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Moyes had known that her grandmother, Betty McKee, is Australian
and her grandfather was Scottish. But she was an adult when
McKee, now 92, mentioned her 1946 journey from Sydney to
Plymouth, England on an aircraft carrier with more than 600
Australian women who were to be reunited with British servicemen
they married during the war.
"It really made me think about how many family stories die with
the people who hold them," Moyes told Reuters. "My grandmother
honestly didn't think it was that remarkable."
Moyes, 45, spoke with Reuters about the book and how she
develops characters:
Q: How did you research the historical period in which
the novel is set?
A: I entered the name of my grandmother's ship (HMS
Victorious) and couldn't find anything. I started to think that
my grandmother had been mistaken. One night I was tooling around
on the Internet and found a self-published book about the
Victorious. Buried in this incredibly well-researched labor of
love were two pages on the time that the Victorious was used to
transport war brides from Australia to England.
Slowly, this voyage just started to come to life. If you thrive
on tension for your story, what greater tension than 600
completely overexcited war brides ... on board the most
militarized, orderly, male war machine?
Q: How do you develop the characters' personalities?
A: I do a lot of cooking, as I call it, before I start
writing. For every book that I write ... I develop a history for
each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You
have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to
where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what
they like to eat, to what they want out of life.
Q: How long does it take to develop a character?
A: It depends. In "Me Before You," the two characters
popped into my head fully formed, which is really strange and
unusual. Other books, I sit on them for two or three months. I
have a whole routine: I buy a nice book, I hand-write all their
characteristics. I put them through little tests just to see how
they would react to things.
(Reporting by Suzanne Barlyn, editing by Patricia Reaney and G
Crosse)
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