Tread Softly

by Wendy Perriam

"It seems crazy that in all that time I never stopped to think what I was actually cut out to do or be. But I'm sure I'm not unusual. There must be hundreds of people stuck in jobs they hate, or married to the wrong partner, or trying to be someone they're not. It's such an awful waste." Catherine Jones – conscientious working wife and mother - is catapulted into a dramatic life-change. As the shock waves subside, she realises that she's never had the chance to be her true self, never even considered who that self might be. Over the years she has become her own gaoler, someone merely waiting to live. Peeling off her "second skin" of duty, guilt and fear, she starts living with a vengeance. She joins a bohemian flat-share in Camden Town, with people little older than her own children. She takes a job in Camden market - a startling contrast to suburbia. She meets a poet, Will, and embarks on her first ever affair. But her heady new existence is threatened by her family's demands, even, paradoxically, by Will himself. At this turning point in her life, will she succeed in her bid for freedom and become the person she was born to be?

376 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’

Reviews

[Amanda B · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF @ around 31%. Not for me at this moment, too depressing at this time and in need of my spirit being lifted, not lowered.

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed reading this book, but it wasn't well enough written for the lack of plot to not matter. There are some books that are so beautifully written that the language itself is enough of a pleasure, for no plot to be required. This is no t one of those books.

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't remember other Wendy Perriam novels I've read being as bad as this one. Apart from the odd spattering of humour, I just found it too depressing, the dialogues too artificial and the story uninteresting. Thank god it only cost me 99p!

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautiful and evocative story.