It took Shari Low until she was 30 to realise her ambition and put pen to paper. Nine books later, she talks about friends, family life and finding her inner author.
Working life got busier and more demanding, however, and there came a point when a change, as well as a rest, was needed.
“I was 30 and it really was an early mid-life crisis. I knew I wanted a family and I wanted to be a writer. John (he’s an IT consultant) and I were living in London, we had great careers but it wasn’t what we really wanted so it was getting a bit miserable. We’d also been having fertility treatment so there was so much happening and none of it exactly brilliant. After listening to me go on about it for years, John then pointed out that if I really did want to be a writer, I’d better actually write something which was pretty sharp of him really!
“At the time, I was a sales director managing a team of 12, in a different city each day, and I just decided that wherever I was, I’d sit down at night and start battering away on the laptop. By the time I’d got about 10,000-12,000 words together, I fired it off to various publishers and agents.
“On March 13, 2000, at 4.10pm, I got my first publishing deal with Piatkus Books. I was feeling absolutely awful so while John was opening the champagne to celebrate the deal, I went and did a pregnancy test when you’re trying for kids, you hope all the time and you always have these things in the house. It was positive and that was me. Life changed completely in 10 minutes!”
Within the next two years, Shari produced two books and two sons, her boys coming along within 16 months of each other. Her family and her writing have since grown up together and she reckons it’s just as well that her book production has outstripped her baby production “otherwise I’d have ended up like the Waltons!
“We also decided we wanted to come back to Scotland to bring up our boys. I was working at Pinewood Studios at the time and it was so busy, it just wouldn’t have been possible to cope. I had so many family and friends here and John’s a Scot, too.
“It’s funny, having travelled all over the world, I always thought I’d marry someone exotic, someone called Santiago or something. But I married John Low from Cumbernauld – and he’s pretty exotic in his own way!”
The publication of What If? in 2001, was followed by Why Not? in 2002 and Double Trouble in 2003. She contributed, with Jenny Colgan, Isla Dewar, Muriel Gray and many more to a collection of short stories, Scottish Girls on the Town, before producing another handful of novels, culminating in her latest, Friday Night with the Girls. As you can tell from the title, it”s about how important best friends truly are.
“There were recurring characters in the first few books which were kind of based on myself, my friends, our careers, marriages, kids etc and I suppose I”ve developed that theme, that inspiration from my group of friends. There are romantic relationships in there, of course, but more and more I find I”m getting back to how much your friends mean to you and how they get you through anything in life. For me, female friendship is one of the most important things.
“It is based on my own network. John didn”t realise when he married me that I came with at least four women sitting round the kitchen table at some stage of each week. I”ve got a group of friends who have all known each other since school and you”re there for each other in every possible situation you can imagine.
“I have one girlfriend and at one stage, I don”t think that any time we went out together which was regularly we had a hot meal for about six months. Waiters had to keep taking stuff away because we”d be sitting at a restaurant table and one or both of us would be in tears or literally crying on the other”s shoulder.
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“But the big thing about it is humour. You get laughs with your pals about the worst possible things and it gets you through. It”s that who spirit of ‘This”ll get better”. You can do it with friends, humour and snacks.”
And cocktails, as promised in Friday Night with the Girls? “Definitely cocktails,” Shari says firmly. “I”m partial!
“My favourite Friday night with the girls (when we can sort out the kids, the babysitters, the work and all that) is round the kitchen table with wine and a bowl of Doritos. Those are the kind of nights that keep you going, the kind you remember.
“Our house is always busy, we”re surrounded by people popping in. It”s crazy, busy and unpredictable.” Just like its inhabitant, in fact.
With her next book, exotically titled Meet Me in Monaco, already completed and at the publisher “I handed it in last week and it will be out this time next year” it”s the first time in ages that she hasn”t had a book on the go. “I really am rubbish at relaxing. Last Sunday was the first time for four years I didn”t have any book work. I had nothing to do and it lasted until about two o”clock when I told my husband, ‘I need to do something, it”s driving me crazy!”
