Ratings: 2 stars, no paws, bedtime reading
Hmmmm. I have always enjoyed the dark and slightly desperate side of Adrian Mole, even in the later incarnations of his diaries and when there was a growing New Labour critical edge in them. And TWWWTBFAY seemed to do quite well in the bestseller charts and thus made for a satisfying supermarket bargain. I even kind of enjoyed reading it, but mostly because I was looking for the POINT, the crucial moment where it all becomes clear. And there was a flashback to a lost pregnancy and unresolved grief which might have been said point, but for me that was too little, too late.
It just seemed a rather self-indulgent thing of Eva, TWWWTBFAY, to take to her bed after her horrible teenage twins leave home to start at university. Her husband is a rather useless and hopeless human being, who also has carried on an affairs for years, her mother and mother-in-law are your average amount of self-obsessed, the twins are somewhere on the autistic spectrum, and she just doesn’t want to/can’t deal with it in any more. So she abdicates all responsibility and retires to her en-suite bedroom. Her builder/white van man basically supports her through a lot of this, even though he has more reason to take to his bed than she does, perhaps being able to sympathise. So do many of the people who come to see her, as she develops into a bit of a cult figure. It’s probably meant to be a satire of the cult of minor celebrity, as well as a damning indictment of the dysfunctionality of families, but to run with this interpretation you have to warm to the main characters, and I didn’t, with the exception of a lukewarm appreciation for Alexander, who seemed nice enough. Everybody else could have done with a serious talking to, administered at frequent and regular intervals.
But when the author biography and interview at the end of the book are more interesting than the book itself, I think we can safely conclude that I just didn’t particularly take to this book. Ah well. Moving swiftly onwards…
rushedreader 