Larger Than Life by Adele Parks

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About Adele Parks

Biography

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Larger Than Life

» Adele Parks

Penguin
Paperback : 04 Apr 2002

£7.99

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Synopsis

Georgina fell in love with Hugh Carter the moment she saw him. She's never loved another man. She was eighteen. She's now thirty-two and Hugh has finally moved in with her. Faces tend to fall when she mentions that when they first met he was seeing a friend of hers, whom he subsequently married and had two children with. But hey. Life's not a fairy tale.

All is well until George finds that one small miscalculation with dates leaves her - pregnant. Still reeling from this news she notices that Hugh is turning out to be a bit of a disappointment. After fourteen years of seeing life through a Hugh-tinted filter can George start to make up her own mind?

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Interview

When I started writing my third book, Larger than Life, I was pregnant. A friend of mine, who was already a mother (twice over), commented, ‘I wonder how it will differ from your other books as you are writing it as a pregnant woman?’ I thought her comment was odd, misguided. I might have been pregnant but I was still me. Still an individual, wasn’t I? How could being pregnant affect what or how I wrote?

It did.

It does.

In fact being pregnant, and being a mum, affects everything I do, say, think, feel and for a time (i.e. during the pregnancy and whilst I was breast feeding). It also affected how I ate, drank, slept, bathed, made love.

People are always asking me, how has being a mum changed your life? My most truthful answer has to be, ‘in every way’. Without a doubt the birth and care of my son has been the most momentous, amazing, difficult, wonderful, joyous, frustrating, life affirming, scary experience I have ever had. To say I was unprepared is like saying Cinderella got lucky. Of course I’d read the maternity books, which were mostly terrifying and universally depressing (NB none of them addressed the fact that pregnancy, and ultimately a small person, will restrict your freedom, sex life and career and still somehow be worth it). Still, I consumed the books avidly in an effort to maintain some level of understanding, if not control, of my body. I admit it: I am a control freak, I’d always been the type of person who knew which direction I was travelling in, why and how I’d get there, I even had a fairly good idea of how long it would take me to travel each particular journey. Suddenly, once pregnant, I was sharing my body and there was not a single aspect of my life that I could call my own. My body was public property (not that anyone was too keen to place a claim, as it was a pretty grim body), my mind was mush, my soul belonged to the baby. From the moment it was a tiny group of cells, no bigger than a grain of cous cous, I knew that the baby was in control. I’d do anything for my child - live, die, love, hate, kill, donate organs, change nappies, get up in the middle of the night.

He is now sixteen months old, not a baby anymore. Nor does he seem like a child to me, although I am certain he will become one; to me he is already a personality, a person, an individual. I am unreasonably proud of him. My biggest hope is that as a mother I am good enough.