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RACHEL JOHNSON
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The next novel is set in Dorset and is a sort of darkly comic romp..think Desperate Housewives meets Straw Dogs...Penguin £6.99. Coming out in the US in 2009 under the title In a Good Place (Simon and Schuster), on the grounds that readers think the "shires" refers to the Lord of the Rings according to my wonderful agent Peter Straus anyway (I have cleverly managed to avoid reading LOTR and even better, seeing any of the films, so cannot comment. I do Harry Potter). So I am now plotting my next move...and it's a period novel set in the 30s in Germany and present day England, I think. So I am embarking on what I am calling for short "Notting Heil" for the moment. Please read me in the Sunday Times News Review if you don't already, if I can't plug myself on my own website, where on earth can I do it..Also in Esquire and She magazines, to which I contribute monthly columns. My US tour back in April (there are some pix of me looking tubby to view) was a hoot. As you see there are shots of me signing scads of (probably unsold) books (published by my wonderful US publishers, Touchstone Fireside at Simon and Schuster) at places like Barnes and Noble and so forth. I "did" seven cities - New York, Dallas, Washington D.C, Denver, Chicago, L.A, San Francisco. In one of the photos I am at a Chicago bookshop with Santa Montefiore, who was with me on what our publishers brilliantly termed the Blonde British Bombshell tour. I made Santa sit down for this photo because - though you can't see it - she is about seven foot tall and built like Gisele Bundchen and I come up to her hipbone in real life (also out of shot, but invariably clad in buttery suede Ralph Lauren). I loved all the cities I visited. I ate eggs every breakfast, and Caesar salad for lunch, and the contents of the mini-bar for supper, usually in front of the Weather Channel. It was so much fun. Even the events. The biggest thrill was walking into store and seeing a big sign saying, Moms Day! and Gifts for Moms! and there would be a massive tower of my books next to a rapidly shrinking tower of Shopaholic and Baby by the brilliant bestsellering Sophie Kinsella. I hope you can see that in the photo. Anyway, for those of you who have loyally sought this page, here's the latest: 1. Until the new one's out you will have to be content with Notting Hell (out in paperback from Penguin at £6.99 here, and hardback in the US, Touchstone Fireside $25.) 2. Inexplicably, no-one has yet offered to buy the film rights so hurry now to avoid disappointment. 3. I am still writing a weekly column for News Review in the Sunday Times and lots in the Spectator too so, as the Black Eyed Peas recommend - check it out! Meanwhile the Mummy Diaries is, fancy! still available in paperback too and, though I say so myself, makes a perfect stocking filler (I think I may have said that before this time last year, but who cares?) Click on Amazon.co.uk and also in all good bookshops still I hope. Er, that's it for now. More soon I hope. The Mummy Diaries - let's recap: A message from Penguin: "Rachel Johnson's take on life as a so-called yummy mummy (whatever that is) in West London and on Exmoor has been entertaining her newspaper readers for the last couple of years: now they are seamlessly turned into a diary of her year." I have been shamelessly plugging the book here there and everywhere but here in full is my best review - from Heat magazine, no less. "Oh, the trials of Rachel Johnson's life. Running a house in Notting Hill and another one in Exmoor, with only minimal help from a cleaning lady and au pair. Honestly, we wonder how the woman manages to get up in the morning, never mind haul herself to the Aga, such is her burden. Of course, she does work occasionally, since she managed to rattle off this book between trips to the Portobello Market...but we can't think it's too much of a drain. Despite the type of charmed life that usually makes us grind out teeth and harrumph with envy, we just can't manage to dislike Rachel Johnson. The weekly instalments of her middle class mummy's diary are actually very, very funny, possibly because you get the distinct impression she is making up this whole wife/mother thing as she goes along. A must-read for all you yummy-mummies." About Rachel (Warning - this section is almost guaranteed to irritate. Those to whom I already cause catastrophic pain are advised to move straight on to my archives at the Telegraph and Spectator).
Rachel Johnson comes from a large blonde family and has spawned three flaxen-haired children, now aged 10, 13 and 14. She is the daughter of the environmentalist and writer Stanley Johnson, and the painter Charlotte Johnson Wahl. After Oxford, where she read Mods and Greats and edited the University Magazine Isis, she was hired by the Financial Times. She was the paper’s first female graduate trainee, and almost its last, as she managed to spend a healthy proportion of her five years at the pink ‘un either on maternity leave or working on secondment to the Foreign Office think-tank, the policy planning staff. She left the Financial Times after her second child was born and moved to the BBC. Then she got cunningly got pregnant a third time and, after scoring her third paid maternity leave in four years, left the BBC to "launch a freelance career from home" (ie skank about in tracksuit bottoms), her husband having been conveniently posted to Washington D.C, where it is very easy to park and they literally give away the clothes in Baby Gap, it’s that cheap. Since then, she has written weekly columns for the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Evening Standard, the Brussels-based Bulletin, and the Daily Telegraph, although - hello! - not all at the same time. She has also written for the Guardian, ES Magazine, and many others she can't remember, including a cover story on Chelsea Clinton for Hello! Rachel Johnson is married to Ivo Dawnay and lives in Notting Hill and in a seventeenth century farmhouse deep in a river valley in the Johnson pridelands on Exmoor. She does not hunt. |
