When I was in my early twenties, Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen was my favourite song. I’m forty-four now, and it still is. Back then, I was doing an MA in Creative Writing at Chichester University, and I wrote a short story titled After His Body Was Burned, about a love triangle, based on the song. I made everyone I knew listen to it and tell me how they interpreted the lyrics, and my sister said she thought it was a suicide note.
When my tutor marked and fed back on the story, he said it seemed more like the ending of a novel than a short story, and I remembered that. So when I was scratching around for ideas for a novel, it came back to me, and I decided I’d write up to that end point. Of course, by the time I got there, everything had changed so much the original short story was no use whatsoever, but it had got me started.
I started writing that novel in London and finished, years later, in New York. We’d moved there with my husband’s job, and I had a couple of periods where I wasn’t working. I read novels on our downtown roof terrace and, finally, got my novel’s ending down. I didn’t have a title. I fretted over it for weeks. And then one day, I was having a cigarette on the street outside our apartment building, and I ran the lyrics to Famous Blue Raincoat through my head, and it jumped out at me.
‘You treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back, she was nobody’s wife’
It would be another nine years before the book was published in 2019, and now it’s getting a second life in 2024, when living in New York feels like a dream I once had, rather than a solid memory. I’ve been listening to the audiobook these past few days. I’m very fond of these characters who I lived with for so long. I hope you’ll read the book. And I hope you’ll listen to the song, too.