Mike Gayle in conversation about 25 years of writing and his latest romantic novel

Back in October 1997, journalist and former teen magazine “agony uncle” Mike Gayle was in a London taxi with his literary agent on the way to meet his publisher for the first time. Hodder had recently acquired Gayle’s début novel My Legendary Girlfriend after a fierce auction and his agent was briefing him on what to expect from this first meeting.

“And she said, ‘They’re going to ask you what your next book is about—have you got any ideas?’ I remember thinking, ‘My next book? What next book? This is literally everything I have to say about anything! There is no more!’” he says, laughing, over Zoom from his home in Birmingham.

Fortunately for fans of his début, which was praised as “full of belly laughs and painfully acute observations” by the Independent on Sunday—and for Hodder, which has remained his publisher ever since—many more books followed.

A Song of Me &You, his 18th novel, opens with Helen—a middle-aged, part-time primary school teacher whose husband Adam has recently dumped her for a younger colleague—waving off her two teenage children when the insufferable soon-to-be-ex turns up in his Audi A3 to take them on holiday for a week, his new girlfriend in the passenger seat. Helen is at her lowest ebb when the doorbell rings again. The man standing outside is someone she hasn’t seen since they were teenagers: her former boyfriend Ben Baptiste. But while Helen has spent the intervening years in suburban south Manchester, Ben became the lead singer of a hugely successful British rock band and now lives in LA. So what on earth he is doing on her doorstep? As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Helen and Ben are both in the middle of life crises, even though one of them is a multi-millionaire rock star.

Clash of worlds

Gayle explains, in his soft Brummie tones, that the novel was inspired by a quote attributed to the actor Jim Carrey, who reportedly said: “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” Gayle wanted to explore the “idea that money and success is the answer to everything. I knew that that was always going to be part of the story, but I also like to ground things in the reality that the reader will know about as well, so I wanted to have this clash of worlds.” He also wanted to explore “how difficult the middles of life can be sometimes”.

I not only know the beginning, middle and end of the book, but I know the beginning, middle and end of each chapter

As a proud writer of popular commercial fiction—he won the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award in 2021, both the first man and the first Black author to do so—Gayle has always been interested in the situations ordinary people grapple with, especially in their close relationships.

In his earlier books, the dilemmas he put his characters through roughly corresponded to the challenges experienced by his peer group, from post-university, first-job life (My Legendary Girlfriend) to twentysomething relationship issues (Mr Commitment), to moving back in with your parents after the collapse of a relationship (Turning Thirty). But of his more recent work he says: “I think where I am now, my scope is slightly wider and I’m thinking less in terms of a generation and more in terms of society in general and the places that we find ourselves, as well as the things that are on people’s minds.” If there is a common thread through all the books, he thinks it might be the idea of redemption; his characters go through the mill, but there is always hope.

Quite often I’ll get emails and messages from people who have literally just that minute finished the book and are desperate to tell me how they feel about the emotions it has brought out in them

One thing that has changed over 25 years of writing is his attitude to plotting. When Gayle started working on his first novel, he “just wrote this book that I had inside me. I would sit down every day and write, and just see where the story went”. Now, before he starts to write “it’s the complete opposite! I not only know the beginning, middle and end of the book, but I know the beginning, middle and end of each chapter.” This makes A Song of Me & You a finely-honed page-turner and, for this reader at least, it offers the surprise of two very unexpected twists. Gayle is delighted to hear that, because unpredictability is what he is after. “I think it’s important for my readers that there is a real sense of jeopardy for the characters. Sometimes when you read a particular genre, you get to know where things are going. But I feel it’s really important that when [readers] meet the characters on the first page, they feel that ‘we can’t take anything for granted here’”. Anything must feel possible, he says, so “it’s only when they get to the end of the book that they will know exactly where the story was going, and why”.

His readers are loyal and many of them “have been there since the very beginning”, he says. “I’ve grown up with them and they have grown up with me.” These original readers are now introducing their own children to his books. In the late 1990s, he used to receive actual letters addressed to his publisher. Now his readers contact him directly via his website, or social media. “Quite often I’ll get emails and messages from people who have literally just that minute finished the book and are desperate to tell me how they feel about the emotions it has brought out in them. It is really lovely to have that immediacy.”

Keeping the relationship alive

Spending your entire career at one publisher is pretty unusual, I suggest, and Gayle agrees: “Besides my marriage, it is just about the longest relationship of my life.” Over those 25 years, he has worked with just four editors in total. He has never forgotten that, pre-acquisition, his first editor Philippa Pride wrote him a letter in the style of his manuscript “and it was real signal to me that she really understood what the book was about and what I was about.

‘Surely I’m spent now, surely there is no more’. Then an idea will come to me and I can’t wait to get it down and share it with readers

“I came to Hodder with a very strong sense of what sort of writer I wanted to be and how I wanted to go about telling stories, and I feel that has been nurtured rather than trimmed away. No-one has ever tried to fit me into a mould.”