Meet & Greet

I love a list.

Any kind of list – to-do-lists, shopping lists, lists of the fifty books you must read before you die, or a Buzzfeed list of celebrities you never knew were related. To be fair, I’ve read enough Buzzfeed articles to know the Kardashian-Jenner lineage inside out, but I would still keep scrolling.

With that in mind, I thought there would be no better way to introduce myself than a list of random facts. A biographical pick n’ mix, if you like.

• Lily Joseph is a pseudonym (it’s an amalgamation of my grandparents’ names). I decided to take a pen-name since my day job in dentistry is nothing to do with writing, although I’m not really expecting the two worlds to dramatically collide. Hang on, I’ve just had an idea for a new book…
• I have two teenage children, but still haven’t made my peace with being old enough for this. In my head I’m still drinking Bacardi Breezers in a sweaty nightclub on a school night and wandering home with kebab juice on my chin.
• Other than writing, I’m awful at sticking to things. When I was a kid I became partially accredited in ballroom dancing, gymnastics and the Air Training Corps. My mam always said I just waited until she’d paid for the uniform and then got bored. The same applies in adulthood. In my shed there is a very clean set of ladies’ golf clubs to testify to this.
• Things I love the smell of: matches (both struck and unstruck), banana flavouring but not actual bananas, actual limes but not lime flavouring, and books.
• Favourite fiction writers – a not-exhaustive list: Mhairi McFarlane, Sarah Waters, Lindsey Kelk, Philip Pullman, Diana Gabaldon and George R.R. Martin. Non-fiction: Caitlin Moran, Cheryl Strayed, Jon Ronson and David Sedaris.
• I absolutely love musicals. I spent many hours in my teens wearing my mam’s beige trench coat in my room, pretending to be Eponine from Les Miserables. I’ve aged out of Eponine, past Fantine, and am now in my Madame Thenardier era, still to be heard belting out show tunes while stirring a spag bol in my kitchen.
• I’m disappointingly unadventurous, but spent three months in Finland when I was at university. I travelled around Sweden, Russia and Estonia, embraced naked saunas and reindeer sausages, and developed a mild addiction to Fazer cocoa nibs chocolate. You can’t get it in England, which is probably for the best.
• I’ve been photographed with two celebrities – Jim Bowen and Warrior from Gladiators. Both of the pictures are the result of my dad boldly insisting that they pose with me and neither of them look very happy about it. The memory of my dad suggesting I perch on Warrior’s knee while he was trying to enjoy his Little Chef Olympic Breakfast haunts me to this day.

I write this, safe in the knowledge that I’m not using up any golden nuggets of information that might make it into my actual author bio. It would maybe raise a few eyebrows at Bookouture HQ. But as lists go, it gives you a bit of a flavour of who I am – a fickle, foreign-chocolate-addicted, former friend-to-the-stars.