Guest Post: Run Alice Run by Lynn Michell

Run Alice Run by Lynn Michell 

Release Date: May 2015
Publisher: Inspired Quill

Genres: Contemporary Fiction, Women's Fiction

Brook Cottage Books is thrilled to welcome Lynn Michell to the blog with a fantastic guest post. But first, lets find out what her book is all about.

BOOK BLURB

In the flat emotional plains of middle age, Alice Green has lost her way. In a bid to escape, and to find the highs and lows long missing from her life and her marriage, she embarks on an outrageous shop lifting spree, and is caught. Unexpectedly coming face with her younger self, she has the chance to rake over the past and reexamine her life, with all its joys and disappointments. With a voice as unique as its heroine, Lynn Michell tells the story of one woman’s attempt to understand and acknowledge her past in order to secure and save her future.

This is the first novel from author Lynn Michell to be published by Inspired Quill, although her reputation as a writer is well established. Her characters are strong and believable. Her settings in Birmingham and Edinburgh are recognisable and fresh, yet coloured by the emotional baggage that Alice brings to them. Half way between literary fiction and romance, and drawing on the best of both, you will cheer on the valiant Alice as she searches for meaning in a life that has gone off the rails. It is insightful and engaging - storytelling at its very best.

GUEST POST

There’s a quiet but persistent dialogue in my head which plays on without ending or conclusion. If it were a play, the characters could only be female - one a politically correct, anti-agist, wise feminist who says aging doesn’t bother her so long as she’s healthy and then there’s the other one who weeps as she watches her body nose dive towards gravity and her face acquire the crinkles of un-ironed linen. The first protagonist speaks resolutely and sensibly about experience and wisdom, of faces showing the warrior scars of life’s experience, of inner radiance and beauty. The second misses her younger self, hates covering her arms, and misses the glances that told her, long ago, that she was attractive.

I blame the dog and the full length mirror besides my bed, but these are red herrings. The reality of my angst goes much deeper.

The dog is clearly an excuse. Why wear something smart or decent when he’s going to plant muddy paws all over me? Why put on make-up to walk in the woods? Those are the lines I recite to myself, but they’re a detour. It’s nothing to do with the dog. I choose to wear comfortable old clothes. I like their baggy, soft familiarity. There are women who can throw on tweed and scarves, and whose hair looks romantically tousled in a gale and who look fabulous as they set off with their canine friends. Yes, middle-aged women. I’ve never had that knack. With or without a dog. I leave my face bare because it feels fine that way. I have impossible flat straight hair. I haven’t a clue how to dress. Presentation is not my forte.

As for the the full length mirror that hangs next to my bed, I could remove it, but it’s useful for checking that my t-shirt isn’t inside out, and that I haven’t left a smear of toothpaste on my chin before I go to the post office? But when I climb into bed at night, or worse, emerge crumpled from the duvet in the morning, there’s no avoiding the years etched on my face and body and truthfully they are not attractive.

This was the tape-loop that played on and on before I created Alice Green and shunted some of my words and worries and questions on to her. Let her carry the dilemma on her shoulders and try to resolve it. Should we acknowledge that in our fifties and sixties, attractiveness is irrelevant? Should we accept and even embrace this stage of our lives when no-one gives us a second glance but we have freedom, independence and a strong sense of who we are? Or is it understandable to resent the invisibility and diminishment of middle-age in a society which values youth and beauty?

So Alice was wandering around without a plot, invisible, when I decided to let her make the most of it and do something outrageous. So she stuffs a top from Marks & Spencer into her bag without paying for it and with pounding heart exits past the security bloke and the alarms. The adrenalin boost lifts her sky high. So she does it again, and again, and soon she’s a mistress at sleight of hand because no-one notices an ordinary, respectable, middle-aged woman dropping clothes into a big carrier bag. Alice goes on a shop-lifting spree for the sheer hell of it. Or to run away from a life that is a train wreck.

But she gets caught. Returning from her swim at the local council baths, there’s no avoiding the two police cars parked outside her house in leafy Edinburgh and she knows the game is up. Alice has to take stock, rake over her past, pinpoint when she went off the rails and find - and accept  - herself all over again.

Run, Alice, Run is an irreverent, blackly funny coming-of-middle-age novel which looks with irony at the way society defines and diminishes women of all ages.

   

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lynn Michell always written books - alongside but unconnected to her previous career in academia. After a very long cohabitation with the devastating, debilitating illness ME, she ran writing groups in Edinburgh for 10 years. There, she met 93 year old Marjorie Wilson and discovered Childhood’s Hill which had been rejected by every publisher in the land. With no experience, Lynn published it herself, and Linen Press was born. 

Previous books include a writing scheme for schools and a book about chronic fatigue syndrome, Shattered: Life With ME. Her first fictionalised memoir, Letters To My Semi-Detached Son, published by The Women’s Press, attracted national reviews, radio and TV interviews. Her debut novel White Lies received ecstatic reviews and was runner-up for Scotland’s Robert Louis Stevenson award. A few years ago she crossed the Atlantic in a sailing boat and wrote the story in Shooting Stars Are The Flying Fish Of The Night. Run, Alice, Run is close to her heart - a coming-of-middle-age novel.

Lynn is building a house on a steep hillside in an oak clearing in France.