Book description
Big and beautiful? Or thin and miserable?
Jay has always envied her cousin Delphine. While Jay was brought up
in a large, noisy and chaotic family, Delphine was indulged, perfectly
dressed with a co-ordinated bedroom, an immaculate wardrobe, dancing
lessons and monogrammed silver-backed hairbrushes. Now Jay lives
happily with her architect husband and their three teenage children,
running a successful cleaning company and trying to keep some kind of
order on her disorderly household, while Delphine has long since
disappeared to Australia with her second husband. But Jay does
sometimes wonder whether she should be more like her cousin - utterly
well-organised and with a size ten figure.
So Jay decides to diet. But what should it be? High carb, no
protein? High protein, no carb? High fibre? Wheat free? Fat free? Food
free? She tries them all, with a variety of successes and failures.
But then Delphine reappears, with a third husband in prospect and the
same old air of apparently effortless superiority. Jay never considers
that perhaps Delphine is the envious one...
Judy Astley was frequently told off for day-dreaming at her drearily
traditional school but has found it to be the ideal training for
becoming a writer. There were several false-starts to her career:
secretary at an all-male Oxford college (sacked for undisclosable
reasons), at an airline (decided, after a crash and a hijacking, that
she was safer elsewhere) and as a dress designer (quit before anyone
noticed she was adapting Vogue patterns). She spent some years as a
parent and as a painter before sensing that the day was approaching when
she'd have to go out and get a Proper Job. With a nagging certainty that
she was temperamentally unemployable, and desperate to avoid office
coffee, having to wear tights every day and missing out on sunny days on
Cornish beaches with her daughters, she wrote her first novel, Just for
the Summer. She has now had eleven novels published by Black Swan.
