Everything Changes But You

Everything Changes But You

Everything Changes But You tells the story of three women: Hannah, in her thirties, is happily married to Matt and living the cool life in London's East End but struggling to reconcile motherhood and her glamorous job as a beauty editor. Her mother, Marguerite, patiently copes with an alcoholic, abusive husband and wonders if this is all her life has to offer. While Matt's young cousin, Ali, is starting to feel lost looking for love in a strange city.

Things start to unravel when Hannah becomes certain they'd be much better off down in the English countryside with her family - and Matt's mum needs them with her, back in Sydney, 17,000km away.

All of them have unsettling secrets and while some are better shared, others might be best left unspoken. The problem is knowing which are which.

In this very modern story of three women's search for a place to call home, Maggie Alderson, in her most sophisticated novel yet, crosses continents and generations to explore how we find happiness - and whether love can survive betrayal.

Maggie Alderson was born in London, brought up in Staffordshire and educated at the University of St Andrews. She has worked on two newspapers and nine magazines, is married with one daughter and owns many pairs of shoes. Maggie's other novels include Cents and Sensibility, Handbags and Gladrags, Mad About The Boy, Pants on Fire and How To Break Your Own Heart. Everything Changes But You is her seventh novel.

Everything Changes But You
Michael Joseph
Author: Maggie Alderson
Price: $29.99

Interview with Maggie Alderson

Question: What inspired you to write Everything Changes But You?

Maggie Alderson: I was inspired by my experience of moving from London to Sydney and from Sydney back to the UK and also observing so many of my friends, whether they be Australian or British moving between the two countries. I've got other friends who moved to Sri Lanka, American or France and I find it very interesting the rather casual way that people move around the globe now but it inevitably leads to new sets of complications in life and I wanted to look into how we all deal with that.


Question: What motivated you to incorporate Sydney, Australia into this story?

Maggie Alderson: Mainly because I used to live in Sydney and it's generally a good thing for novelists to write what they know because as much as I love Melbourne I've never lived there so I wouldn't be able to write about it with the real feel that you have with a city that you know.

Question: What was the best thing about creating the character of Hannah?

Maggie Alderson: I enjoy creating all of my characters and what was quite interesting with Hannah was that I started off having her work at a magazine which is where I've set several of my books; I had Hannah change jobs to work at an online high-end fashion and beauty retailer with a magazine content on the website. If I were young now that's what I would be doing and that job is something that I wanted to explore.


Question: What do you hope readers take from Everything Changes But You?

Maggie Alderson: A few laughs, a few tears. With all my books I hope that they'll give people entertainment because I love it when I read a book and I live in the world, of the book and I really live and breathe the book, for the time that I'm reading it. If I can give readers that sense of escape for a couple of days then I'll be really happy.


Question: Are you currently working on your eighth novel?

Maggie Alderson: I have to start the eighth novel when I return home from Sydney, it's cooking in a low part of my brain where I leave it to take care of itself and I've learnt over the years to not over think it and every now and again take the lid of the stew pot and give it a stir and leave it to cook and it'll take care of itself.


Question: Can you talk about your writing process?

Maggie Alderson: I pre-plan a little bit as I know what the general theme of the book is going to be; with Everything Changes But You I knew it was going to be about the issue of moving countries and leaving families behind; I pre-plan to that extent. Then, I begin to build up the idea of the main characters, in my head, and then I look through magazines and tear up pictures of people and places that have the right feeling for the book and I stick them on the wall, over my desk, creating a mood wall. Then I begin writing without planning at all.


Question: Does the name of the character come before or after the character itself?

Maggie Alderson: That gets harder. The names always comes afterward, I find names really difficult especially now after seven books as it's really hard to find names that you haven't used before and you don't have friends with that name. I can't call a character Jane because I have several friends who are named Jane and I don't want them to think I'm writing about them.


Question: Do you base your characters on people you know in real life?

Maggie Alderson: When you know people well you know them as complicated beings but when you're writing a character you keep it simple at the beginning and gradually build them up. I don't ever base characters on real people because I already know the 3D version of them and it's much better to start with a very small idea about the character and then build it up.