It's the 20th
anniversary of the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral,
apparently. Pause whilst you wonder where your life went. Stop
weeping at the back. And I was reading that it very nearly wasn't
called that at all. Allegedly, it was going to be called Toffs on Heat.
Or Charles and Chums. Hard to imagine it being a success with either
of those titles!
I was thinking of this because of a
very nice review of our book by Becca's Books in which she writes
“Firstly the title. Ambiguous and I LOVE it”. I was overjoyed to
read that to be honest.
The title seems so right now, but
it was one of the last things we wrote. The original title of the
book was Wish You Were. Not 'Wish You Were Here', though of
course we expected people to add a silent “Here” at the end.
Which we then mirrored with the last line of the book – PS, so that
the last thing people read was supposed to be a silent, unwritten “I
Love You”. (Of course, in reality, we not only changed the title,
but the proof-readers missed out the PS at the end of the novel).
So the title was Wish You Were for
95% of the time we were writing the book. My guess is most people
reading the book will imagine that the title came first, and that
explains why Trip has such a silly nickname. But in reality we came
up with the nickname first, at least a year earlier. It was only when
we were improvising a dialogue scene on Facebook chat that I used the
phrase “a farewell trip” and suddenly realised that was an
obvious title.
It still took a time to take hold.
I was worried about using such a corny pun. Karin had become attached
to the original title. I liked the original. Wish You Were what? My wife had stated constantly that she hated the name Trip. A best friend likewise.
Even Karin wasn't keen.
Now, to me anyway, just as with
Four Weddings and a Funeral, it feels like the book has always been
Farewell Trip, was always meant to be, and could never have been
anything else. And Becca's review sits nicely with that.
