Bestselling UK Author Jane Costello on Tennis, Writing, and Motherhood

In tennis and in writing, the game is never over

I watched Wimbledon year after year growing up in the 1980s, mesmerized by Steffi Graf, Gabriela Sabatini, and Chris Evert. But I never had the chance to take lessons myself, and it wasn’t until I turned forty-five that I picked up a tennis racket for the first time. (I don’t count my Swingball bat.)

I was spurred on after watching my youngest son have the time of his life at a junior lesson. I turned to the woman next to me and said, “I wish I’d learned to play this as a kid.”

“What’s stopping you now?” she asked. It struck me as a good question.

That weekend, a friend and I went along to our first “Rusty Rackets” session, and there was no turning back.

It didn’t matter that I’d never had any coaching before, that I was shaky on the scoring system, or that I was convinced my legs were past their best, so there was no way I’d be wearing one of those tiny, unforgiving skirts.

The fact that it was just me, my friend, and a couple of hours in which we had nothing more important to do than get a small yellow ball between some lines was enough. I was sold.

Seven years later, I’m heavily involved in that same tennis club and compete for our ladies’ team in a local league. Tennis gave me community, joy, fitness, competition, and a version of myself I’d half forgotten.

Tennis gave me community, joy, fitness, competition, and a version of myself I’d half forgotten.

It also led to me watching Roger Federer play on Centre Court at Wimbledon, and traveling to Spain for coaching — which, full disclosure, involved as much rosé as work on my forehand.

I’ll admit I could never quite shake the feeling that someone was about to tap me on the shoulder at training and say, “Excuse me, aren’t you supposed to be sacrificing yourself somewhere?”

But my kids were growing up. My eldest is now twenty-one. I was flattering myself if I thought they needed me hovering over them all the time. Far better, I decided, to have a mom who wasn’t slowly disappearing into her laptop and a sense of duty.

It was probably no surprise, then, that when I was kicking around ideas for my sixteenth novel, my thoughts turned to the sport.

Forty Love is about a single mum called Jules, whose friends persuade her to join a beleaguered women’s tennis team to take her mind off her daughter’s backpacking trip around Europe. It’s partially inspired by my own experiences (but for anyone who has read the steamy chapter set in the equipment shed, I should clarify that the romance is entirely fictional).

The deeper I got into both the tennis and the manuscript, the more I recognized the parallels between the two. My love-hate relationship with both is uncannily similar. There are days on court when the ball does exactly what I ask of it, and I feel like I could play forever. There are others when I want to hurl my racket into the nearest hedge. I have “given up” the game and sworn never to return, more times than I care to admit. Writing is no different. Some mornings, the words arrive like a gift from the heavens; on others, the page feels like a barren wasteland that I have to somehow turn into the Garden of Eden. Yet both demand that I show up anyway, whichever kind of day I’m having.

Above all, there are the highs, and they feel extraordinary every time: a match won, a book finished, a promotion for my team, a new bestseller. Moments of pure joy.

Perhaps that’s the truest parallel of all: in both tennis and writing, the game is never really over. All you can do is keep playing and be grateful for every day you’re still in it. That, and be brave. These days, I wear the skirt.

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Find out more about Forty Love here.