Not Your Heart Away
I’ve been looking for a synopsis for Not Your Heart Away. Writing the book was the easy bit. Saying what it’s about is proving a lot more difficult.
I began it in September, the day after August Bank Holiday, but really, it began itself. When I got back to East Anglia, where I live for the time being. I was going to write ‘where I live for the moment,’ but anyone who knows East Anglia will realise how ridiculous that sentence would be. Where before it had been difficult to write anything much, it just poured. Two thousand, three thousand words a day. Twenty-seven pages of A4 in a single sitting. It streamed.
It came to what I thought was the end just around Christmas time and I thought it was a job well done. It coincided with the start of my first TV script-writing job and I think I was glad to finish the one so I could start the other. I showed it to friends, the way you do, and got a surprise.
“It’s not finished,” they said. “He’s got to find her.”
So he did.
Life has imitated what I choose to call Art in curious ways all the way through writing it. I stopped at someone’s house on the way back from seeing a friend in Dorset. I’d lost track of the girl who used to live there thirty years ago. I’d wondered what happened to her ever since.
This Christmas, by accident, I found her online, thanks to online Births Marriages and Deaths and Facebook, but I had to do some detective work. Tantalisingly, there is no photo of her on the web anywhere I can see. But there is one of the girl I think is her daughter, the eerie identical ghost of her mother in modern clothes. So the ending of the story changed. It may change again. Stories do.
So what’s it about? Oh, the usual. Boy meets girl. Boy takes girl to theatre. Boy nearly crashes car and kills her. You know how it goes. Boy goes to London, meets girl’s friend. Goes to bed with probably the wrong person. Goes to bed with someone else. Then girl disappears. It’s got fast cars, big houses and a surprising amount of Lebanonism.
So far so it goes. But then girl disappears. Just like the girl who inspired the story disappeared. Finding her through fiction has been very strange.
You can buy it here on Kindle today. Wait a week or so and you can buy it in paperback too.
