P = Presenter J = Jessica Part 1

P: Now, have you ever daydreamed about changing your life forever,
about giving up your job and setting off for a distant country where you
could find love and happiness? Well, Jessica Fox did just that and
she’s on the line now to tell us about her journey.
Jessica, welcome to the programme.
J: Oh, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
P: Now, you started your journey in Los Angeles. Tell me about your life
there. What was your job? What sort of lifestyle did you have?
J: Ahh, I was consulting for NASA and I was doing what I loved. I was
living in a city that I adored and I had an extraordinary network of
friends. There was, I can only describe it as like a … a … an abstract
taste that I was missing. And so I really began … it was about a year …
I began daydreaming of something quite different.
P: Did you have an actual vision of what the change might be?
J: I would often sit down in my studio and just dream of different things,
and usually they turned into the screenplays I was writing, and this
dream kept on coming back of working in a used bookshop by the sea.
And I …
P: Working in a used bookshop by the sea?
J: In Scotland, yeah.
P: In Scotland, right. Had you ever had any connection with used
bookshops or Scotland before?
J: None, absolutely none.
Part 2
P: And so did you set about doing something to realise the dream?
J: Yeah, it happened quite quickly actually. I typed in ‘used bookshop,
Scotland’, into Google and Wigtown came up, Scotland’s national book
town of, I think, it was about sixteen bookshops and I thought ‘Oh my
 gosh, one of them, hopefully, will take me in for a kind of live/work
exchange while I was on holiday and I could realise this dream of ...
P: So, did you just send an email to these bookshops and ask them to
take you in?
J: I sent one email to the first bookshop on the list, which was The
Bookshop, and it was the largest used bookshop in Scotland, and
within a couple of emails this sort of extraordinary, generous bookshop
owner said ‘Yes, I host a lot of other artists. Come on over for the
festival.’
P: And so you came over and you stayed at The Bookshop, and what sort
of a bookshop was it? What sort of impression did it make on you when
you first arrived?
J: I would describe it as, if Harry Potter had a bookshop, this would be it.
P: And what about the bookshop owner? Did you get on with him?
J: I did. You know I was … I was here for a specific reason. I really
wanted to get away from things, I wanted to write, so when I first met
the bookshop owner I, it was just … it was a friendly, a kind of a
friendly relationship I had with him. I didn’t get to know him very much
until towards the end of my stay …
Part 3
P: Your month ended and you went back to LA. Did you find yourself
missing the shop and missing the owner?
J: Yeah, I loved the shop, I loved the town itself and the people there.
And it took me a while to admit that it was actually most of all the
bookshop owner that I was missing.
P: And how did you find out that he was missing you too?
J: We would correspond over email and Skype and I’d get lovely
packages from him with things I missed about Wigtown.
P: Such as?
J: Such as, this is terrible, such as the biscuits, digestives, the digestive
biscuits I absolutely adore, um, and a lot of the sweets and movies. I
fell in love with Scottish films …
P: So your relationship deepened? Did you think, ‘Well maybe I’m falling
in love with this man’?
J: Yeah and I think the reason why it took so long for me to admit was
that it meant a radical life shift. And luckily my job shifted at NASA; so
suddenly I had this freedom of being able to be anywhere in the world
that I wanted. And I just thought, ‘Well, why let all my characters in my
movies have all the fun?’ I really wanted to jump in and try this. This
was a true challenge, an adventure.
P: So, tell me about your life now, living above the bookshop in Scotland.
J: Well, right now there’s a heater underneath my legs – it is absolutely
freezing – there is ice crawling up the windows, but it’s very cosy, um,
and the snow has just hit here, it’s
beautiful outside, and Wigtown remains, four years on, remains as
charming as when I first came.
P: … and how is it going with the bookshop owner?
J: Wonderful! You couldn’t find a more beautiful place, and you couldn’t find
more excellent people, and you know … the love of my life is here so ...
P: Jessica, it’s been wonderful to speak to you.
J: Thank you so much for having me.