Jane Fallon on the secret to her 40-year relationship with Ricky Gervais

I don’t think it was a midlife crisis, but instead I had a big kind of epiphany when I was 45,” says the novelist Jane Fallon. “I actually handed in a book for the first time and that was a big, strange kind of flood of confidence that I had… I think for a lot of women around that age – 45 onwards – you change a lot. And for some people you get a lot more confident, and for others you lose it for a while. I think it’s a really interesting time. And I also think, generally, it’s an age that we don’t look at enough. And you know, women my age have got a lot to say!” 

It’s a late spring morning and Fallon and I are in a Hampstead café, not far from the home she shares with her partner, comedian and cultural lightning rod Ricky Gervais, talking about her latest novel, Just Got Real. Now 61, she cuts a tomboyish figure, dressed in a Marc Jacobs Peter Pan collar blouse, tucked into oversized Studio Nicholson boyfriend jeans; with her ashy-blonde hair scraped up into a top knot. 

In fact, she could well be one of the characters who populate her snappy, clever fiction that just seems to slip down like a glass of nicely chilled white wine (she’s been a fan of Fay Weldon since she was a teenager and adores writing that feels as effortless as conversation). 

Just Got Real – her 12th book – makes no exception. It’s about the smoke-and-mirrors minefield that can be midlife online dating (Fallon has a nose for distilling the zeitgeist and we are in The Tinder Swindler territory here). However, the snaking turns of revenge plotting are tempered by her perceptive take on female friendship and loss (she doesn’t think it’s a plot-spoiler to share that her main character Joni mourns the death of her best friend more deeply than the end of her marriage). Oh, and lashings of brilliantly on-point lifestyle observations.

Some hecklers at the back might ask what Fallon (who has been with Gervais for the past 40 years) knows about online dating. Well, for starters, she would be the first to point out that the courtship rituals of two cash-strapped 1980s London students (she and Gervais met at University College London) couldn’t really be described as dating: “You didn’t really do dates, because nobody had any money. So you would just sort of meet in the union, for disco nights… have a few beers.” 

However, as she politely points out: “We all have a kind of existential side to us… where you think about what if my life was different, what if I was going through this… as a novelist you do that a lot.” And frankly, her close-knit group of girlfriends has been more than happy to report from the online dating frontline. “I really came up with the idea because so many of my friends were doing it and because they know I love a good story, they would all tell me their stories… Quite a few of them would think they were having a lovely time for a while and then something would go wrong.” 

She reckons it is horribly easy for dissemblers “to be convincing” on dating platforms. And while none of her friends have been actually catfished, they’ve certainly encountered the “s**g and dump” users and just random acts of disquieting creepiness. She describes herself as a “fairly disciplined” writer, she’s one of those enviable types who can get up at day’s peep. “I get up very early, naturally, at five. But I don’t force myself… I find that a really lovely time to write. I tend to get up and start straight away. Some days, like yesterday, it’ll go great and I’ll have written loads – I think I wrote 1,500 words yesterday morning – before he even gets up.” (In case you are wondering about Gervais’s wake-up time, it is “about eight”.) 

The early-rising gene is something she inherited from her parents – newsagents who rose at 4.30am seven days a week (Fallon and her four siblings lived with them above their Buckinghamshire shop). “The thing they instilled in all of us was not to expect anything from anyone – you have to make your own way in the world, so I always knew that I was going to have to work hard.” 

She and Gervais were living on their uppers in a fleapit of a flat, above a King’s Cross brothel no less, when she landed a gig as a “girl Friday” at a theatrical agent (her dad had cut out the ad from The Telegraph). It was the ultimate foot in the door, and from there the opportunities just seemed to flow… 

By 1994 she’d been made a producer on EastEnders and when her time on Albert Square was near to running its course, she took a punt and approached Tony Garnett, the grand master of social realist telly (“a massive hero of mine from Kes, Cathy Come Home, all those things I’d watched when I was much too young to watch them”). The timing could not have been more fortuitous. Garnett was developing a new drama series about a group of twentysomething newbie London lawyers and housemates and was seeking a young producer to run with it. “He basically said to me, ‘I know nothing about this generation.’ So he gave me carte blanche.” 

For those who don’t remember This Life, which first aired in 1996, think of it as Friends’s darker, sexier, grittier London twin. Fallon is clearly still proud of that show and the artistic risks they took with it. “We had a blast, really. And we had no money clearly, so the visual style of the show was born out of that, because we had to find a way to shoot quickly without moving the camera,” she explains. 

