Just over 18 months ago, Jessica George went to bed a regular 26-year-old publishing assistant living in a flatshare in Wandsworth, and woke up the next day a millionaire.
“You have to remember: this is the story I didn’t think would go anywhere,” the British-Ghanaian first-time author tells me repeatedly as we meet to discuss her new book Maame (pronounced ‘ma-meh’), which is finally published in the UK tomorrow after long being tipped as the biggest debut novel of 2023 (it launched in the US last month and is already storming bestseller lists). After five failed book attempts over the course of her twenties, George says Maame — a fictional story of grief, identity and female friendships inspired by her experience of caring for her father, who had Parkinson’s disease — was the one she never expected to take off.
What a good thing that George decided to switch from superheroes and murder mysteries to writing a story closer to home. A year after she started writing Maame, in summer 2021, George was offered a two-book deal with leading publishers Hodder & Stoughton after an (almost-unheard-of-in-the-industry) eight-way auction. It was exactly the pinch-herself moment the now 28-year-old had been dreaming of for years — and, as it turned out, just the beginning of a chain of pinch-herself moments.
Among them: a seven-figure advance deal from a US publisher (also for two books), plans for an on-screen adaptation with Universal Studios, and an impressive host of rave reviews from everyone from award-winning author Celeste Ng to the Washington Post. “A quarter life crisis handled with grace and guts... it’s easy to forget she’s a first-time novelist,” is how the New York Times described George’s masterpiece, currently at number five on its hardcover fiction bestseller list.
The book follows the story of Maddie Wright, 25, the London-born daughter of Ghanaian immigrants juggling all the usual hurdles of modern twenties-hood in the capital (navigating the world of work, finding flatmates, online dating) with the more personal, exceptional anxieties of being her father’s primary caregiver. Her mother — mostly absent, living in Ghana — is forever on her back about everything from how often she’s going to church to when she’ll find a husband, while her older brother James claims he is too busy pursuing his own dreams to do anything to help.
Maddie’s regular Google searches paint a picture of her anxieties in the early chapters of the book (“Back pain in your mid-20s”, “Is Parkinson’s disease genetic?”, “Does a third date mean sex?”) — then tragedy hits (no spoilers). “Maame”, Maddie’s family nickname and a translation of both “mother” and “woman” in the Twi language, is a clever mechanism adopted by George to illustrate Maddie’s feelings of entrapment and the quest for her own identity.
“I get a lot of ‘is this a memoir?’, ‘is this an autobiography?’ — but it’s very much not,” George tells me when we meet at her local coffee shop, Beam, in Crouch End, a few days before publication day. She greets me in leggings and a sweatshirt with a warm handshake — and in many ways, she is exactly who I pictured Maddie to be: bubbly yet softly-spoken; shy yet self-assured; “wise beyond her years”, as her literary agent Jemima Forrester puts it, but with little sign of the “heavy shoulders” Maddie is described as having in the book.
So how close is George to her fictional protagonist? George smiles patiently. Naturally, it’s the question she’s been asked the most over recent months. “The main similarity I share with Maddie is the relationship with her dad,” she says. George lost her own dad to Parkinson’s in 2020, the same year she started writing Maame, and says her character’s father-daughter relationship “very much reflects” the relationship she had with him: close, yet increasingly distant due to the nature of the disease. Like Maddie, she had the most regular relationship with her father of all her family members “so we all lost different versions of him”, though thankfully her real-life mother and two brothers, aged 18 and 30, were “much more supportive” than Maddie’s fictional family.
George says it still surprises her, to hear publishers describing her as a young carer. Despite being the secondary caregiver for her dad after a professional carer for many years, she never thought of herself that way. “Because... he’s my dad. It made sense for me to look after him,” she says. It was a woman in a bookstore who first said the term out loud and raised the timeliness of the subject given the pandemic‘s forcing of many young people to care for their parents.
That woman was right. “I’ve already had a lot of people on Instagram saying ‘You don’t hear about this in stories’,” says George. “And it’s true. People talk about Alzheimer’s, cancer, things like that... but nobody really talks about Parkinson’s disease. It’s very interesting and emotional, getting messages from people about watching parents go through Covid or Parkinson’s disease — it turns out a lot of people resonate. I love that they say how comforting [Maame] is to read.”
Maddie’s struggles with her family are interspersed with relatable scenes from flatmate nights out to painful sexual encounters, which is perhaps what makes Maame seem so real. Nods to pizzerias in Clapham and rush-hour Thameslink trains make it a true London story, but the themes clearly feel universal, given that readers around the world have been in touch. George says she’s had messages like “I’ve had that boyfriend” or “I’ve had that boss” or “thank you for showing that the grief process isn’t linear”, but also some less-expected ones: “I had one guy who was like, ‘I really relate to Maddie having back pain in her twenties!’... It’s very random but it’s very true — we all need ergonomic chairs now and we’re not even 50.”
Another theme that George hopes will resonate with readers is race. She grew up on stories without any black female protagonists and struggled with being the only black woman in the classroom at university (she studied English Literature at Sheffield), so is delighted to hear comparisons of her book to Candice Carty-Williams’s bestselling novel Queenie. Like Queenie, George’s protagonist Maddie finds herself stuck between two very different worlds: that of a devoutly religious Ghanaian family with high expectations, and a creative industry that’s designed for well-connected white people, with micro-aggressive bosses who don’t really see her.
