'I don’t know why I married him — after we got engaged, the red flags were going up'

Author Lisa Jewell's life has been more psychological thriller than rom-com, starring three generations of varyingly terrible men, she tells Suzanne Harrington

Lisa Jewell has successfully transitioned from one genre to another while best-selling all the way. Picture: Andrew Whitton 

Lisa Jewell, 20 novels in, has successfully transitioned from one genre to another while best-selling all the way — 10m and counting. Starting out in romantic comedy, she now writes psychological thrillers — her latest, The Family Remains, starts with a bag of human bones being discovered near the Thames. It’s a long way from her 1999 debut, Ralph’s Party, about housemates falling in love with each other — written after a holiday bet with a friend who promised her dinner in return for writing the first three chapters. Jewell got her dinner.

“It was always a matter for me when I would start writing psychological thrillers,” she tells me over Zoom. “I started writing in the mid-’90s when I was in my 20s, madly in love and starting out on the best part of my life, and although the books I liked reading and the films I liked watching were very dark, the novel I ended up writing was feelgood and romantic and funny, and it did really well.”