Lizzy Stewart

'Subtle and deliciously complicated, this is a big book on big subjects, but lightly, elegantly done. I loved it' Tessa Hadley Alison is newly married, barely twenty and struggling to find her place in the world. A chance encounter with an older artist upturns her life and she forsakes convention and her working-class Dorset roots for the thrumming art scene of London in the late seventies. As the thrill of bohemian romance leads inevitably to disappointment, Alison begins to find her own path - through art, friendship and love. 'This book is a testament to the right to choose your own life' Jessica Andrews

Alison

Beatrix

I think we were happy. We were certainly ordinary, which made us assume that we must be happy. Whether we felt it or not.

l had always worried – all my life, perhaps- that I had no personality. I felt that I had missed some key stage in development where one accrues the necessary information to be charming or passionate or interesting in public. Dropped, as I was, into a world where everyone was filled with what seemed like such richness of experience, such expression, I felt like blank space.

wine and sweets, fish and chips in the floor of Tessa’s studio, screeching with laughter on the bus after a po-faced gallery opening.

Our best times were those when we seesawed between childhood and adulthood;

At home all I had in me was sleep. Bundled up in my bed, Id focus on every sensation in my fuzzy, rattling body.

.. I think that what I was feeling was a loneliness, and loneliness became anxiety, and that became exhaustion.

The rattling in my head began to fade. It would return, of course, from time to time throughout my life, but I grew better at recognising it for what it was: a need to stop and admire the view.

I found being near him - watching him draw, the way he mumbled to himself, the sounds he made whilst he slept against me on the sofa - was the most intoxicating thing I’d ever experienced. He was loveliness embodied, lovely in his bones.

Jawahir M

Now, though, I wonder what it meant for him to look at me as a shape, a subject, and then sleep with me, in the very same room

It was as though we knew that the world wasn’t really designed for us, and the knowing allowed us to turn it into whatever we wanted.

I had lost myself over and over. And now it was time to start again.

Alison quotes

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