Q&A: Fran Littlewood, Author of ‘The Accidental Favorite’

June 28, 2025

55 5 minutes read

Q&A: Fran Littlewood, Author of ‘The Accidental Favorite’ — Fran Littlewood The Accidental Favorite Author Interview.jpg

We chat with author Fran Littlewood about The Accidental Favorite, which is a wryly resonant and deeply moving family dramedy investigating the question so many of us have asked ourselves: do my parents have a favorite?

Hi, Fran! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

I’m the author of The Accidental Favourite and Amazing Grace Adams, which (amazingly!) was a New York Times bestseller and Read With Jenna pick, and has been published in seventeen countries to date. I have an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, London. Before I started writing novels, I was a journalist, including a stint at The Times. Home is London.

When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?

In a pre-memory time, I think… My parents reading to me and my sisters, my dad doing all the voices, making us laugh. Iconic books like Winnie The Pooh, Topsy and Tim, the Richard Scarry books, Travelling to Tripiti, and something about a bear named Frances… I’d have a teetering stack of about eight books by my bed throughout my childhood, and I’d read them all at once. Reading was truly my happy place. And then writing, getting lost in it, or making sense of things. I specifically remember a poem I wrote about rowing down the river close to my home, the sound of the oars, the water – maybe that’s been kept in a Scrapbook somewhere, and that’s why I remember. I just loved language, the colour of it, painting pictures with words, putting my thoughts down on the page, creating characters like the ones I’d read about.

Quick lightning round! Tell us:

The first book you ever remember reading: My Mum taught us all to read before we went to school, so it would have been the iconic Peter and Jane books – ‘Pat the dog has a red ball’ etc., that kind of compelling narrative! And I remember the early reading books at school, Janet and John, Roger Red Hat, Billy Blue Hat – loved them all. The magic of decoding the words. Reading each line with a bookmark underneath, moving the bookmark down, reading the next line.
The one that made you want to become an author: All the childhood books! (Does anyone actually answer these in a quick fire fashion?!) The Rumer Godden books, The Secret Garden, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Borrowers, Flat Stanley, Enid Blyton’s entire oeuvre, I could go on for pages. And also, I think Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, books my parents had on their shelves that I read and adored. Although mostly, I wanted to be Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music back then…
The one you can’t stop thinking about: The Overstory, by Richard Powers. Beyond powerful on the climate crisis. It made me understand at a deep-rooted and urgent level something I knew intellectually. A true expression of the potency of fiction.

Your latest novel The Accidental Favorite, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Wild, truthful, dark, funny, hopeful

What can readers expect?

A book about three adult sisters, whose father – following an almost-accident – inadvertently reveals that he has a favourite. It’s set in a remote glass house in the English countryside, where three generations of the Fisher family meet for what they’re hoping will be an idyllic holiday. It’s an exquisite, contemporary, expensive glass house, but there’s a seeping bad smell… The story tracks a single week, and also four decades, moving between the past and present. It’s a book about family and siblinghood, and the ‘scripts’ we can’t escape – the clever one, the pretty one, the screw up… It’s also about (unstable) memory, and the sometimes wildly different versions of the ‘same’ past.

Where did the inspiration for The Accidental Favorite come from?

I’m one of three sisters and I have three daughters. My younger sister also has three daughters. My older sister – slightly ruining the fairy tale-esque symmetry – has two daughters and a son. My mum is one of three sisters (and a brother), so… there’s a LOT of sister energy in our family, and I wanted to write it, as part of a wider commentary on womanhood. I saw so many parallels between the way I felt my sisters and I were compared growing up (by family friends, teachers, boyfriends…), casually and otherwise – because we came as a group, a three, and the kind of scrutiny I was seeing young women – my daughters – being subjected to, amplified more than ever before by social media. The same insidious, toxic social comparison.

It felt a natural extension of this to address what’s surely the ultimate damaging comparison – the taboo of a parent having a favourite child. It was so interesting talking to people in the early stages of the idea because everyone has a story – there’s so much to unpack! The fact is, we’re all conditioned to fight for our parents’ attention, it’s wired in, and what particularly struck me as I researched, was that this is something that continues into adulthood. Our childhood experiences cast a long shadow, so that at some level, we’re all still competing with our siblings to see how we measure up.

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

I’m the (troubled) middle child, and my husband claims I gave Nancy, the middle Fisher sister, all the best lines (I don’t think I did…), but actually, I think it’s Alex, the firstborn sibling in the book, who goes on the biggest journey. I love all the sisters, and I couldn’t possibly pick a favourite…, but I was so invested in Alex’s story. She’s the keeper of the family flame, whose thinking is most in line with her parents’ world view, but she starts to throw off the shackles as we get into the novel. There’s a particular chapter towards the end, which I can’t describe because… spoilers! But it’s quite a filmic scene, when the scales fall from her eyes, that was so compelling and fun and just brilliant to write.

Did you face any challenges while writing? How did you overcome them?

The toughest thing was trying to write The Accidental Favorite at the same time I was going through the publication process for my first book, Amazing Grace Adams, as I am not a fan of multi-tasking. It was such a steep learning curve for me, knowing very little about the publishing industry – meeting the teams, foreign editors, TV execs, being interviewed by journalists, rather than doing the interviewing… and I was way out of my comfort zone at times. So I was writing the Accidental Favorite in the in-between bits, always feeling I was playing catch-up. I overcame it, as you have to, with boring discipline. Sitting at the desk/ kitchen table/ in bed, and forcing myself to do the work!