{"id":76,"date":"2018-05-20T21:03:15","date_gmt":"2018-05-20T20:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/217.199.187.195\/jpdelaney.co.uk\/?page_id=76"},"modified":"2019-08-21T15:09:46","modified_gmt":"2019-08-21T14:09:46","slug":"the-perfect-wife","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jpdelaney.co.uk\/?page_id=76","title":{"rendered":"THE PERFECT WIFE"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When I tell people my new psychological thriller, The Perfect Wife, is set in Silicon Valley, they\u2019re often surprised. Although I dealt with high-tech minimalism in The Girl Before, and used an American setting \u2013 New York \u2013 for Believe Me, people associate the psychological genre more with suburban secrets than with San Francisco\u2019s vibrant start-up scene. But once I\u2019d decided to make my two protagonists a driven, successful tech entrepreneur and his beautiful artist wife, I gradually realised that Silicon Valley is the perfect setting for a novel of suspense.<\/p>\n

There are the people, for one thing. Think Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk \u2013 successful tech entrepreneurs are often obsessive, and obsession is one of the basic requirements of a psychological thriller. My tech company founder, Tim Scott, has some of those qualities too. Yet such people can also be strangely attractive \u2013 think of Snapchat\u2019s Evan Spiegal dating model Miranda Kerr, or Twitter\u2019s Jack Dorsey and Lily Cole. When Elon Musk proposed to the British actress Tallulah Riley, he\u2019d only known her a few weeks. He didn\u2019t have a ring, so they shook hands on it. (He later bought her three engagement rings, including a small one for everyday.) That was just Musk\u2019s first proposal to Riley, incidentally: after their marriage, and divorce, he proposed again \u2013 and was accepted.<\/p>\n

Silicon Valley\u2019s a place where women are either idolised or treated horribly, and distasteful though that is, it makes for interesting fiction. Tech companies often call themselves \u2018campuses\u2019, with free food, nap pods, all-night hackathons and an all-consuming work ethic.
\nNot surprisingly, some develop a heavily masculine, even macho culture, often called the \u2018brogrammer\u2019 mentality. (It\u2019s worth remembering that Facebook started out as a way to rate women\u2019s attractiveness.)<\/p>\n

Yet it\u2019s also a place where the incredible happens every day. At companies like Apple or Google, people\u2019s day jobs are to pursue perfection, bringing to life ideas so beautiful or ground breaking that they become part of humanity\u2019s future. My story starts with Abbie Cullen, the gifted artist wife of the British tech-firm founder Tim, waking up in a hospital bed with no recollection of how she got there. It\u2019s only when Tim reveals that her memories of their marriage are in fact an upload, painstakingly recreated from her social media feeds, that she realises she hasn\u2019t just come around from a car accident. The premise might sound far- fetched: I thought so myself, until I came across a Google patent application for just such a deep-learning intelligence that \u201cbe able to mimic the personality of a loved one.\u201d (It\u2019s still under development).<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been fascinated by fairy stories that end \u2018And they lived happily ever after.\u2019 Perhaps because of my love of a good twist, I immediately think, Really? Is anyone\u2019s marriage as straightforward as that? Tim might have the money to make his courtship seem a fairytale, but what happens to someone like that when real life begins? What happens when the pursuit of perfection is compromised by, say, the stress of a Wall Street flotation, or having an autistic son? The Perfect Wife asks the question: how do we cope when the person we married turns out to be less than perfect? And that\u2019s a theme that\u2019s always relevant, wherever in the world we are.<\/p>\n

Originally written for Booktopia<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>

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