Imprint: Vintage
Published: 05/07/2001
ISBN: 9780099284222
Length: 192 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 13mm x 129mm
Weight: 138g
RRP: £9.99
Helen Simpson's third collection is a bold, honest exploration of the trials and the rewards of motherhood.
‘Her stories are - for those who, like me, recognise the truth in every word - like a reprieve... Sharp, poetic and marvellously witty’ Kate Kellaway, Observer
Here are tales of a highflyer stuck at an interminable Burns Night celebration, increasingly aware of the babysitter waiting for her at home; an exhausted mother longing for adult conversation but whose son unwittingly precludes it; and a teenage girl whose fraught encounter with a harried mum of one brings newfound appreciation for her own capable mother of four. Most strikingly of all we meet Dorrie, whose efforts to calm her tinderbox of a family leave her struggling to contain her own emotions.
Hey Yeah Right Get a Life is a singular achievement: relatable, perceptive and utterly poignant.
‘It's a brilliant, painful, funny and courageous book’ Esther Freud, Guardian
Imprint: Vintage
Published: 05/07/2001
ISBN: 9780099284222
Length: 192 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 13mm x 129mm
Weight: 138g
RRP: £9.99
It's a brilliant, painful, funny and courageous book
Simply tremendous... She is a witch, with the surest hand in contemporary fiction
Her limpid, chaste, luscious fiction describes real lives
Her stories are - for those who, like me, recognise the truth in every word - like a reprieve... Sharp, poetic and marvellously witty
Motherhood has long been a subscription-only sort of subject. Helen Simpson has found a way to tell it, and I hope that people beyond the constituency margins are listening