When Joanne Harris wrote Chocolat, her novel of morality and magic set in a cloistered French village, she didn’t anticipate it to be revealed, not to mention succeed. Her agent thought that it was “very retro writing” and “wasn’t in any respect the sort of factor he felt could be industrial”. Now, 25 years later, after greater than 1m gross sales and an Oscar-nominated movie adaptation starring Johnny Depp, Harris is writing a prequel.
Within the unique novel, protagonist Vianne units up a chocolaterie – promoting champagne truffles, oyster-shaped pralines, chocolate-coated pains d’épice – originally of Lent, drawing the ire of the city’s priest, who fasts and sees chocolate as sinful indulgence. Within the prequel, as a result of be revealed in March 2025, readers can anticipate to study extra about “how Vianne turns into Vianne”, says Harris.
The prequel, titled Vianne, will see the titular character arriving in Marseille from New York, getting a job at a bistro, and ultimately turning into concerned in an rising chocolaterie. Nonetheless, the chocolatier has secrets and techniques, one among which “is prone to trigger [Vianne’s] life and his to be overturned”, says Harris.
Since Chocolat’s publication, Harris has written greater than a dozen novels, which transfer between magical realism, thriller, fantasy and historic fiction. Her newest, Damaged Mild, is about Bernie Moon, a girl nearing 50 whose menopause reawakens her capacity to look into individuals’s minds and manipulate their ideas – a ability that has lain dormant since Moon was a toddler.
In 2020, Harris was recognized with breast most cancers. That have, significantly the “concept that issues can occur to your physique that you simply don’t like and that you simply don’t perceive”, grew to become a place to begin for writing about Moon’s “typically fairly scary” menopausal signs, she says.
Harris’s novels usually interact with gender politics, and Damaged Mild isn’t any exception. Early on, a girl is killed in a neighborhood park – a storyline partly impressed by the homicide of Sarah Everard, says Harris. “It grew to become a really offended story about males and their responses to ladies.”
Past her novels, too, Harris has expressed her views about gender and her help for trans rights on-line. “I do know quite a few authors who could be very uncomfortable partaking in public on issues that they imagine in, and I believe they completely have the suitable to not, and I additionally suppose that individuals who really feel comfy doing it or really feel compelled to do it or have sturdy emotions must also be capable to do it,” she says. “A few of us are glad to be recognized solely by way of our books, and a few of us are like me” and “don’t see the road between the books and the world”.
Between January 2020 and January 2024, Harris was the administration committee chair of the Society of Authors (SoA), and through that point, she noticed off a vote to oust her. The transfer got here after Harris posted a Twitter ballot within the wake of the stabbing of Salman Rushdie – and after a dying menace to JK Rowling who had expressed solidarity with Rushdie – which requested whether or not authors had ever obtained a dying menace. On the time, Harris said she felt that the criticism she was dealing with had “nothing to do with the [SoA], and every part to do with my help of the trans group.”
Within the vote, 81% of members finally backed Harris. Requested what she makes of the vote now, she says that “this stuff typically occur. The SoA is a democracy.”
“It’s wholesome in any organisation that any voice ought to really feel that they’re heard and represented, even when what they’re saying is one thing that almost all don’t agree with, or one thing that the society doesn’t endorse,” she provides. “Now we have 12,000 members, they usually all have totally different opinions on various things, and there are sure to be disagreements. It will be important for the organisation to nonetheless be capable to say ‘We symbolize all of these individuals’.”
after publication promotion
Regardless of the controversy, Harris stays an lively person of X (previously Twitter). “I at all times knew that social media was stuffed with one of the best and worst of all people, this isn’t one thing new,” she says of the criticism she obtained. “Simply because one thing that I stated could have made the papers at one level doesn’t imply that I hadn’t skilled comparable conditions earlier than.”
Social media performs a significant position in Damaged Mild, wherein a personality is drawn to a conspiracy principle {that a} drug, MK2, has been created by ladies to poison males, destroy their masculinity and ultimately launch a “gender coup”, taking on all positions of energy and “decreasing males to slavery”.
Harris thinks conspiracy theories come up as a result of social media feels “very intimate, and but it actually isn’t – we could possibly be speaking to anyone.” Interacting with customers repeatedly “builds a sort of belief, which is predicated on this false intimacy”, and results in the propagation of misinformation.
Whereas the Chocolat prequel will happen offline, lies nonetheless unfold: Vianne comes to understand that the chocolatier resides a double life. As his “fastidiously constructed internet of lies begins to unravel, Vianne finds herself caught between loyalty to her pal, and the worry that her personal secret – a secret her mom has saved all her life – could itself be found,” says Harris.
The prequel will see Vianne reinventing herself, trying to eliminate her mom’s affect. “Individuals in my books, as in life, are at all times the product of their previous, and infrequently discover it laborious to depart behind the alternatives which have made them who they’re.”
