What do all these have in common? - Marriage was better when women couldn’t leave. - Sending children to school is a form of abuse. - Nobody over seventy should be allowed to drive. They’re all quirky, sensationalist, intended to shock or intrigue you - and, above all, to HOOK you. That’s the key word [...]
There’s a thin dividing line between being loyal to your parents and exorcising the demons they cause in your life. I tried to exorcise those demons by writing a novel, Infinite Stranger, about the very close yet complex relationship between a mother and daughter, and the unattainable man who came between them. More specifically, it [...]
It all started the day my mother received a letter from the Town Council, denying her application for an extension to our living room. She was gutted. All her dreams of that longed-for extension, which would have added a good eight feet to our poky back living room, had gone to dust. My heart cried [...]
My first love? Hmm. That's a tricky one. Was it the gorgeous, dark-wavy-haired Colombian teenager I fell in love with when I was eleven? The one at my international school who said ‘hi’ to me once? Nope. Okay, was it the equally gorgeous Italian waiter in Llandudno when I was fourteen? The one who gave [...]
I first wrote this poem years ago, but it returned to me after learning of the recent death of a young Ukrainian woman following a car accident. She was very close to her mother, who rushed to her side in hospital. I post it now in their memory, and in honour of that bond. NO [...]
I’ve always envied people who live in the present, rather than in the past. People who don’t have nostalgia hangups; who don’t go on about if only, or if I could have my time again, or those were the days … Trouble is, I adore that song: Those were the days, my friend. Gorgeous melody, [...]
When I was a teenager, the wealth of stories my mother raised me on began to resonate more deeply. All of them — memories of her youth — were exciting, romantic, and drenched in settings that cried out to be immortalised by literature or cinema. By then, I was already writing humble novellas, short stories [...]
Wendy Skorupski 