Lucy Edge: Down Dog Billionaire

We caught up with author Lucy Edge, to discuss her latest book Down Dog Billionaire and how her quest to find life’s deeper meaning began…

When did you first realise you wanted to become a writer?

I was seven and saw a commercial opportunity. I started entering poetry competitions in my comics, Debbie and Mandy. I won a radio, a black and white camera, and (drum roll), a Jimmy Osmond sew-on patch, though I missed out on the colour TV, which has always bugged me.

How did your yoga journey begin?

I was in my thirties, an ambitious board director of a top ten advertising agency, working eighty-hour weeks for a man whose notion of people management involved sitting me on his knee. Of course it was not without its compensations – the people were really bright, two days were never the same and the money was good. But no matter how hard I worked I never seemed to get on top of it all.

An M&S ready meal became an icon of domestic bliss. There was no time to go out and play, only time to stay in and recover before the next ludicrous deadline came flying across my desk like a cruise missile. Guaranteed to seek, find and destroy all chance of finding a man before I hit the retirement home.

It was on holiday in Tobago in 1997 that I saw a girl practising yoga poolside – she seemed so chilled; I was a stressed ad exec and I wanted to get me some of that Zen. She was practising using a cassette tape (remember them) and I liked her teacher’s voice; he turned out to be one Simon Low. I attended my first class with him as soon as I got back – in an old church in St John’s Wood.

As my hamstrings screamed from the rooftops in ‘downward facing dog’, I listened to Simon explain that yoga can help us ‘peel back the layers, like the layers of an onion’, enabling us to see ourselves more clearly and ‘awakening us to new possibilities, new ways of being.’ Knowing I needed to make some changes, I was hooked.

In Yoga School Dropout you are the central character; did writing this book and reflecting on your life change anything for you?

Eventually I decided that I’d had enough of those eighty hour weeks debating what song sunflowers should sing and headed off to India on a yoga school pilgrimage, in search of life’s deeper meaning.

I would find a guru and return a Yoga Goddess – the embodiment of feminine perfection – peaceful, happy, loving, wise and endlessly compassionate towards a suffering world – and a magnetic babe attracting strong and sweaty, yet emotionally vulnerable men.

Eventually, after nearly six months of trying really hard to fit this mould, travelling north, south, east and west, trying out every different kind of yoga, I realised that it wasn’t going to happen. It was time to ditch the goal – interesting that if we reverse the ‘o’ and the ‘a’ in ‘goal’, we get ‘gaol’ – and start with some small stuff.

I would give up on trying to make headlines – the big merger with cosmic bliss, the quest for bodily perfection, the recruiting of a retinue of male followers, and instead I would concentrate on the small print – using my yoga practice to increase the moments of seeing clearly and choosing wisely in everyday life, just like the real gurus of India – the so called ‘ordinary’ people – the waiters, tailors, railways workers and government officials – I’d met along the way.

I came home and chucked my full time brand strategy job in in favour of freelance work, which would give me the time to write Yoga School Dropout. I moved into a smaller flat, traded Ariel Liqui-Tabs for Sainsbury’s low price washing powder, wore my expensive Laura Mercier lipstick only when I went out, and swapped my cashmere enriched Joseph habit for Top Shop and the sales. Yoga School Dropout was published a year later.

Your newest book ‘Down Dog Billionaire’ came out last week, tell us a bit about it…

Down Dog Billionaire is my first novel, the story of one woman’s attempt to navigate the path between granola guy yoga and big brand yoga, set in the glossy glass towers and and colourful neighbourhoods of London and L.A.

Meg is the new Brand Experience Director at Shine, a luxe yoga multinational, but when her brand smarts threaten the beloved community yoga studio owned by the granola guy up the road, she’s forced to make a choice.

Is she to be a buff-bodied, corporate girl, circling the globe and dating her sexy, charismatic boss, or does her heart lie closer to home, with the granola guy and her own soul-fired business?

It’s a timely examination of our obsession with yoga pants and youth, with rich lists and quick fixes, celebrity and selfies, and a journey towards self-acceptance and happiness.

We love the illustrations on the cover of your books, why did you choose this particular style?

I had a very specific idea of what I wanted with Down Dog Billionaire. I spent hours googling fashion illustrators because I wanted to invoke glamour and eventually I found French illustratrice Solène Debiès. Hailing from Nantes, with a track record in magazine illustration, her characters were elegant, feminine and had a certain attitude that was both fun and rebellious. I also loved that her characters were full of life – striding across the page with great purpose, just like my heroine Meg.

I found the magnificently titled Domini Dragoone on another google search and was immediately impressed by the individuality and dynamism of her cover designs. Although each one was totally different, they all had coherence and an energy which leapt out of the page. She is responsible for the book design – both inside and out.

What has been your favourite book to write so far and why?

As a writer, you get to choose where your imagination lives. Yoga School Dropout was great fun to write because, effectively, it extended my trip to India by six months, if only in my head. But writing Down Dog Billionaire went beyond that.

My beloved father died two years ago and I decided to take my imagination to someplace young and optimistic as a way to escape from the grief. I loved creating Shine world – a glossy, luxurious, tech savvy yoga brand complete with ionised air and high tech yoga mats, and juxtaposing it with Ekatman – the neighbourhood yoga studio up the road with its garlanded Ganesh and community noticeboards. Setting part of the novel in L.A. also required me to watch a lot of Venice Beach and Abbott Kinney YouTube videos, which on some dark days, made me smile.

What’s a day in the life of Lucy Edge like?

Work. Coffee. Work. Chocolate. Work. Yoga.

What’s next?

Yoga School Dropout described a quest that never went entirely to plan, but brave readers didn’t let that stop them – they got in touch, wanting recommendations on yoga holidays and classes and teacher training. So far, so brilliant. Just one problem. I was sun saluting on a pinhead; I didn’t know jack about yoga anywhere except India or London.

Then I had an idea.

I was, in the words of Brody as he stared down the shark called Jaws, ‘gonna need a bigger boat’. A much bigger boat. A crowd-sourced boat. A place for the global community to find, love and live great yoga – the teachers that inspire us, the centres that welcome us, the holidays that change our lives. So we found our rock star developer and we built our boat, and David named our boat YogaClicks. We’ve got lots of exciting new features, which will launch over the next few months. Come and check us out. #YogaHood.

My bank manager is hoping I will make a successful transition from Yoga School Dropout to Down Dog Billionaire.