Hello welcome back. It's episode 41 of Control Alt Delete.

Today's guest I'm so excited about is Lisa Owens, who is a writer and author of the book Not Working,

which came out last year with Picador. And it's one of those books that made me laugh so much when you have an

awkward moment on public transport where you are snorting and laughing.

Before writing this brilliant book which got brilliant reviews she was an editor at an independent publisher called

profile books and she left to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

So this debut novel called Not Working is about a girl called Claire who quits her job to go and find her true purpose and it brings up many conversations about how much work is part of our identity, whether that's a good or bad thing.

It's out at the moment in hardback and it's going to be published in paperback by Picador in January.

So if you want the paperback, go get it in January and I hope you enjoy this episode. Here it is.

I'm sorry if you've been asked this like a hundred times by other people but where did the inspiration come for the book?

Well there are a couple of different answers I give to this actually so the first one is

like how I actually came to physically write it which was that I had lots of different kind of observations

that I'd been keeping for a while, just like, you know, I was writing at the time I was doing a master's

in creative writing, so I kind of, every little thing I saw or thought of I would keep an out of my phone which I think is quite a common thing

But I ended up having quite a lot of them in this kind of I didn't mean I was to do with them and one day I was kind of a bit stuck for inspiration and ended up just pulling them out and playing with them and kind of messing around and realized they all had this same kind of tone and they also had this kind of, they felt like they came from the same character, which was someone who was maybe a little bit last searching for something.

And so I just kind of it kind of spoiled out of that.

And that was then where the job and work aspect came from. Like the very first

scene in the book, Claire is having this altercation with her neighbor about this plant that's

growing out of her building and that was kind of the beginning was,

okay, so who is someone who's at home during the day,

who has time to deal with something like this,

and but is also someone who's quite, you know,

...