Jade Beer wants to make you cry, to feel the depth of love played out across the page, and to root for a happy ending in "The Memory Dress."
What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?
Diana, the Princess of Wales, certainly had a lot to do with how “The Memory Dress” came to life.
It began with the June 1997 Christie’s auction catalogue, Dresses from the Collection of Diana, Princess of Wales. I stumbled across it online, ordered it, and while I was waiting for it to arrive began to research it. I noticed that 80 dresses were listed and 79 sold. That was the starting point. What happened to the missing dress? The entire story hinges from that one question. I spent a lot of time deciding which dresses in the catalogue I would include in the book, studying their composition and interviewing dressmakers and pattern cutters so I could understand how each was made. I then made several trips around England, walking through each of the locations the dresses were worn by Diana – there were many happy afternoons spent at Althorp (Diana’s family estate); Spencer House, Kensington Palace and the Royal Albert Hall.
One of the key characters, Meredith, is named after Meredith Etherington-Smith who was the editor-in-chief of Christie’s magazine and the curator of the Princess of Wales auction. I read her brilliant eulogy, describing a woman who was “incredibly zeitgeisty, with her bejeweled finger on the pulse of fashion and style and society . . . with a love for her husband that was deep and profound. She liked to present their union as one of the great love stories of the century.” She helped to form the very glamorous premise I like all my books to have.
What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?
Unashamedly reading what you enjoy, whatever that may be. Any story you choose to escape with is legitimate and valuable because you chose it. There doesn’t need to be any further justification. You shouldn’t ever feel your choice is lesser because it’s not what the majority go for, it’s not high-brow enough, or too high-brow, or too obvious or too niche. There is plenty of space in the world for the lightest, coziest romance or a deeper emotional exploration of the human race, and I personally love reading both and everything in between.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
Wouldn’t books be a little meaningless if we couldn’t see ourselves in them? And that means we need to see everyone. No one wants to be relentlessly presented with the same characters, tackling the same problems. I’ve written a book that has a very glamorous jumping off point – the Christie’s auction of Princess Diana’s clothes – but the characters we are introduced to as the story unfolds are not of that world at all. You have an older woman, Meredith, whose memory is crumbling, she’s living chaotically and is terrified she’ll never again make sense of her world. Then there is Jayne, a young woman who struggles to connect socially and lacks the confidence to assert herself until she is put in a position where she has no choice but to act.
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
I love writing books where the ordinary pushes up against the extraordinary. Where we see apparently normal people achieve something they did not think possible. “The Memory Dress” has a community of strangers at its heart. Despite their close proximity to each other (they all have an apartment within a beautiful converted Georgian townhouse) they are living very separate lives and making quite wrong assumptions about their neighbors. They dine alone behind their own front doors each night, pretending not to see the signs that each of them is struggling in their own way. The arrival of Jayne into the apartment at the very top of the house changes all of that.
What can fans expect from your book?
Royalty, romance, family, fashion and friendship. My aim is to make you cry, to feel the depth of love that is played out across the page, and to really root for the happy ending. But is it realistic to hope it will come? I’m going to take you on a road trip around London and the U.K., where Diana wore some of her most iconic looks – the very same ones that sold in that Christie’s auction the book opens on. As Meredith and Jayne start to retrace the steps where the gowns were worn, Meredith is able to start piecing back together all the fractured parts of her past and finally understand what has happened to her missing husband and daughter.
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
I have a fully formed synopsis and chapter plan for my next book that I want to revisit and revise. It will be set in the present day and 1980s London, have a glamorous fashion theme and, as with all my books, will be multi-generational and celebrating strong female relationships. I think it’s a solid story, but it needs the sprinkle of fairy dust that’s going to make it a gripping and deeply emotional read.
“The Memory Dress” by Jade Beer is published by Berkley and is on sale now.
