Alice: A Memoir VBT

Blurb:

Few, if anyone, could have had a life like Alice Gilmore. It was almost unbelievable yet carried on under the cover of a respectable middle-class existence.

You might strongly disapprove of what she did, but Alice was determined. She overcame insurmountable obstacles to keep the love she longed for.

Her single-minded fight to live out her love makes a gripping, riveting story that one eminent literary person called ‘staggeringly readable’. It is shocking. Her methods will upset some, but are you with her or against her? Your decision.

This is no misery memoir. It’s a story told with joy, wit and fervour – the astonishing story of the overwhelming love Alice Gilmour was determined to live out.

Excerpt:

I am going to tell you our story, my darlings. It is really only for you three and one other (you know who) but I can’t help hoping that the world will read it, which is why I shall probably publish it. But not for some years. When you’re fully grown up and have flown the nest. God knows what they will make of it, the world I mean, whoever they are, but I am not suggesting that any rules or taboos should be changed by our story, or new rules made. Leave all that alone. Our story, perhaps I should say my story, just is. You could tritely call it the exception that proves the rule. Perhaps that is just what it is: unique. I doubt that but it is certainly extraordinary. I have carefully chosen those words. Any old event of yawning banality is called ‘amazing’, ‘fantastic’, ‘unbelievable’, ‘fabulous’ in our current jargon. Whatever else people may call my story it is certainly extraordinary.

It is, above all, a love story, an all-consuming love story, though I have never felt consumed by love, rather continually renewed. But isn’t that what love should do to you? Consume you and renew you constantly like the phoenix. And it brought with it another constant emotion: fear. And pain. The fear of pain. The fear of the pain of losing it, this wonderful state. The word love doesn’t fully express what I/we felt. Another word that is more or less totally debased.

What would we find under your bed?

Dust and anything that needed storing that I didn’t have room for elsewhere.

What was the scariest moment of your life?

I was driving a car in the USA when I first went to live there and in a rural situation a school bus pulled up in front of me, red light flashing. I pulled out to overtake, not realising that the school bus red light meant that I must stop to  let children cross the road. As I passed the bus a boy ran out from behind it. He was quick witted and stopped dead as I just swished past his nose missing him by nothing. There were shouts from behind and I looked in the mirror. The boy was clearly all right, staring after me, and the bus driver was furious so I just kept going. There was no point in my stopping to explain I was a foreigner. I said it was a rural setting so I was going at more than the urban speed limit. I still wake up at nights, or am brought to a dead halt every time I see a US school bus stopping, lights flashing. I was 100% in the wrong and my life would have been wracked with guilt and completely different if I had hit him, probably killing him, to say nothing of the effect on him and his family had he been so unjustly killed.

Do you listen to music while writing? If so what?

Now that I’m back in the UK I often have Radio 3 on in an adjoining room so that it is background. In the USA I would have in the kitchen a player or an appropriate radio station that played serious music of many sorts. Occasional jazz and popular music OK but never rock ‘n’ roll or contemporary pop of any sort.

What is something you'd like to accomplish in your writing career next year?

A novel that is widely praised and widely read, in that order. Prizes? Yes, I don’t really care and don’t think a first novel from a middle-aged should win any prizes, except New Writer ones of course. Come to think of it leave those for younger, needier, more ambitious writers than me (I? Me? Me, I think).

How long did it take you to write this book?

Years for the first part, as I lived it. Then in a rush, only weeks, after my husband was murdered and I needed to have it done before events blew my cover.

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Author Bio and Links:

If you want to know about my life and background read this book. I can scarcely add to what I have written about myself in there. I earnestly hope that the rest of my life is too uneventful to even consider writing anything else, I am no novelist. The life I have described was full enough and rich enough for me. God knows what I would come out with if I had to invent. If you find you need a good chef I shall consider anything not too energetic – which rules out most jobs in the kitchen.

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