Book description
‘It seems crazy that in all that time I never stopped to think what I
was actually cut out to do or be. But I’m sure I’m not unusual. There
must be hundreds of people stuck in jobs they hate, or married to the
wrong partner, or trying to be someone they’re not. It’s such an awful
waste.’
Catherine Jones - conscientious working wife and mother - is catapulted
into a dramatic life-change. As the shock waves subside, she realises
that she’s never had the chance to be her true self, never even
considered who that self might be. Over the years she has become her own
gaoler, someone merely waiting to live.
Peeling off her ‘second skin’ of duty, guilt and fear, she starts
living with a vengeance. She joins a bohemian flat share in Camden Town
with people little older than her own children. She takes a job in
Camden market - a startling contrast to suburbia. She meets a poet,
Will, and embarks on her first ever affair.
But her heady new existence is threatened by her family’s demands,
even, paradoxically, by Will himself. At this turning point in her life,
will she succeed in her bid for freedom and become the person she was
born to be?
In this, her thirteenth novel, Perriam espouses a new optimism, while
losing none of the wit, sexual daring and psychological insight which
have made her name.
‘Perriam must be a contender for Britain’s most underrated novelist.’
Daily Telegraph
Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her
first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and
told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read
History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs,
ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her
time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she
went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed
for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written
extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor
to radio programmes such as Stop the Week
and Fourth Column
.
Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences - strict
convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and
divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic
Bedlam - have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for
shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the
well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in
a straitjacket.’
