'I found the thing I loved': Jane Fallon on leaving television to pursue her writing career
When Jane Fallon’s first novel became a best seller, she was with someone she didn’t know when she got the news.
“Penguin phoned me when my first book went into the Top Ten the week it came out, and I was in a car with someone I didn’t know very well,” she remembers. “I couldn’t tell this near stranger, because it would have been weird and boastful, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted to scream.”
That was 2007. Since then, Fallon’s novels have sold over 1m copies in the UK alone, and she has just published her 12th, . This one is about online dating - how three middle-aged women get to know each other when they discover they are all dating the same man. It’s a fun read, although online dating gets something of a bum rap.
“It sounds terrifying,” says Fallon. “I’ve never done it obviously, but some of my friends have – and some of the stories have been horrendous. Like one guy who let slip that every time he had a phone conversation with a woman, he would mark it out of ten. He had a notebook where he kept all the scores.”
Admittedly such stories are more entertaining than dull anecdotes about meeting and falling in love. But this is what happened to Fallon, a year before the internet was invented; she has never online dated because she’s been with the same guy for 40 years, having both met as students in 1982. She and Ricky Gervais have been together ever since.
Before she became a novelist – which had been her dream since she was five – after university Fallon worked first in theatre, then in television, producing series such as , and .
She says that her books are always being optioned, but so far none have actually been made into TV dramas. Instead, she is looking forward to seeing one of her earlier books, – which also deals with revenge – being adapted for a Roxette musical in Sweden.
“I’m so excited about that,” she says. “I love theatre. And it’s definitely happening, it’s scheduled in at the Malmo Opera House, and then it could travel.”
Fallon is speaking to me on Zoom from the Hampstead house she shares with Gervais and their cat. She’s in her work room, surrounded by books.
“I read everything,” she says, but she prefers commercial to literary fiction. “A lot of crime, a lot of domestic noir.” Favourites include Gillian MacAllister, Lisa Jewell, Ruth Ware, Claire MacIntosh. “When I’m writing I try not to read in my own genre, because I find that confusing.”
Like Joni, the main character of her new novel, Fallon is keenly into fitness – she’s 61, and can do cartwheels – and is a bit of an introvert. One of Gervais’s running gags bout her is that she has no friends.
“I absolutely love fitness - it does my mental health so much good,” she says. “I’m trying to conquer the handstand, but I haven’t got there yet.” She pauses, laughing, “Although I do have friends.” As a child, she was introverted and self conscious, and had terrible social anxiety: “I’ve gotten a lot better. But I really like my own company. I’m very happy pottering around, I like going away on my own, I’m very self-contained.”
Since leaving the hurly-burly of television in 2006 to give writing a go, she’s never looked back.
“There’s always fun and excitement and a bit of panic around TV, but I love the nine months of the year where I am just inside my own head,” she says. “I’m at my best when I’m doing my own thing, doing my first draft.”
How does that reconcile with having a partner as famous as Gervais? There are lots of photos of them at glitzy events – would she prefer to be home alone with the cat?
“I can dip in and out of it,” she says. “When I’m not with him, I can walk down the street and nobody knows who I am. So I quite like dipping my toe in to showbizzy things very occasionally – glamming up for an awards ceremony and seeing famous Hollywood stars is kind of funny.”
And not just Hollywood stars – Fallon has met the actual ‘Starman’.
“Many times,” she says of Gervais’s comic collaborations with his hero, David Bowie. “What a lovely man. The first time I met him, when he came to our hotel room in New York, he was just a bloke in an anorak. He had a CD he wanted us to listen to – Arcade Fire, I think – and he spent ages crawling around under the telly trying to make the CD player work. He was just so charmingly normal.”
As is Fallon herself, despite all the success. Born the youngest of five, in 1960, in Harrow, she grew up over her parents’ newsagent shop - today she and Gervais could probably buy Harrow. But when they first got together, they lived in a tiny freezing cold flat over a brothel in King’s Cross, London – now a chichi Eurostar hub, in the 80s it was a notorious area for heroin and prostitution, its infamous Meat Rack depicted in the 1986 film .
“We were in one of the worst bits, it was horrendous,” says Fallon. “There were two identical doors next to each other – one to the brothel, and one to our flat. All night, people would ring the wrong bell. It was pretty grim.
“I was earning £40 a week and Ricky was unemployed, and we couldn’t afford the heating. There were icicles indoors. I used to sleep in all my clothes with my hood up. We realised it was cheaper to go to the local pub and buy a pint and make it last all night than try to heat the flat. The pub was full of local villains who took us under their wing because they felt sorry for us. It was very heart-warming. They were such kind generous people, these armed robbers.”
Fallon’s determination pushed her on. “I’d parked the idea of being a novelist as it seemed so ridiculous,” she says. “But I knew I wanted a career – that was massively important to me – and once I got into the film and theatre world, I’d found the thing I loved. I knew it would take years of working my way up, but I was totally single-minded.”
And now here she is, on top of her game, and able to heat not just their London mansion, but their second home in Buckinghamshire too – with a bit left over.
“It’s a weird, the money thing,” she says. “When you have none – and for many years, we didn’t – you imagine all these things you want to buy, and then when you actually get money, you wonder if you really need more stuff. You want to do something good with it. Animals would one of my priorities.”
Fallon and Gervais are famous supporters of animal rights. They have never wanted children – perhaps, I venture, the secret of their happiness – but she has always dreamed of opening an animal sanctuary.
“We’re in a privileged position and animals are what I feel passionate about,” she says. “Opening a sanctuary is a long-term dream. I have a hankering for farm animals – the personalities of those animals is just staggering.”
She is inspired by friends who run a sanctuary in Canada, where Esther the Wonder Pig lives. (Check her out – she has her own website)
Fallon and Gervais are also famous for not being married. Do people ask her about this more than they ask him?
“All. The. Time,” she says. “It drives me absolutely nuts. People say to him, why won’t you marry her? As though I’m desperate to marry him and he’s saying no. It’s never, ever been on my radar. It’s infuriating that people think I’ve been sitting there all these years going, oh please marry me.”
Other than that, life in leafy, peaceful Hampstead sounds rather delightful. Is there anything in her life she would change? She smiles. “This probably sounds nauseating, but no. Nothing.”
