‘I must be the opposite of a psychopath’

On her 10th birthday, Jojo Moyes came home from school in the 1970s’ pre-gentrified Hackney — one of London’s grittier boroughs, even now — to a bedroom full of hay. “I was a country child who happened to be living in the inner city. And all I wanted for my birthday was my bedroom to turn into a stable, and mum did it,” she says, warm brown eyes lighting up at the memory.

“My parents — both artists — were certainly bohemian to an extent. You don’t notice that your childhood is eccentric or out of tilt at the time. But it was all great material for a writer.” Little wonder, then, that award-winning novelist Moyes, 46, has never had to worry where her next plot will come from, or inspiration for unforgettable characters such as those in her bestseller “Me Before You”, which is being turned into a movie due for release next year, starring “Game of Thrones”’s Emilia Clarke and “The Hunger Games”’s Sam Claflin.

Louisa, in particular — an imperfect but hugely empathetic character — came to life so vividly under Moyes’s pen that she is the subject of a just-published sequel, “After You”. The new book begins with Louisa living in an empty but expensive Docklands flat, bought with a bequest from her lost love, Will, and estranged from her own family, living in lower-middle class chaos in a Home Counties town.

Both scenarios sound a long way from Moyes’s early life inside the family’s towering Victorian house, so big she “kept swapping bedrooms — I was the only child”. Unlike Louisa, she has always been close to her mother, a successful illustrator, and her father, Jim Moyes, a sculptor, who set up Momart, the specialist art storage and transportation company.

It sounds enviably unconventional: “I have these little pictures David Hockney gave me, and remember going with my dad to Peter O’Toole’s house early one day to help hang a picture. O’Toole didn’t get up till 1pm, but when he did, he gave me £10 and told me: ‘Your dad is a cool guy.’”

Moyes was allowed to ride sculptor Elisabeth Frink’s horses, and after saving up money as a 14-year-old from her cleaning job at Momart, managed to buy her own pony, Bombardier. Which came as a surprise to her mother. “I came home and said, ‘I’ve bought Bombardier.’ I was told to promptly un-buy him, and, being stubborn, refused. A long time later, she told me she was secretly proud of my determination.”

That dichotomy — the country girl in Hackney, plus a stint working in a dodgy minicab office in Bethnal Green — left her with a streak of hyper-vigilance, which she has never entirely shaken off. “After I moved to the country in 2000 with my husband [she is married to the journalist Charles Arthur, 54, and the couple have three children, Saskia, 17, Harry, 14, and Lockie, 10], it took me six months to walk in the fields by our house without holding my keys as a weapon. Even recently, I tried to warn Saskia a skirt she was wearing out was too short. She told me, ‘Mum, this is Saffron Walden.’”

In “Me Before You”, Louisa seems to give up her own life to care for Will, a moody, angry quadriplegic intent on ending his life at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. Its sequel finds Louisa “rescuing” a runaway called Lily. “I share Louisa’s overdeveloped sense of empathy,” Moyes laughs. “I think I must be the opposite of a psychopath.”

She admits this heightened concern for others — “in my dating days, I was a sucker for someone wounded” — wasn’t helpful during her career as a journalist, principally for “The Independent”. “I was there during the Fred West trial — it really hit me.”

Moyes had begun working for the local “Egham and Staines” newspaper while at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 1989. That job landed her a bursary financed by “The Independent” to attend the postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University, London, and then a full-time position.

She began to stretch her fiction wings while working nights, with nothing to do during the day. “I’d always been writing novels and stories, and thought, I’ll see if I can get to the end of one. I posted it in chunks under my neighbours’ doors to see if they liked it. Then an agent read it and said, ‘She has a voice.’ I became obsessed; I would get excited taking a bus which went past the agency I wanted to take me on.”

Between 1995 and 2000, she wrote three novels, none of which were published: “I was married by this point; I had a baby, and was pregnant again. I thought, ‘This is getting kind of ridiculous.’” She had also watched another writer on the paper — a certain Helen Fielding — turn a column about a sad London singleton called Bridget Jones into a publishing phenomenon.

“I can still recall one of the editors coming round one night saying he wanted to have some kind of humorous column about the life of a young woman — I got sidetracked, and the next thing you know Helen Fielding does it brilliantly. I tried not to kick myself quite hard afterwards.”

Yet by Christmas that year, she had written three chapters of something that got her agent excited: “Suddenly six publishers were bidding for it. I remember being at work, writing about the best end to stuff a Christmas turkey, with this auction going on. I kept saying to my agent, ‘Can’t we stop it here?’ I was worried it might go back down again. And then when it finally hit a level where I didn’t have to come back to work, I burst into tears. So did the girl sitting opposite.”

Since that novel, “Sheltering Rain”, was published in 2002, she has produced 12 more and two novellas, winning the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice. Having turned “Me Before You” into a film script for MGM she now has other film projects in development: “It seems surreal to be my age and in these meetings. But I love the positivity and the intellectual challenge of having to learn a new skill.”

Moyes is an interesting mix of this positivity and cautious but canny strength. Now her children are living her Swallows-and-Amazons dream, playing cowboys on real horses (family ponies, and a series of retired racehorses), she has gone, she says, “from being a catastrophist to an optimist”.

But she is still drawn to the grittier aspects of the human experience and, as her own children grow up, “the slightly grubbier side of a young person’s existence”.

In “After You”, Moyes explores teenage sexuality and risky behaviour — “These days, the landscape is tougher, the ways children can trip themselves up are harder, thanks to social media, and as parents we don’t understand.” She adds: “The thing that bugs me: I get criticised for my plots being too far-fetched. But I look at real life and think, are you kidding me? Everything is so far-fetched.”

–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015