Melanie Ifield's Blog: Writing with Illness - Posts Tagged "fictional-biography"

Today my new novel, a fictional biography of one woman’s journey into spiritual awareness, is available on Kindle. The paperback will be coming out within the next month.
Listening to Echoes of her Self , is written from the perspective of the heroine. She is never named in the book – I did this to allow anyone and everyone who cares to, to identify with the main character on their own level.
She is in her nineties and is looking back over her life and recounting how things transpired so she ended up where she is.
I've watched others struggle with spirituality and religion and explored aspects myself, so I wanted to write a book that encompassed much of what I've seen.
The main character, a woman of strong convictions (she doesn't start off strong, I can tell you!) came to me out of the blue with quite a lot to say about quite a lot of things!
She was impossible to ignore, so I wrote her story in a long stream of flashback, dividing the book into parts - The beginning which is in fact her old age, then I go to the start - when she was young, the middle and the end - which is back at the beginning again (old age).
It's written in a semi-biographical way, even though it is fictional and explores how she confronts her fears, her insecurities and the so-called wisdoms her father told her.
The greatest thing she overcomes is the feeling of being ordinary - and finding out just how wrong that was!
The idea being - no one is ordinary and we all have a story to tell about our lives, how we got to where we are and what has made us - us - along the way.

Exclusive to Amazon Kindle, the compelling fictional biography about the strength of one woman who overcomes her domineering family background to discover the joys of walking her own path in life.
In this part biographical fiction, part spiritual fiction, the heroine of Listening to Echoes of her Self learns to listen to her inner voice and even finds the intuition to commune with the Voice of Nature.

Have you even woken up one day and wondered how you ended up with the life you are now living? Do you have hidden cravings for something different? Something more, or a life that is bigger?

“There are rules that everyone lives by. They can be imposed upon you, placed around you like a comforting blanket, or hardwired into the society within which you are born. These rules confine and restrict. There are very few that open and urge…
Sometimes, however, someone comes along who feels the weight of these rules. They see the bars of their cage and wonder how things got to this point? They speculate on the need to change and how to go about it. They work on making their lives ‘fit’ the hungers of what is on the inside; not the platitudes of what lies on the outside.
These people feel the freedom of wind on their faces, allow the wind to blow through their hearts and reach out with desire to what lies beyond.” Excerpt from Listening to Echoes of her Self.

After living a small life for years, the heroine of Listening to Echoes of her Self wakes up to realise – the only person holding her back is herself. At the grand age of 90, she looks back over her life, back to the day she now believes was her moment of truth: her coming of age.

Sixty years ago she faced the monumental realisation that nothing she had done up to that point had made her happy. Confronted with the idea that nothing in her life made sense, she set about changing everything.

This book is not in print. Available only through Kindle digital platform.