“I”m not cut out for that, I like being on the go. I like a ‘to do” list!”
On that list is a screenplay for at least one of her books, a couple of which have been optioned by US production companies, leading to two stints of family living in Los Angeles. Her book A Brand New Me has been under option for the past 18 months with Working Title films, who made Bridget Jones” Diary, Atonement and Four Weddings and a Funeral, not to mention the recent hit version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
“My girlfriends and I have picked out our frocks for the premiere! But it is a long-drawn-out process, you just have to wait and see. I”d love one of mine to get made into a film. I always have ideas in my head while I”m writing about who might star in them!”
She doesn”t see Friday Night…as a Hollywood blockbuster, however. “It”s very Glasgow, very Scottish and very personal it has a Glasgow hotel setting and documents the main characters” lives together and apart from school onwards, through everything you go through. All my girlfriends are turning 40 this year (I was 40 four years ago but I”m staying 40 with the rest of them!) and I do think it”s quite a reflective age. Have I done what I meant to do? What”s important to me? Where do I go from here? All that goes through your mind. I think it”s about the way friendship should be and how brilliant lifelong friends are.
“It”s quite special to me, this one.”
I catch Shari Low just after she’s done the school run with sons Callan, 10 and nine-year-old Brad. “I like it hectic!” she says cheerfully. “I’m rubbish at relaxing and the kids keep me busy.
“I have a step-daughter who’s 22 although she doesn’t live here, she pops in a lot, which is great and the two boys, so it’s never dull. They’re so different one is really sporty, can’t sit still and the other is musical, more calm and chilled out. But they have so much energy and I want that energy!”
One suspects that they might actually have got it in the first place from their mother who has rarely, it would seem, sat still or hung around in one place for long since her teenage years in Glasgow. Now a popular writer and humorous newspaper columnist, she could hardly have got where she is today by a more roundabout route.
Born and brought up there, she started out in sales, slogging around flogging fire extinguishers door-to-door all over England and Ireland, taking in Amsterdam along the way the part of the advert that actually appealed to her most had mentioned “extensive foreign travel” and that was it!
A move into nightclub management back in Glasgow literally took over her life for the next few years, working all hours and sleeping hardly at all. Then, at 22, she went to work for the Sheraton group, managing a nightclub in their hotel in Shanghai. From there she transferred to Hong Kong, gaining, she says, “the best wardrobe and the biggest overdraft in South East Asia!” before heading back to Scotland.
She met her husband John during that short spell back in Glasgow working for Hilton Hotels and seven days later, they were engaged. That was 16 years ago, so this is obviously a woman whose first instincts and decision-making abilities are seriously impressive, not to say speedy.
“Having been in Hong Kong and China, then back to Glasgow for the opening of the Hilton, I was planning to go to Australia. But we met on a Tuesday and got engaged the following Tuesday.
“I’m open to a bit of spontaneity. I don’t like to be too predictable.”
If her career till that point had happened more by accident than design, her current writing success had its roots way back, a childhood ambition that somehow never went away.
She explained: “I was a voracious reader as a child at high school I kept getting into trouble for reading when I should have been doing other things. I was never a literary reader I loved Sidney Sheldon, Jackie Collins, Wilbur Smith, a bit of scandal, a really good story!
“But I did tell my high school English teacher in first year that I wanted to be a writer. He thought it was hilarious but he was very supportive about it, just convinced that I would never get anywhere. He’s now a college lecturer and I went back to see him recently and he was really delighted that I’d actually done it!”
You wouldn’t put your money on Shari not having a go at whatever took her fancy. She doesn’t do things by halves. “I’ve lived on my own since I was in my teens and I had to support myself so I just kind of threw myself into what was around at the time. After John and I got married, the only thing I felt I was suited for and could make any money at! was sales but it wasn’t all glamorous. I spent a lot of time with litter bins and toilet rolls!”
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