So instead of creating a book I was creating excuses.” I was afraid of failing, of testing the one thing I’d always wanted to do and coming up short. Penny had always wanted to be an author, but “I was a child who for some reason just came out of the womb afraid. So instead of creating a book I was creating excuses But she “immediately suffered from five years of writer’s block”. If you ask for help, and you hold on, things can change.”īurned out, she quit her job, after Whitehead said he would support her “to write the book he knew that I had always wanted to write”. “I went from thinking life is over to being in love. Within a year of getting sober she met Whitehead. Penny describes it as “that light in the eye, to have hope that you can turn a life around”. Hope is at the heart of the Gamache novels. “Within months, I went from thinking I was going to kill myselfto having hope.” “I went to a grungy church basement with a bunch of people who looked like hobos – it turned out so did I – and they saved my life and I haven’t had a drink since. She tried to quit on her own, but it was a 12-step recovery programme that made the difference. And there was Gamache, too – in him, Michael is healthy and immortal.”Ī man who believes in ‘the essential goodness of people’ … Alfred Molina as Armand Gamache in the upcoming Amazon Prime series. I’d get up really early, look after him, and then make a cup of coffee and go into a world I could control, be surrounded by these characters who were comforting, who were friends, who were kind. But even as he was dying, I found that writing became my haven. “I thought I would just be too sad to write after Michael died, because my Gamache would have died.

Penny’s thrillers, which combine chilling insights into the very worst of crimes with the humanity of her protagonist Gamache, remain as uniquely nail-biting and heartwarming as ever, and the author only looks set to pick up more readers now Amazon Prime has launched its much-anticipated adaptation of her books, Three Pines, starring Alfred Molina as the charismatic detective.īack in 2016, though, this wasn’t the future Penny would have predicted. Then in 2021 came State of Terror, co-authored with an unexpected new friend Penny only met after Whitehead’s death: Hillary Clinton. Kingdom of the Blind, the 14th Gamache novel, was published in 2018.

They made the British PM an upper-class twit with no guts – just 'entitlement and random Latin phrases'

A world of curiosities by louise penny