The Sunday Salon with Alice-Azania Jarvis

This conversation was utterly fascinating. As you know, I've been asking all my guests for a few of their isolation stories. Well, today's guest has a particularly interesting tale. After going through New York's long and grueling lockdown, Frances Cha has moved to South Korea, where she always spends the summer, and had a very different experience. It was absolutely riveting to hear about.

Of course we discussed lots else - not least her dazzling debut novel If I Had Your Face which explores, among other things, South Korea's huge plastic surgery industry and highly stratified society. And we discussed how teaching helps her writers block, her long journey to publication - and why sometimes the best writing is painful.

Instagram: @aliceazania / @franceschawrites

Twitter: @aliceazania / @Frances_H_Cha

Buy the book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/if-i-had-your-face/frances-cha/9780241396070

Edited by Chelsey Moore

I am so excited about this week's episode - it's actually the second time that Emma has been on The Sunday Salon. Last time, we were discussing her hugely successful book The Multi-Hyphen Method, about combining different jobs into one career. Now she's back - with a novel: the smart, warm, refreshing Olive, about a woman whose friends who are settling down and having children but who is not sure she wants that. It's a great theme for a book and I loved hearing why Emma wanted to explore it. I'm so grateful that she was so open about that - as well as the disappointment of having your book out in a pandemic, writing anxiety and much, much more.

Buy the book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/olive/emma-gannon/9780008382728

Twitter: @aliceazania / @emmagannon

Instagram: @aliceazania / @emmagannonuk

Edited by Chelsey Moore

I am so excited that my guest this week is the journalistic legend that is Alexandra Shulman. As well as being British Vogue's longest serving editor in chief (she ran the title for more than 25 years), she is the author of two novels, as well as Inside Vogue: My Diary Of Vogue's 100th Year and most recently, Clothes And Other Things That Matter, a totally riveting and engaging memoir in which she uses different items of clothing as jumping off points for sharing memories and anecdotes from her life and career. It's moving, funny and very revealing - and unsurprisingly became a Sunday Times bestseller. As you can imagine I was excited - and a little nervous - to speak to Alexandra. This only made it all the more mortifying when a problem with our virtual recording meant that I lost her halfway through - and with it, seemingly, our conversation. These, of course, are the perils of podcasting in lockdown but it was nonetheless pretty excruciating - particularly as it happened not once, but twice. Well, all's well that ends well - Alexandra was beyond kind about it, and gave me extra time so we could recap, and even spoke to me the next day so we could finish our interview off. I was also eventually able to retrieve the lost files. So thank you Alexandra, and thank you too for being so open and honest and interesting to speak to. We covered everything from the moment she decided to leave Vogue, to her struggles with anxiety, what she has been up to in lockdown, and, of course, her writing routine and rituals. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Instagram: @aliceazania / @alexandrashulman

Twitter: @aliceazania / @AShulman2

Buy the book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/clothes-and-other-things-that-matter/alexandra-shulman/9781788401982

Edited by Chelsey Moore

I am so delighted that my guest this week is Pandora Sykes, whose new book, How Do We Know We're Doing It Right? Essays on Modern Life, is a thought-provoking and insightful dissection of contemporary fads and foibles - from wellness and self-optimisation, to our urge to appear "authentic" even when doing so is in itself superficial and so much more. I found her totally fascinating to speak to. As an early adopter of Instagram while working as a fashion journalist - and as the co-host of The High Low podcast - she has had to get used to putting herself out there, being public facing, and being scrutinised - for better and for worse - by the entire internet. We discussed that, as well as her identity struggles when she became a mother, how and when she writes (it's often in the small hours) and what, as someone who is highly sensitive, it is like to be publishing your thoughts and opinions in book form. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Instagram: @aliceazania / @pandorasykes

Twitter: @aliceazania / @PINsykes

Buy the book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/how-do-we-know-were-doing-it-right/pandora-sykes/9781786332073

Edited by Chelsey Moore

Fashion! Psychodrama! Jealousy! Harriet Walker's debut novel The New Girl has it all. A psychological thriller about the relationship between a magazine's fashion editor and her maternity cover, I could not put it down - and I'm not surprised that it is one of the year's most buzzed-about books. As you can imagine, I was delighted to have the chance to grill Harriet on how much of it was drawn from personal experience (as fashion editor of The Times, she has seen her fair share of Devil Wears Prada-style madness) and how on earth she managed to write it while on maternity leave (as you will hear, it was a bit more complicated than that). And there was so much else I loved about our chat - from Harriet's honesty about the imposter syndrome she struggles with as an author to how she juggled looking after her daughter with working full time in lockdown, to the time she interned at Tatler and was too afraid to speak. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Twitter: @Aliceazania / @harrywalker1

