Me Before You

"Me Before You is a very poignant story. It has two main characters: Will Traynor, who is a high-achieving, very energetic, sporty, go-getting young man, who, tragically, has an accident and ends up a quadriplegic. Lou Clark is the girl who’s hired by Will’s mum to look after him. (I can’t remember the details, but she’s probably not the first carer that he’s had—most have been seen off very quickly). Lou is like a breath of fresh air in Will’s life. I don’t think he’s ever met anybody like her; she’s certainly never met anybody like him. That immediately sets you up for the perfect scenario of a romance, but this is a tragic romance. It’s about a man who has pretty much given up on life, both literally and metaphorically, and Lou is full of life. It was such a clever matching of those two characters by Jojo Moyes and so well done. “They’re the books that I aspire to write and love to read” I was one of the last people in the whole world to read this book. I was dead set against it because I’d heard the basic premise and thought, ‘Oh, that sounds too depressing. That story is never going to end well! I don’t think I want to sign up for 300 pages of heartache.’ Eventually, the pressure of everybody talking about it and being the only one who hadn’t read it meant I did pick it up. I then just kicked myself for having wasted so much time in not having read it because I adored it. I adored the film version as well, which deviates slightly here and there, but not too dramatically because Jojo Moyes wrote the script. A lot of the dialogue was taken straight from the pages of the book. It’s not often that a film version will live up to the book, but this one does. It brought the book to a whole new audience and has made it her synonymous book. I think whatever else she writes, she’s probably never going to have that kind of impact with a readership globally that she had with Me Before You. The poignancy, I think, rather than the sadness. It was the hopefulness. It was Lou’s continually trying to get something out of this man who was so resistant to every one of her efforts. Gradually, like she’s chipping away at an ice sculpture, she is finding the man beneath the figure in the wheelchair. He comes to life with her in a way that nobody else has been able to, and I think that’s the wonderful part of the story. The sadness is there pretty much from page one. From the first meeting between the two of them, you know that he’s not going to suddenly have a miraculous cure. They’re not going to go to Lourdes, where he’s suddenly going to get better. He is what he is, and it’s about the journey that Lou takes him on, with that eternal hopefulness and effervescence that fizzes off the page."