Labour of love

Wonder author RJ Palacio on why it took so long for her latest novel, Pony, to hit the shelves

- JANE VORSTER

HER publishers didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. For two years one of their star authors, RJ Palacio, had been hard at work on a new novel – one that after the success of her smash-hit bestseller Wonder was guaranteed to fly off the shelves – and now here she was telling them she’d destroyed the manuscript because she was unhappy with it.

“I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere in the beginning, and the pacing was off,” the American writer, whose real name is Raquel Jaramillo, tells us.

But was there really no way of fixing it?

“The whole structure was wrong. So yeah, I threw it out. And I don’t mean that metaphorically: I had 400 pages of the printed-out manuscript full of all my handwritten notes and addendums, and literally trashed it.”

After that she put the novel aside to work on other projects but all the time her abandoned book continued to haunt her. Last year, when the world went into lockdown, she returned to it, and within three months she’d written the book that had for so long eluded her.

“When it finally came out, it came out not like a trickle but like a flood,” says the mother of two, who lives in Brooklyn, New York.