Sarah Jessica Parker’s new Jewish author
Meet the former journalist who gave a tired mother a plot twist and created a bestseller
Life has changed for Ellie Levenson since her first novel was published. And yet, in many ways, it hasn’t changed at all.
She is still picking up her three children from school, shopping and making dinner. The difference now is that while cooking egg and chips she Zooms with Sarah Jessica Parker. For SJP is publishing the American imprint of Ellie’s debut novel Room 706.
It’s in Room 706 where the drama unfolds for protagonist Kate, a mother who makes a decision she shouldn’t have and finds herself trapped in a hotel. Can’t say more as there should be no spoilers for this deeply suspenseful exploration of marriage, guilt and complicated choices. It’s like a movie in fact, which this book will inevitably become as it’s so dramatic. Ellie is entirely the opposite. Warm, funny and unassuming, she’s a nice Jewish girl from East London who is thrilled her book has found readers.
“People keep asking if it’s me,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘no, it’s fiction. The affair isn’t me, and the meeting in hotel rooms isn’t me – but being a tired mum? That’s me.”
It was Ellie’s exhaustion when her kids were little that sparked the idea for the novel. “All I wanted to do was go to a hotel and sleep. People would be like, ‘What, with a lover?’ And I was like, ‘No, God, no. No thank you. I want to go and sleep.”
From this Ellie got her complicated heroine, Kate. “She was always clear in my mind from the moment I put pen to paper in 2018 and I wanted her to be every woman. To be completely relatable.”
That universality explains Ellie’s unusual decision to not describe Kate’s appearance. “We have no idea what she looks like,” Ellie says. “We don’t know her skin colour, hair colour, if she is she fat or thin. I did that deliberately.”
Ellie came to fiction after years as a freelance journalist and lecturer at Goldsmiths. But the desire to write a novel never left her. “I’m an English graduate, don’t all literature graduates want to write a novel at some point? And it got to the stage where I thought, ‘I’m in my 40’s -I have to do it now and stop talking about it.”
The book took years to shape and is different to when she first submitted it. “My agent said you need to put it into threads,” Levinson recalls. “So I separated everything — the past, how she met her husband, her lover, and the present – then wove them back together. I always think of it as a bit like plaiting a loaf of challah.”
Ellie’s Jewishness – lightly worn but unmistakable runs through her storytelling. “I think everything a Jewish writer writes is Jewish,” she says. “Because it reflects your ways of looking at the world. That we understand people are complex and fallible and if things go wrong, it’s sad, but not the end of the world.”
For all the international attention the book is receiving, Ellie remains grounded. “It was my mother who wondered if the book deal meant a move to a bigger house.”
“It hasn’t changed my life materially in that way,” says Ellie who lives in Loughton, near to her childhood home. “But the novel has sold in multiple territories, so it’s financially bought me the equivalent of a salary for a few years to see if I can write another one.”
It has changed how she introduces herself. “I can say I’m a novelist, when asked what I do, and I really am a real one. So that’s quite nice, I think.”
There are book shop introductions and promotional appearances, but life for Ellie is still reassuringly familiar. “So I’m writing at my kitchen table, picking the kids up from school. And..”
Yes, sometimes between frying egg and chips, Sarah Jessica Parker calls.
Room 708 is published by Headline
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