Love story with a Britpop backdrop

Anyone who was behaving badly during the Britpop years of the Nineties may recognise the anti-hero pop star in Lisa Jewell’s latest novel, Before I Met You.

Award-winning novelist Jewell, 44, whose previous books include Ralph’s Party, One-Hit Wonder and The Truth About Melody Browne, well remembers the Britpop years when she was living in Camden.

“They were the best days of my life. I’d just fallen in love with my soulmate, the man I would have my children with,” she says.

The man she was in love with was to become her second husband, but her first marriage had just come to an end.

“I’d been in this horrible marriage (she won’t reveal her first husband’s name) for five years in my 20s, stuck away in the middle of nowhere. He controlled everything I did, so I didn’t have any freedom or any fun. He dragged me out of London and made me live in the suburbs in Surrey – not where you want to be when you’re 23.”

Jewell was 22 when she married her first husband and 27 when she left him, after years of not seeing her friends or family. She used the experience for one of her books, Vince And Joy.

“He was three years older than me but it was like living with an introspective, grumpy, slobbish 50-year-old,” she says.

Yet it was her first husband who fuelled her interest in books and encouraged her to write, she admits.

“If I hadn’t been married to him, I wouldn’t have ended up being a writer. He really encouraged me to read and he made me grow up. I was very immature when I married him and I came out of five years with him as a grown woman. I owe him quite a lot.”

Before I Met You is about a young woman called Betty who leaves the island of Guernsey, where she grew up, to trace the mysterious beneficiary in her grandmother’s will. She moves to Soho, where she becomes a nanny to the children of a divorced pop star and his high-maintenance estranged wife. Betty’s romantic entanglements add to the plot – should she fall for the rich, good-looking pop star or the potentially more loyal, caring market trader she meets outside her door?

“I fell in love during the Britpop era. In 1995 I was 27 and I completely got caught up in the fashion of the time.”

Brought up in north London, Jewell studied art at Barnet College and then became a fashion PR before doing a creative writing course.

Before I Met You by Lisa Jewell is published by Century, priced £9.99. Available July 19.

Portrait of the author

Jewell began writing when she lost her job in PR.

“I thought I’d use my redundancy money to use the time to write a book.” That book was Ralph’s Party, which became the UK’s best-selling debut novel in 1999.

She’s writing her 11th novel, The Bird House, about a family reunited when their mother dies.