Wise Words: Lucy Nichol/Roth

It takes courage to publish a book with a title which is a pun on a much-loved 1980’s film. But author Lucy Nichol, writing as Lucy Roth, has the strength of character to do exactly this.

Her new novel, When Sally Killed Harry, has the humour of it’s almost-namesake When Harry Met Sally, but that’s where the similarity ends. Lucy’s story is no rom-com light tale. Instead, it has a page-turning feminist plot with a female killer at its heart who is looking for revenge, rather than faking an orgasm in a café.

A determined champion of mental health issues, she has never baulked at facing tough challenges and this is seen clearly in her empathetic, yet dark and very funny writing today.

Looking back at her childhood in East Yorkshire she remembers loving reading enchanting witchy tales before moving onto more gritty memoirs and novels in her early teens.

She said: “I read a mix of books at that time, I loved stuff that showed me the darker side of life, such as Dangerous Candy by Raffaella Fletcher, a memoir of heroin addiction and recovery. The Dark by James Herbert was also a book I frightened myself with – and of course The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty.”

After success at GCSE’s Lucy admits her social life wasn’t conducive to getting good A level grades so she decided not to go to university and worked as a glass collector at the local uni bar before moving into administration roles for independent recruitment agencies. This experience allowed her to build up knowledge of marketing as the size of the firms meant she could work across different areas.

Lucy then became a press officer for the Hull Truck Theatre Company and loved this role. It gave her the opportunity to do copywriting about the plays and explore her love of language.

Her fiction taste also now included women’s fiction by authors like Marian Keyes and Helen Fielding who wrote Bridget Jones’ Diary.

In her 20s Lucy then went travelling for a year, working around the world including New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, and New York. She returned to Hull Truck Theatre and then moved to Newcastle with her husband, the actor and director Chris Connel.

In 2012 she did an online writing course and began avidly reading memoirs particularly enjoying those which raised mental health issues such as the biography of punk icon Nancy Spungen - written by her mother.

Lucy said: “I became absolutely fascinated by the conversations on social media about different mental health problems. This led me to begin exploring my own life. In the light of all this I began a blog explaining how I felt about issues, like having panic attacks, and my writing got a positive response. People would write to me saying they had similar experiences.

“This blog led to me doing a fortnightly column exploring mental health stereotypes in Sarah Millican’s Standard Issue magazine. I also became a freelance adviser for MIND’s media advisory desk which helped scriptwriters depict realistic mental health situations. This work shaped some major storylines in soaps which resonated with the public and helped people understand the impact of these problems.

Lucy is honest about the difficult nature of being at the front line of this work and was occasionally trolled. She cites the online mental health community as being a fantastic mutual support.

This work into mental health and stigma was the inspiration for Lucy’s first book, a non-fiction publication called A Series of Unfortunate Stereotypes. She calls it a ‘memoir and a rant’. It was then updated in her second book, Snowflake, which continued the conversation, with contributions from professional experts and people with lived experiences of mental health issues – including a foreword from global mental health campaigner Sue Baker.

Then in 2019 Lucy started to write fiction, using her knowledge of mental health and wrote The 27 Club, about a young music fan and the singers who had died at 27 - and how the media sensationalised their deaths. It became a stage play, written and directed by Chris Connel and was followed by a sequel, Parklife.

Harper North spotted her talent and she had her first feminist fiction book, No Worries if Not, published by them two years ago.

In her own reading she was enjoying gripping thrillers by female authors like Lisa Jewell, Claire Douglas and Cally Taylor, then decided to write one herself.

She said: “My agent, Jo Bell, actually made the suggestion to me – as I was writing some quite dark comedy-drama and she suggested I go all out and try my hand at writing a thriller. However, I’ve found there was so much to learn and it’s a very different style to my previous novels. There was more pacing and plot driven action. To help me I applied and got DYCP funding from the Arts Council to get a mentor, the author, Nikki Smith, who has been a brilliant support. The former Met detective and author Graham Bartlett was also very helpful, as were many others I worked with at the time.

“Harper Collins knew I was keen to write a feminist revenge killer so When Sally Killed Harry will be launched next week, on 27 March. It has had some great reviews and been described as ‘deliciously dark’, which I love.”

In terms of advice for other writers Lucy said: “Keep writing what is right for you and keep doing it. You will get lots of rejections but that is just part of the writing life. Timing and a bit of good luck also play a part in getting published.

“Finding my agent and the time she has invested in me has been game-changing. Her trust in my writing is what gets me through any tough times.”

Lucy has recently been a guest at the East Riding Festival of Words and will be speaking at the Little Felton Book Festival on Friday, 28 March at 7.30. She is also doing an event with author Katy Brent in Swindon in May.

My novel The Stand-Up Mam has funny family stories in it, do you have one to share?

When I was 17 I had gone to the pub for tea and was sitting in the back of the car when my Dad said ‘Is that our cat?’ as he had spotted a dead cat by the roadside. We were so upset and went back to collect it, then buried it in the back garden. All of us knew my younger sister would be devastated and sure enough she refused to come home for a while. When she did come back she said, ‘Willow’s not dead. Look!’ Our cat was in the house. We had buried someone else’s cat and even though we had an idea who it belonged to, we never did say what we’d done!”