This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Fran Littlewood, whose novel The Accidental Favorite, is out today from Henry Holt. The Accidental Favorite follows Vivienne and Patrick Fisher along with their three adult daughters, Alex, Nancy, and Eva. The daughters all have impressive careers, caring partners, exciting hobbies, and sweet children. Three generations of the Fisher family gather at a beautiful glass house in the English countryside for a weeklong celebration of Vivienne’s seventieth birthday. But when Patrick’s reaction to a freak accident on the first day of the trip inadvertently reveals that he has a favorite daughter, decades-old, unresolved sibling rivalries are suddenly unmasked. Tender wounds are reopened before an audience of friends, husbands, grandchildren, and coworkers, and as the family’s past is rewritten, they find themselves suddenly unmoored. Library Journal called The Accidental Favorite a “compelling drama about a dysfunctional family that will make readers laugh out loud and cringe all at once.... Littlewood’s sharp characters and emotional depth beautifully capture the messy and complicated side of adults’ relationships to their families of origin, quirks and all.” Fran Littlewood is the author of Amazing Grace Adams (Henry Holt, 2023), which was an instant New York Times bestseller and a #ReadWithJenna book club pick. Littlewood has a master’s degree in creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. Before her master’s, she worked as a journalist. She lives in London with her husband and their three daughters.
Fran Littlewood, author of The Accidental Favorite. (Credit: Si Begg)
1. How long did it take you to write The Accidental Favorite?
I pitched the idea for this novel in 2021, at the same time my agent sold my debut, Amazing Grace Adams, so in a sense I was working on it from that point. In reality I’d say it took about two and a half years, from the opening sentence to sending the first draft to my editors. Then another few months beyond that working on the edits.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Trying to write at the same time I was going through the publication process for Amazing Grace Adams, as I do not love multitasking. It was such a steep learning curve for me, knowing very little about the publishing industry—meeting the teams, foreign editors, TV execs, being interviewed by journalists rather than doing the interviewing…and I was way out of my comfort zone at times. So I was writing The Accidental Favorite in the in-between bits, always feeling I was playing catch-up.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I mostly write in the kitchen because…snacks, but also in bed, especially when I’m finding it tough and trying to pretend to myself that I’m not really working. And then, when I hit a wall and need a push, I’ll write in local cafes. When I’m in the swing of things, I’ll start after the kids head off to school, and try to have a break late morning for a walk around the woods with my husband (who’s a composer and so doesn’t have a proper place of work either). Things fall apart a bit once school’s out at three in the afternoon (so damn early!) and the house gets busier, so I’ll do disjointed, distracted bits and pieces from then on, often picking things up later in the evening. How often I write depends on what else is going on, editing or publicity-wise with the book that I’ve already written, rather than the one I’m trying to write. At the moment I’m looking forward to the bliss of a clear few months to sink into the next novel.
4. What are you reading right now?
The Glass Hotel (Knopf, 2020) by Emily St. John Mandel, and I am loving it. Her books are so utterly original and sublimely immersive. She’s a builder of worlds, of strange, brilliant characters, and I’m a big fan!
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I love the short story writer Helen Simpson, who has huge recognition in that she’s critically acclaimed, award-winning, and generally just superb. But I think people can be averse to short stories, so too often haven’t read her. With a new collection every five years (six collections in a quarter century), Simpson’s heroines track her experience of contemporary womanhood, aging as the author has aged. She’s a truth-teller, often writing into unchartered territory in a way that’s astute, political, darkly funny, and with so many “yes, exactly that!” moments.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Right now, the pram in the hall. Or whatever the teenage version of that is (the vape in the coat pocket?). Both my middle and youngest daughters have public exams, which will determine what they do next with their lives, and so have been weighing heavy in our house for the past couple of months. And since my sixteen-year-old has been studying at the kitchen table, I’ve been relegated to the bedroom/lounge. But in terms of the bigger picture, the most significant impediment has to be the Fear. I think it’s important to feel a little jeopardy in the creative process, in order to do your best work (in the time you have, with the tools you have), but if you don’t keep the doubt in check, it can quickly derail you.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing of this book that stuck with you?
When she read the first draft of the novel, my brilliant U.S. editor e-mailed me to tell me that I’d inadvertently written her family. Quite weirdly specific overlap in some places. So, for example, both she and my fictional Fisher sisters have a mother who’s a secret smoker. But it was one of the best things she could have said to me, because it made me hopeful that what I’d written—this book about siblings, and unstable memory, and scripts we can’t escape—had a universality to it, something that would chime with readers.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Accidental Favorite, what would you say?
Don’t panic! I agreed to a stupidly short deadline for this novel, and so felt on the back foot the whole way through the writing process, and didn’t really enjoy it as much as I would’ve liked because of that. Needless to say, I missed several deadlines (which didn’t sit well with me as an ex-journalist) because I wanted to write something good not fast. Also, since it was my “difficult second book,” I kind of assumed the whole way through that it probably wouldn’t live up to expectations, but—happily—it’s going down well so far!
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of The Accidental Favorite?
The research I did for this novel was so intriguing, looking at the psychology and science of siblinghood, memory, identity. And within that, comparison culture and the “golden child.” The fact that siblings continue to compete for parental approval, attention, and love into adulthood—that it’s hardwired. Also the way our siblings both validate and invalidate us, and misguided notions that there’s just one true account of the past. And even when the consensus of the research is that there is no consensus—particularly when it comes to birth order—it threw up some gems. Most memorably for me, (speaking as a middle child), statistics that showed that following a car accident, first- and last-borns tend to call a family member, while middle children call a friend. A slight statistical uplift. It goes without saying I’ve had a word with my own middle daughter about unacceptable ambivalent attachment since then.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
As someone who used to be a chronic overwriter, partial to a metaphor or ten, the piece of advice that I always come back to is that prose should look like water, taste like gin. This from former U.K. poet laureate Andrew Motion, who was one of my tutors when I did a master’s in creative writing at Royal Holloway in London. I took it to mean that writing should have clarity, simplicity, precision, and also punch powerfully. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
