve come away from the story and I’m being more analytical and trying to chop it up, I kind of lose it a little bit, I feel like I’ve lost the magic, or I’ve lost the love for it.

Carrie: You lose the feeling of what it was like to write it.

Beth: Totally. And having the songs that had inspired me as I was going along really helped.

Carrie: Awesome! I’ve said that my favourite scene to read was the scene where they meet in the bathroom. What was your favourite scene to write?

Beth: I would say that was definitely up there, because it was just so much fun and I’d been looking forward to it for so long, but I loved writing the epilogue. That was something that came in later, with the edits. It was after I’d sold the book and I had feedback from editors, when they said the ending had a little short epilogue, but it didn’t have the heart that it needed. Then we came up with the idea for exactly how the epilogue would happen, and once I’d thought of that I couldn’t wait to write it. It was just so lovely because I wanted to give the characters their happy ending, I felt so fond of them.

Carrie: I cried.

Beth: Did you? Yes!

Carrie: I cried at the end of that book, I honestly was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s the happy ending we all deserve! Oh my God!’ It’s so good.

Beth: That’s great, thank you! I’m always really pleased when people tell me they cry, and then after I’m initially like, ‘Yes!’, I’m like, ‘Oh, sorry.’ Normally I’m not pleased about making people cry, but I’m kind of glad this time?

Carrie: Well, thank you so much for asking me to be Tiffy.

Beth: No, thank you so much for doing it. Can I ask, what was it about the character that made you interested in taking the part?

Carrie: She’s just so much fun. I think she’s got that sort of confidence that I wish I had. The way she dresses … she has issues with past relationships and stuff, but in herself — and it shows in the way she dresses — she doesn’t really care too much about what people think. She’s described as a very tall girl, and it seems like she’s grown up not being able to not care about what people think, because people are always going to look at her in some way or another and make stupid comments about her size and her height and stuff like that. I think also with the past relationships thing, people reading this book are going to really relate to Tiffy in some way. I know I certainly did — I’ve had my fair share of idiot boyfriends, I’ve had my fair share of Justins.

Beth: God, I’m sorry.

Carrie: But that’s what’s so brilliant about this book: Tiffy isn’t your typical role model. So many people are getting bogged down in writing ‘the perfect female’, who replies to people in the perfect way and does the perfect thing, who everyone should take lessons from, but I feel like Tiffy’s real. Tiffy actually reacts in the way that you would expect a normal human female to react in those situations, but eventually through the help of her friends and through the help of Leon, she does eventually get out of that abusive, vicious circle. I think girls who have been in the same situation are going to read that and take a lot of comfort away from Tiffy and the way that she does get out of it.

Beth: I really hope so. I wanted to write somebody that was going through something shit, but still hadn’t lost the essence of herself. She was still a confident person and very unique and extroverted and this really lively person. She was dealing with some stuff, yeah, and that had taken away a bit of her, but she was getting it back, and I really wanted to see her come through it. I wanted to make sure she was going into a healthy new relationship, so I wanted them to be a friendship before they were a relationship.

Carrie: Well, Leon’s perfect for her. I highly approve.

Beth: I’m glad you approve!

Carrie: Thank you again for letting me voice Tiffy, and thank you for writing such an incredible book!

Beth: Thank you so much.