Knaresborough friends' debut novel Over The Fence comes out after a difficult few years

They met in pre-Covid times but, during the lockdowns both contended with difficult circumstances - Julie’s husband, Stuart, died of cancer in 2020, while Karen has overcome breast cancer - but through a joint writing project ended up with Over The Fence.

The novel is written in the form of diary entries by two neighbours – Seren and Clarissa – which explore “how they view and judge life”, and the discovery a secret which could have major consequences for both women.

Julie, 63, says: “I'm a prolific writer. I've been writing since I could hold a pen and just never had the confidence to submit anything. When my husband, one drunken night, discovered that I still had such an interest in writing, he actually really encouraged me to start again, and I did.”

Karen, 54, is co-owner, with husband Garrey, of Yorkshire Eyewear opticians, which operates in Knaresborough and Howden.

Stuart and Julie were patients, and at an appointment he told Karen about his wife’s writing. Later, Karen asked Julie to join her on a creative writing course at Rossett Adult Learning in Harrogate, where they paired up.

Julie says: “He naughtily told Karen that I was a writer, and I said, ‘I'm not a writer, somebody that gets published, I just write’. But he developed cancer during lockdown and sadly died. So then Karen got in touch with me and asked me to go on a writing course with her. And at first I was a bit reluctant, but we did, and here we are, 80,000 words later.”

“I was never a writer,” says Karen. “I was always into sport and maths and optics."

Despite co-authoring a book Karen says she is “not very good at English” – and is actually dyslexic – but has always had an imagination.

“We were going through a really bad time with the practice, and I literally sat up in the middle of the night and started writing. Garrey bought me a Mac. He said: ‘Oh, this will change your life’. And I remember looking at this Mac for six months thinking, oh, my goodness, I can't think of anything else, how am I going to learn this? And I literally opened up and just started writing, and I just found it cathartic, and it was a way of me coping with all the rubbish going on in our personal life and our business. And that's why, when Julie's husband Stu mentioned about writing, it sort of lit somebody up inside of me.

“I just felt I had stories to tell, but I didn't know how to do them.”

She was able to take time out from the stresses of the business and dedicated time to writing, and that ended up being put into the book, which was partly inspired by a real former neighbour.

For Julie, a mother-of-three and grandmother-of-two, it was a revelation to return to her love of writing.

Having spent many years as a nurse, working predominantly with older people, she says: “I had a mum who told me that I was too much of a dreamer in that I needed to grow up and have a proper job.

"And so I grew up – maybe – and had a proper job, and I met lots of different people from all sorts of walks of life, and their characters made an impression on me. So even though I wasn't actually writing, I was still storing them, and I liked to hear their stories.”

She felt as though she had “lost permission” to write but was spurred on by Stuart’s honest constructive criticism, and he supported her up to his death aged 50 in June of 2020. Cancer spread to various parts of his body and it was “nine weeks from diagnosis to his funeral,” says Julie.

“His last thing that he said to me, really, was: ‘You need to write, and you don't stop writing, and you need to get published. You've got something - do it’. And because he told me I had to do it, I thought, no, you're not here, I'm not doing it. But fortunately, Karen came along and I did.”

Mother-of-four Karen’s health, thankfully, is much improved.

“I was very lucky,” she says, because she had taken up cancer screenings that were on in Harrogate. “I just went along to one of those and it got picked up. So I ended up with a few operations and a full mastectomy, and then a hysterectomy. I was the same age as Stu, so I remember thinking, I survived and other people don’t, and it just hits home, doesn't it, sometimes?”

Julie says that, post-Covid, “we were all a bit lost, but I think I was doubly lost and I'd intended never to write again”.

Karen says: “The writing just grew and grew, didn't it? I've not gone back to work yet. I'm behind the scenes still.”

They did not think Over The Fence would be released, but contacted Rick Armstrong at Fisher King Publishing anyway.

“We never thought anything about it,” says Karen. “We emailed him and then he sent the synopsis off, and then he asked for like, 6,000 words, beginning, middle and end. And then we had the Zoom meeting with him in December. We were both thinking, oh, he’s just being nice.”

Not so. The book was published in May, they held a launch in July, and they’ve received plenty of congratulatory feedback.

“It’s been an incredible journey,” says Julie. “To think when we started it, we were both in pretty shady places. We're different people now. It was a healing process for us, but not just that – there was real fun in it.”

No wonder they’re already writing book two.

Over the Fence is out now.