You have to remember: this is the story I didn’t think would go anywhere... it turns out a lot of people resonate
Like Carty-Williams, George spent years working in publishing — she was an assistant editor at Bloomsbury until last summer, when she started writing full-time — and says the industry lacked the diversity of her previous jobs at a literary agency and a theatre. “What I’ve learnt about publishing is that sometimes it’s often a lot of talk, rather than action. The stories they’re telling are definitely a lot more diverse, but the companies themselves, not so much.”
Though George is technically a millionnaire now, she insists her relationship with money hasn’t changed since that “life-changing amount” when she saw the frst sum pop up in her bank account. She and her brothers grew up in a working-class family in Battersea and later Thornton Heath, with a security guard father and a mother who managed their family business. “We always struggled with money so I’ve always been very cautious — I nearly didn’t go to university because of my fear of debt, so I’m still very wary of spending. When you spent 26 years having a certain relationship with money, I don’t think you can undo that in a year.”
The first thing George spent money on after her publishing deal was a tax advisor. Since then, she’s moved out of her flatshare with Lucy (a fellow writer and Bake Off-lover), and treated herself to her own place (though she admits this probably isn’t a good thing for her “introverted tendencies”).
“My friends look at me like ‘So, you’re worth... millions? And I’m like ‘Yes? But it’s not in my bank account, I don’t feel like I actually have that money,” she says in a nod to publisher advances, which are often paid in installments in exchange for the rights to the book. “When I pay rent I’m still like: ‘Woah, that’s an eye-watering price’ and my friends are like: ‘Shut up!’”.
George says she’s never had an extravagant lifestyle — her biggest expense after rent is food — but her newfound wealth has afforded her the joy of treating her mum to a new kitchen and private healthcare. “That was very important to me,” she says, smiling at a set of pictures her mum recently sent her from outside a GP on Harley Street. “That’s how I’d like to spend my money: to give her that peace of mind, because a really sad thing that I don’t admit very often is the reason I hoped for a big [book] deal was to get my dad proper care... I missed out on that opportunity. So I’m very much aware of trying to do that for my mum now.”
George looks upset when she speaks of her five failed books attempts, but admits they weren’t really very her; more ideas that were modelled on what was “popular” at the time and she thought would be the most likely to get published. She tried writing about teenage spies and a murder mystery set at university, but authenticity, it transpired, was what publishers were looking for. What began as 10,000 words of digital diary entries discovered on a laptop after her dad’s death slowly but surely transformed into an full-fledged novel, churned out during a personal period of intense grief and alongside a publishing job, in the time she would have been commuting pre-pandemic.
I hoped for a big book deal so I could get my dad proper care when he was ill — I missed that opportunity
She sees Maddie or Maame as the younger version of herself that she has been working hard to shed — not because she isn’t a talented, loveable character already, but because — like many of us in our twenties — she is still working out who she is. Maddie’s therapist in the book, Angelina, represents the person George hopes she’s become today: still learning, still charmingly introverted, but more honest, less of a people-pleaser, less afraid to ask for help and definitely less addicted to Dr Google.
How will she celebrate publication day? George says she’s planning a pizza and pasta lunch with her Maame publishing team before seeing Ashleigh and Camila, the two BFFs she credits as inspiration behind Maddie’s best friends Nia and Shu (she refers to them as “my Nia” and “my Shu”, which they love). The other characters in the book are fictionalised combinations of people she and her friends have met over the years (which I am devastated to learn unfortunately includes Maddie’s love interest, Sam, who George is sadly yet to meet IRL).
George says getting to publication day feels “bittersweet”. She is relieved the book has been published in the US already because it’s helped her to prepare for the inevitable rollercoaster of emotions that are to come: the joy of sharing her story with the world after eight years of hard work, but also the sadness that none of this praise would have happened if it wasn’t for the loss of her dad.
“I had one of my crying sessions with my therapist on [US] publication day because of that,” she says. “She said: ‘That’s a very normal way to look at grief. But also, take into account all the things your dad has left you with. Your dad was the only other introvert in the family... so your ability to sit alone and complete that book was because of your dad.’ I thought that was a really lovely way to look at it.”
George says this is why she recommends therapy. “I wouldn’t have come to that conclusion on my own”. Her mum, a devout Christian known for “brilliant one-liners” like Maddie’s mum, is coming round to the idea, but doesn’t view therapy as highly as she does. “Personally I think therapy and religion go hand in hand,” says George. “She’s not there yet.”
George admits a lot of what she’s worked through in therapy hasn’t made it into the book (“mostly because the book would be huge”), but she’s excited to be working on a second novel, this time about platonic female friendships because she doesn’t think enough is said about the work it takes to keep them going. She writes at home, mostly, or at the British Library, but feels lucky as a writer because “I’m really good with solitude”.
I ask how it feels to have this first story being published on Valentine’s Day and George laughs, telling me it was accidental. The original date was supposed to be February 16, but it was brought forward to be closer to the US release. “Then again,” George pauses. “I call this book a love letter to my dad... so maybe it actually makes perfect sense.”
