Scott Jacobs: 'I made a few things up along the way'

Fictionable

This season we've already heard from Daisy Johnson and Judith Vanistendael. Over the next few weeks we'll be sitting down with Esther Karin Mngodo and Hannah Webb, but this time we welcome Scott Jacobs and his short story Be Careful Who Your Friends Are.

According to Jacobs, this curious tale was a "real-life experience".

"I changed the names, to protect the innocent," he says, "including the name of the restaurant."

But the last-minute invitation, the bottle of Primitivo, the bowler hat and that curious note were all drawn from life.

The story gave Jacobs a chance to examine the sharp divisions of social class in New York City during the 1990s, and to offer a glimpse into the rarefied world of Manhattan's Upper East Side.

"You really had a sense of the dichotomy in society," he explains, "the haves, the have-nots."

After time as a marketing executive and as a lawyer, writing is Jacobs' third career. And it's one that combines the skills he learned in marketing with the linguistic precision he honed in the legal profession – that and his own "creative juices".

We'll be talking with Hannah Webb next time.

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