Featured Interview With Lucy Broadbent
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I feel like I fell out of the lucky tree because I have been a journalist and writer all my working life. It was all I ever wanted to do. I started out in newspapers and magazines in London where I grew up and moved to Los Angeles some twenty odd years ago to be a correspondent because I was curious about America. In Los Angeles, I was privileged enough to find myself eating a lot of lunches with celebrities in fancy restaurants which gave me the idea to write my first two novels. I still live in Los Angeles with my husband, one of my sons who has yet to fly the coop, and our dog Lulabelle. I’ve written for The London Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Daily Mail, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and many others.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
My first-ever piece that was published was a personal account of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. I was in my twenties, rather rotund and very unfit, which gave me an angle for humor in the article and I got a job as a travel writer for Hello! magazine on the strength of it. But writing travel and newspaper articles is not the same as writing books. I had to do a whole lot of living, and a whole lot of reading, before I could graduate onto writing books.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My all time favorite author is Miriam Toews, author of Fight Night and Women Talking. She has the ability to write humorously about serious subjects. That’s a skill, I just wish I had. She makes me both laugh out loud and cry. My other best friends – because sometimes you feel that way about your favorite authors, don’t you? – are Maggie O’Farrell, Joyce Carol Oates, Caitlin Moran, Barbara Kingsolver, Rose Tremain. I never particularly went looking for strong female writers, but even I can see the pattern here.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book is What Would Ted Lasso Do? How His Positive Approach Can Help You. Not long after I’d been watching Ted Lasso on TV, a car accidentally scraped the side of my Subaru in a parking lot. Ordinarily, there’d have been a expletives in such a scene. I’m no angel. But I found myself thinking ‘Well, what would Ted Lasso do if it had happened to him?’ The comedy show had somehow got to me. I knew that if I reacted in a kindly way, as Ted would, I could turn an adverse situation into one where I ended up feeling better about myself. And it worked. I still came away with a scraped car, but I didn’t feel as bad about it as I might have done.
That set me on a research path. I’m a journalist – it’s what I do. I discovered that many of the themes of Ted Lasso come from the Positive Psychology Movement. Ted tells us to believe in ourselves, to be optimistic, be kind to others. I found dozens of psychologists and research studies telling us to do the same if we want to be better, kinder, happier versions of ourselves. But somehow the lessons from Ted are more palatable, less preachy.
What Would Ted Lasso Do? How His Positive Approach Can Help You is a self-help, motivational book for the kind of people who wouldn’t ordinarily buy a self help book, as well as a love letter to Ted. You might even call it the Tao of Ted.
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