If Only that Initial Firework of Sass was Guaranteed Never to Fall to Earth like a Damp Squib!

In other words... The hope of the younger woman vs the wisdom of the older one.

Here is a recent review of book what I writ. Please note the shouty, annoyed, frustrated capitals. I haven’t included the reviewer’s name because this is not in any way meant to instigate a pile-on or embarrass her, but I will address it as a valid point. And I do not mean to be patronising, but I would put my meagre life savings on this being a review written by a younger person. Why do I think that? Because I recognise the stage of positivity and optimism, when the future lays beyond one like a bright yellow brick road with no obstacles on the radar.

Hopefully not for every woman, but life often has a tendency to short-deliver on its promises over time. And that is why I write so much about women ripe for a renaissance. Why I write about girls imagining their destiny and twenty/thirty/forty years later they are looking back and remembering their dreams and ambitions while they are skint, unhappy, knackered, wondering what went wrong. I write about women who were once sassy and lovely saying they will ‘never take any shit off a fella’, taking shit off a fella. Sometimes our goalposts move ever so slowly but surely and too many find over the years that their concept of normality and the acceptable has been skewed out of recognisable shape.

It is so much easier to wish yourself out of a toxic relationship than leave it. I know this because I’ve been there and my pals have been there. I stuck it out for five years, but my friend didn’t leave hers until she’d cleared her twentieth anniversary. We always imagine that what will lay on the other side of cutting loose might be worse than we are presently enduring, frying pan into the fire. So we stay and suffer and use our energies wishing… But everyone eventually gets to that breaking point, the big catalyst, the moment of no return and with it comes the surge of energy to act. And guess what, it might be hard, but it’s rarely as bad as one imagines. And we recoup and recover and lie in bed (alone) and think ‘I did it. Why didn’t I do it years ago?’ But the important thing is that you get there. Better late than never has become my mantra for so many things recently.

My books often feature women who haven’t travelled on the path they intended to. Somewhere along the line, they’ve been diverted down another one and it is my job to reunite them with the road they should have been on. This has happened in real life with me, with friends, with people I don’t know but they’ve written to tell me that I’ve inspired them to change things. Too many women have wagged their fingers at me and said, ‘I left my husband because of you’. Some of them didn’t even realise they were in a dysfunctional relationship until they read one of my novels and thought to themselves, ‘Why doesn’t that stupid doormat just leave him?’. Then they realised that the doormat might have been written with them in mind because they suddenly come to a realisation that the doormat is acting just the same as they are, rationalising bad behaviour, putting up and shutting up, accepting the blame that their partner’s rage is because they’ve pushed them to act as they have. I just hope none of these deserted husbands know where I live, though I’m kind of strangely proud. At least no one has ended the sentence with, ‘…because of you. And it was the biggest mistake of my life!’

I’ve had women turn up early at signings just to catch me before I start work to tell me their stories. They’re real and human stories with a dark comic edge sometimes: ‘I was sitting in the fracture clinic and I thought, I’m not going back to him. So I rang my son and asked him to put me up. And no, I never went back. I Ieft him that day.’ I’ve had ladies who have read my books and taken from it the hope that there is life after death (ie after divorce). One lovely lady in remission from cancer whose husband had deserted her, met a massive farmer with a heart problem and they decided to just go for it and suck all the life out of the time they had left. If that wasn’t a lovely enough letter to receive, at an event years afterwards, that lady turned up to talk to me in person and I broke down because she was still with him, still happy. Well you would wouldn’t you?

So yes, I suspect a lot of my younger readers who thinks the doormat women in my books are taking fiction too far will one day revisit that opinion – sadly. Even if they themselves have bypassed the misery of things not going quite to plan, they’ll have mates who have fallen foul of love’s young dream. But here’s hoping they cut loose and find love’s older dream. There was a time when I was crying in a corner and thinking to myself that if this was all life had to offer, then what was the point of it? Shit job, shit house, shit car, caged in a terrible relationship by bars of marriage, no money, no hope of getting a better job that paid more. It is amazing though how much difference a few tweaks can make, a little energy spent in changing things, in pushing oneself. Hey mama, look at me now! I often think back to that sad woman who inspired the doormat in my books and I see myself now as the woman at the end of the story. If I can do it, so can you. I’ve lead by example and that’s why I know I ain’t taking fiction too far because it’s fact.

The amount of women I’ve met who have said, ‘I used to take all the crap, but I don’t any more’. The adversity strengthens us. It can take years to grow that hard shell complete and still, when we get there, we surprise ourselves at our ability to say no, bugger off, enough! Our intuition tunes up over time as well, trust it. Don’t override those spidey senses that are screaming at you that all is not well. The week before my wedding my brain was on its knees begging me to RUN. But I’d organised the cake, bought a frock, ordered the mini bus for the guests. Now I’d have cancelled the lot, sent out a ‘Sorry folks, wedding’s off’ blanket email without batting an eyelid about saving face. Putting ourselves, our needs and wants first is an acquired art and it can be sad how some of us do acquire it - but my god, it’s a good reward when you do. At least, in my case, that shit marriage generated two great kids and a load of writing material. But it was too hard won.

So, I do say to the shouty-capitals reviewer of that book… Ah, but the last four pages are where it’s all at, my love. I got her there in the end, even if it was at the eleventh hour. I repeat: better late than never. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, as soon as they get to that ultimate point of no more crap, there are chemical changes that take place that make one into the different person who will never go back. Ironically they don’t see that they’ve had to be strong to survive all the adversity, not weak.

Then it is time to use that strength as a fuel to propel themselves up like that magnificent firework they always should have been.

Those are the women I write about. And for.