Fran Littlewood

Bernadette, Eleanor Oliphant, Rosie, Ove . . . meet Amazing Grace Adams, the funny, touching, unforgettable story of an invisible everywoman pushed to the brink—who finally pushes back. Grace Adams gave birth, blinked, and now suddenly she is forty-five, perimenopausal and stalled—the unhappiest age you can be, according to the Guardian. And today she’s really losing it. Stuck in traffic, she finally has had enough. To the astonishment of everyone, Grace gets out of her car and simply walks away. Grace sets off across London, armed with a £200 cake, to win back her estranged teenage daughter on her sixteenth birthday. Because today is the day she’ll remind her daughter that no matter how far we fall, we can always get back up again. Because Grace Adams used to be amazing. Her husband thought so. Her daughter thought so. Even Grace thought so. But everyone seems to have forgotten. Grace is about to remind them . . . and, most important, remind herself.

Amazing Grace Adams

Ellie 

“It’s amazing what you don’t see when you don’t want to see it.”

you know there's these little boxes coming from your head, and I call them the boxes of life because they disappear one by one when you've done that one thing in your life. They're invisible to us but they're see-through so you can see the pictures inside of your life and really the line of boxes is controlling you. And then when you get to the top and you've only got one more box left - which will be the one which will tell you how you die - then you float all the way up to that last box and then you climb onto the cloud and the cloud is Heaven.

She’d made the decision there and then: she would not be like her mother. She was afraid that she, too, would not be able to do it, that maybe it was something passed down, a failing in her family. That maybe she was partly to blame for the struggle, the misery.

And afterwards she hadn't questioned it, this long-held belief that had grown rigid in her.

'I don't remembers time when I didn't feel tired, and there's this dread in me constantly because I have no idea what I'm doing.‘

That giddy up-and-out-of-herself high that comes from the music, the dancing, the intensity, the promise. It's like she can smell it, taste it, and why hasn't she realized before that it is gone? She has had those moments - in bars and clubs and at festivals, parties, she had them a long time ago and she will never have them again. Standing there, Grace hugs her arms around her body. It isn't that she's jealous, not exactly, because it fills her up that her daughter gets to feel this way. But there's a grief in her too, for this thing she hadn't known she'd lost.

Amazing Grace Adams quotes

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