Me Before You (51 page)

5. Your books always have an incredibly moving love story at the heart of them. What is it about the emotional subject of love that makes you want to write about it?

I have no idea! I’m not very romantic in real life. I guess love is the thing that makes us do the most extraordinary things – the emotion that can bring us highest or lowest, or be the most transformative – and extremes of emotion are always interesting to write about. Plus I’m too wimpy to write horror …

6. Have you ever cried while writing a scene in any of your books?

Always. If I don’t cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it’s failed. I want the reader to feel something while reading – and making myself cry has become my litmus test as to whether that’s working. It’s an odd way to earn a living.

1. When Lou meets Will for the first time he is less than welcoming to her, even playing a mean trick on her to put her on edge. What were your first impressions of both Will and Lou? Did your view of them change over the course of the book and to what extent?
   
 

2. Will and Lou have a profound effect on each other’s lives. How do their lives change after they meet compared with how they were before? In what ways do they change each other?
   
 

3. When Lou first learns of Will’s intentions to go to Dignitas to end his life, she is shocked that his mother Camilla could be prepared to play such a role in her son’s death and thinks of her as heartless: a view shared by other characters, such as Georgina and Lou’s mother. How do you feel about Camilla as a character? Do you think this view of her is justified?
   
 

4. Both Will and Lou have experienced a terrible life altering moment – Will’s accident and Lou’s assault in the castle maze. How do their reactions to each of their experiences compare? In what ways are their reactions similar/different?
   
 

5. As his nurse and friend, Nathan is also a big part of Will’s life. How important is his role in the novel? How does he affect the dynamic between Will, Lou and Will’s parents?
   
 

6. Lou is very close to her family, despite her frequent squabbles with her sister Treena. How important are they in the decisions she makes, such as her decision to take the job with the Traynors and keep it – even when she discovers why she is only contracted for six months – and her decision to go to Switzerland to be with Will at the end?
   
 

7. Will and Lou come from very different worlds. Will’s was one of success, ambition and privilege before his accident, while Lou inhabits a modest, simple and unadventurous world, restricted to the boundaries of the small town she’s lived in all of her life. Do you think they would have fallen for each other if they had met under different circumstances?
   
 

8. Will’s right to die, and Lou’s determination to change his mind about exercising that right, is a theme that runs throughout the novel. How did you feel about Will’s decision at the end? Was it what you expected? Do you think the novel should have ended differently?
   
 

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
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First published 2012

Copyright © Jojo Moyes, 2012

Cover illustration © Sarah Gibb

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without hthe publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978–0–141–96918–3