David King's Blog: A New Author's Journey

Poolbeg, my publisher, has been asking about my next book.

Right now I am (mentally if not physically) in the middle North African desert.... researching the Italian Army in WW2. And I think I need a crash course in Italian! Any translators out there?

The book is called 'Two Lives of the Butterfly' and is the story of a combat-stressed soldier and a married Englishwoman.

More info shortly but one thing is clear... the stereotypes about the Italian Army are wide of the mark. Many were brave men who simply didnt want to kill their fellow human beings for an idiot like Mussolini.

More follows....

The following is a review I wrote for 'You Must Read This' in the Irish Independent.

Most people have heard of D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book forever associated with the ‘dirty book’ trial of 1960, in which Penguin was victorious against the British Government. But despite knowing of the book, how many people have actually read it? The infamously graphic sex scenes, peppered with Anglo-Saxon and including an indirect reference to anal sex, make it as hot today as when it was first written, but there’s a lot more to it than lustiness.

For one thing, Lady Chatterley is Lawrence’s most easy-to-read book. The style is shorn of the introspection of Women in Love, or The Rainbow. The plot unravels quickly. Constance, the lady of the manor, has a husband, Clifford, who is confined to a wheelchair and impotent, leaving his wife vulnerable to temptation.

Mellors the gruff gamekeeper lurks on the estate in his cave-like cottage, a wild man in waiting. The inevitable and orgasmic collision between Mellors and Constance is not long in coming.

But the story is more complex than urban legend suggests, because Constance’s frustration with Clifford is not simply sexual, but also intellectual. He, and his dry academic friends, don’t touch her mind any more than he does her body, and it’s the lack of any connection or meaning that leaves her unfulfilled.

Mellors is initially unreceptive to Constance’s advances, nursing a corrosive cynicism about the world. He’s far more than the typical gamekeeper - a World War One officer and a refugee from the industrial civilisation he holds responsible for the horrors of the trenches.

What happens between Constance and Mellors is a connection deeper than the sweating and grunting of physical release, though sex is the gateway. When they make love on the forest floor, the simultaneous orgasm they share is transformative for Constance, revealing to her the depth of connection.

A growing understanding of each other builds, becoming a love that unites the two halves of humanity – the intellectual and physical. It’s a love powerful enough to redeem souls and change lives. Constance duly leaves Clifford and sacrifices her privileged life for it. Mellors loses his job, but they are together. <

You should read Lady Chatterley for its explosive passion, for its honesty (one of the first books to acknowledge female desire) and beauty of the evocation of love in the open air (weaving forget-me-nots into your lover’s pubic hair).

But the reason you must read it is the back story. Lawrence was ill with TB when writing and unable to meet the sexual needs of his wife Frieda, and was the model for the impotent Clifford, while Freida was the inspiration for Constance. And well she might be, considering her numerous lovers and the infamous incident in which she swam the River Isar to offer herself on a whim to a random woodcutter.

This begs an intriguing question. Since lady Chatterley is triumphant over her husband, was the book a covert green light to Freida’s infidelities, recognising her needs and setting Lawrence’s feelings aside? That would be real love indeed, and it also happens to be a distinctly Lawrencian train of thought.

I was flattered to find the story of writing American Bombshell covered in a piece on Writing ie.... Thanks guys and girls.....



https://www.writing.ie/interviews/wri...

Today I received my first ever invite to a radio interview on Radio Kerry...... 2pm on 21st March on 'Talkabout' with Deirdre Walsh to discuss my first book American Bombshell.

To say I'm nervous is an understatement.

Are all authors this shy I wonder?

Wish me luck!

Excitement! The first copies of my first ever book have been printed!

Two book-signings so far:

Kenmare Bookshop, Shelbourne Street, Kenmare
24th March 2- 4PM

Eason's Bookshop Main Street, Killarney
25th March 11.00 -12.00

PANIC!!! Never expected this to actually happen!

Everyone welcome. Drinks afterwards.

Today the consequences of becoming an author, and writing a first novel based on the life of my larger than life mother became clearer when I was asked to write an article about Beryl, her influence me as a writer and indeed on my first novel , 'American Bombshell,' for the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

Somehow it never occurred to me that anyone would be interested in the backstory to the book itself, but it seems that the tale of a young English girl who escapes an orphanage in the last year of World War Two to marry an American bomber pilot, and then travels from a small bombed out English town to the glamour of New York on board the Queen Mary stirred more attention that I ever dreamed of; from the comissioning of a feature by The Mail, to the book being selected as Book of the Week by WH Smith for the week it first comes out (Last week in March), and a queue of radio interviews ahead.

Writing the newspaper feature proved more emotionally difficult than I imagined too, for, while my mother gifted me an incredible story (or series of stories, for the first book covers only her early life), it came at a high personal cost thanks to her erratic personality and the psychological effects on me as a child in surviving the consequences of her five (known) marriages.

As my father once said a few years after their divorce, had the British dropped my mother on Berlin in 1939 and again on Tokyo in 1941, there would have been no war. Anyone, he said could survive an atom bomb, but no one could survive a Beryl. He may well have been right.

The full story based on a remarkable life lived during a World at War is included in the forthcoming article 'A Mother Like Mine' to be published - so they tell me - in the Mail on Sunday in the first week of April.