Instagram: @aliceazania / _harrywalker1

Buy the book here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-new-girl/harriet-walker/9781529304008

Edited by Chelsey Moore

Yara Rodrigues Fowler is a force of nature. Last year, she published her debut novel Stubborn Archivist, a complex and subtle examination of identity, trauma and recovery which straddles Brazil and South London, winning high praise from critics and earning nominations for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Now she is working on her next book - but if you think this is a straightforward story of a young writer achieving overnight success, think again. As we discuss in this episode, at university she found unhappiness had a detrimental effect on her creativity; later, while trying to fit writing around a full-time job, she pushed herself to the point of burnout. We talk about this, as well as the benefits that antidepressants have had in her life, the Brazilian Black Lives Matter movement, how lockdown has changed our lifestyles, subverting conventional writing styles and much much more.

Twitter: @aliceazania / @yazzarf

Instagram: @aliceazania / @yararodriguesfowler

Buy the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stubborn-Archivist-Yara-Rodrigues-Fowler/dp/0708899072

Edited by Chelsey Moore

My guest this week is Leaf Arbuthnot, whose debut novel Looking For Eliza could hardly have been better timed: telling the story of the friendship that evolves between Ada, a widowed writer, and Eliza, a young student, it taps into big subjects such as loneliness, generational difference and friendship, all of which feel particularly fitting given our current situation.

I loved our conversation - we really got into the nitty-gritty of writing - and I'm so grateful to Leaf for being so honest and open about everything from her creative process to previous writing failures, to learning to let go of perfectionism when it comes to her weight and appearance. I hope you find it as enjoyable as I did.

Edited by Chelsey Moore

Twitter: @aliceazania / @leafarbuthnot

Instagram: @aliceazania / @leafarbuthnot

Buy the book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/looking-for-eliza/leaf-arbuthnot/9781409185796

Two twin sisters, one trauma, two very different paths. One night, Stella and Desiree witnesses the lynching of their father by a group of white men. The night sets them on dramatically different paths, with Stella constructing a new identity and “passing” as white.

This is the premise behind The Vanishing Half, the phenomenal second book by the California-born, New York-based author Brit Bennett. Already a number one New York Times bestseller, it is a fascinating exploration of trauma and race as a construct - but one which carries enormous real-life significance. It's Brit's second novel; her debut, The Mothers, was also a New York Times bestseller. And she is an acclaimed essayist, who has written for the likes of The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.

I was so excited to talk to Brit. Of course, when she wrote her book she could not have imagined how timely some of the themes would be, amidst the global outrage at the death of George Floyd. Neither could she have imagined that it would be published in the middle of a pandemic. We discussed both of these, as well as her writing process, path to publication - and the problem with black authors automatically being expected to answer questions about race. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Twitter: @aliceazania / @britrbennett

Instagram: @aliceazania / @britrbennett

Buy the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vanishing-Half-bestselling-author-Mothers-ebook/dp/B082KH5D4M

Edited by Chelsey Moore

Zeba Talkhani's memoir My Past Is a Foreign Country: A Muslim Feminist Finds Herself is extraordinary, charting her experience growing up in Saudi Arabia and her journey to find freedom in India, Germany and the UK. It is an absolutely fascinating read and I loved chatting to Zeba about it – as well as her path to self acceptance after her hair began to fall out, and how the lockdown has affected her creativity. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Twitter: @aliceazania / @ZebaTalk

Instagram: @aliceazania / @zebatalk

Buy the book: https://www.waterstones.com/book/my-past-is-a-foreign-country-a-muslim-feminist-finds-herself/zeba-talkhani/9781473684058

Edited by Chelsey Moore

Have you ever got halfway through a creative project, only to abandon it - and then wonder what could have been had you completed it? That is what happened to the journalist Jenny McCartney. Having grown up in Northern Ireland, she reported on the paramilitary attacks in the 90s for The Sunday Telegraph, and became fascinated with the psychological legacy of violence. She channeled this into the beginning of a novel, which she never finished. Life took over - she got married, had children. Then, six years ago, she decided to dig it out, getting her draft off a set of old floppy disks and picking it up again. The result was her highly acclaimed debut novel, the Ghost Factory. I found Jenny totally fascinating to talk to - not only was it riveting to hear about her childhood in Northern Ireland, but we also discussed life in lockdown, anxiety, balancing family life with creativity and more. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Twitter: @aliceazania / @mccartney_jenny

Buy the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Factory-Jenny-McCartney/dp/0008295492

Edited by Chelsey Moore