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J ulia Gregson has worked as a jillaroo (a cowgirl in the Australian outback), a shearer’s cook, and a house model for Hardie Amies, before becoming a journalist. She was posted to Vietnam and India as a foreign correspondent, and then went on to work for Rolling Stone in New York. She has interviewed Muhammad Ali, Buzz Aldrin, Ronnie Biggs, Hollywood royalty and several notorious criminals.
Most recently she’s released East of the Sun - a captivating novel which follows three women looking for husbands in 1920s India. With such an incredible life story so far, we asked Julia to take a leap back in time, and write a letter to her younger self, outlining everything she wishes she had of known when she was 25.
Plus we have three copies of this fantastic book to giveaway. Read on to find out how you can win a copy for yourself!
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I’ve just looked up some of your old diaries to see what was going through your head at 25. I was amazed to find you’d copied out this quote from Henry David Thoreau: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.”
Wow! Isn’t that marvellous? Maybe I’ve been judging you too harshly thinking you were a bit of a twit at 25. Would it surprise you to know that that idea is as true to me today, at 61, as it was to you at 25? The dreams may change, but they don’t go away.
You are one year into your new life as a writer. Your first article was a sort of accident. You were helping to look after horses on the set of a film called Ned Kelly, when you were asked to ride out with a baby-faced young rocker called Mick Jagger - you know the one whose Dad wanted him to study economics. He was playing Ned Kelly, and everyone was frightened he’d fall off his horse. Your account of this flukey meeting was published on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald (well of course it was dummy, not because you were an undiscovered Katherine Mansfield but because he was Mick Jagger).
 So, you’ve chucked up the day job, and you’re trying to make a go of it as a full-time writer. Very stupid, very impulsive according to your cleverer friends. Even your pretty laid back parents are sucking their teeth. You have absolutely no training for this. You can’t punctuate, you can’t spell. You left school at 16, married insanely young at 19 and since then have done all the kinds of jobs uneducated young girls do –receptionist, waitress, and worst secretary in the history of the earth. But writing that story, it’s like fireworks going off in your head. You suddenly know what you want to do, and you’re ready to move, not exactly confidently in the direction of your dreams,. This is the first thing you’ve wanted this badly. Don’t give up.
One year on and you’ve gone broke, and you haven’t published another thing, but you have spent a lot of time reading, trying to figure out why almost everybody else seems to do it so much better than you. Time well spent. And then, on the week that you decide you are so poor you’ll have to get another day job, something happens, so fanciful that even now you hesitate to tell the story.
Too frustrated to write you start to re- stuff an armchair you’ve found in the garage. Wedged in the springs, is an old newspaper parcel, tied tightly with string. When you unwrap it, £ 350 in King George V bank notes falls on the floor wrapped in an ancient betting slip. It feels like an omen. That night you go out and celebrate with three close friends. Good girl - don’t forget to celebrate.
There will be times in your life - when you have children for instance - when life simply won’t give you enough hours in the day to do everything. Try not to stress about this- the time for having and raising children now seems to me to have been over in the blink of an eye. There is plenty of time on the other side. I now have friends who have started to paint, trained to be psychologists, written their first books in their fifties and sixties.
Learn to surprise yourself by setting new goals - for you it’s been the slow progression from articles, to short stories to novels. At each point of change you’ve been scared but learned to stay: “stuff it, try anyway.” The journey has been fascinating and demanding. It gave you travel, interesting friends and the chance to do something that would never bore you. Oh, hang on, before we leave the friends, let me tell you that a good circle of friends are jewels beyond price and get even more important as you get older. Not all of them will understand the intensity of your dreams - why should they? But if one or two do, you’re lucky.
At 25 you’ve been married for nearly six years now. You haven’t spent one single night apart. Insanely young, almost everybody warned you against it. They were wrong. The marriage didn’t last but now you look back on it with love and gratitude. I wish I could have told you during the devastations of the breakup that you would love again. That there are different loves for different times of your life, but you’ve got to be open to them.
What else? Never throw your belts away, they’ll eventually come back into fashion, spend as little time as possible ironing most of the creases drop out eventually; write thank you letters or e-mails when people put themselves out for you- good manners are not superficial things, they’re about sympathy and respect for other people; keep supple and fit - you’ll have a much happier life like that. Celebrate the good times. Don’t give up.   East of the Sun is a captivating novel which follows three women looking for husbands in 1920s India. They leave Britain ill-prepared for what awaits them in India - from the parties of the wealthy Bombay socialites, to the ragged orphans on Tamarind Street. We have three copies of this fantastic book to giveaway. To get yourself in the draw just tell us one occupation Julia has worked in before! |
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