After such a powerhouse career in TV, I wonder if she is ever tempted to get back in the producing saddle? She admits she initially worried on leaving the industry that, “I’d sort of miss the camaraderie.” Yes, there have been offers. But frankly she sees the people she wants to see, she is happy to live without the industry politics, “and I’m just doing what I’ve always wanted to do”.

So how about when it comes to her own telly watching tastes these days? Are she and Gervais big TV comedy consumers? I’d love to know what makes the pair of them laugh. “Well, I’m not a huge comedy consumer. I tend to watch grizzly,” she says. “I like murders and thrillers and plots and stuff like that. Who makes me laugh? I mean every single season of Curb Your Enthusiasm has been better than the last, so I would say Larry David.” 

I detect the slightest deflection in her answer. She doesn’t really want to talk about Gervais and given the hornets’ nest he’s recently kicked over with his outspoken routine on trans women in his latest Netflix special show, Super Nature, it’s not surprising.

Our conversation flips back to themes of her novel, specifically her lifting the lid on digital culture’s cauldron of delusions and manicured realities. She’s a somewhat cautious social media user herself – her Instagram feed is mostly book stuff, and cats, with the occasional glimpse of her and Gervais’s glorious Hampstead pile. “I don’t really understand the desire to share every tiny little thing on Instagram. I mean Twitter is a cesspool, but I do see people on Twitter making quite an intelligent point and then you look at their Instagram page and they are just…” (She mimes someone puckering up to take a selfie with giant pouty fish lips.) “My next book is about an Instagram influencer.”

This I cannot wait for. She is such a sharp-eyed observer of modern vanities, but I like that her starting point comes from a place of curiosity rather than judgment. After all, she knows what it is like to be scrutinised herself – all those red-carpet industry gong-fests on Gervais’s arm. “I’ve got a lot better at it. I think if you look at photos from the beginning, I was looking quite awkward. I realised that the worst thing you can look in photos is self-conscious, so I learned to fake a bit of confidence.” Fake tan also helps, she says, and learning which dress shapes suit her body type (she often wears Alexander McQueen and her Dries Van Noten number for the 2020 Golden Globes was a stunner). “I know what suits me… I don’t have boobs and I don’t have great, long legs, but I do have a waist. And my shoulders and arms are OK!”

With her gym-toned physique and insouciant style, Fallon’s look is pretty age defiant. For now at least, she has chosen not to stave off the ageing process with any tweakments. “I’m all for ageing naturally and gracefully,” she says. “Never say never, though. One day I might wake up and be really depressed about the way I look, but I haven’t done anything so far… There are literally two things that are going to happen to all of us: we’re going to get older every single day and we’re going to die. And so we shouldn’t be treating it like it’s something to be covered up. I’ve come through that. I went through it a bit in my 40s when I felt like, ‘Oh no, am I becoming anonymous?’ And now I just think we have to embrace who we are.

“I went completely vegan in January. For two years of lockdown, we’ve been totally vegan at home… I used the time to really learn how to cook vegan food, because I think you have to take your time, you can’t do it overnight… I took the time to learn what to do with tofu and tempeh… and how to make egg replacements. I think it’s definitely a healthier way to live as you get older.”

Lockdown changed life in the Fallon/Gervais household in other ways too – notably the repurposing of their back garden into a badminton court! Now life is returning to normal, do they have itchy feet? Fallon says a Manhattan transfer has vaguely been on the cards in recent years, but if anything, she suggests they are now more likely to stray further into the English countryside. 

“Occasionally we’ve talked about maybe going to New York for a year. But I’d never want to move to LA – never. Three days in LA is enough for me. Apart from anything else, I find the weather depressing. It’s lovely for a couple of days and then I think can’t it just rain or thunder or do something exciting!” On the subject of changeable weather, Fallon has another foreign project in the works, having just announced that Malmo Opera in Sweden is making a musical based on the songs of Roxette and her book Got You Back, premiering in 2024. Surely this is a peak 1990s, Suecophile dream come true? “I couldn’t be more excited,” she beams. 

One last question: I know it’s Fallon’s style to assiduously swerve the cliches, and the sugar-coated happy endings in her fiction; so what I’d really like to know is the secret of maintaining a long-term partnership between two equally potent force fields in real life?

“I think it’s really important that you are friends, I really do. I’ve thought about this a lot recently actually and I realised that all my really close female friends have similar relationships with their partners in that they are really good friends with them. I don’t really understand those people who, when you go out for a drink with them, they are slagging off their partner. You’re meant to be each other’s cheerleader. So yeah, you need to be good mates.”