Happy publication day to Louise Beech for Eighteen Seconds! Huge thanks to Mel Sambells at Mardle Books for letting me have an early read. Before I give you my thoughts, here’s the blurb.
The Blurb
Family is the best thing in your life. And the worst.
My mother once said to me, ‘I wish you could feel the way I do for eighteen seconds. Just eighteen seconds, so you’d know how awful it is.’
I thought about it. Realised we could all learn from being in another person’s head for eighteen seconds. Eighteen seconds inside Grandma Roberts’ head as she sat alone with her evening cup of tea, us girls upstairs in bed. Eighteen seconds inside one-year-old Colin’s head when he woke up in a foster home without his family. Eighteen seconds inside the head of a girl waiting for her bedroom door to open.
Writer, Louise Beech, looks back on the events that led to the day her mother wrote down her last words, then jumped off the Humber Bridge. She missed witnessing the horror herself by minutes.
Louise recounts the pain and trauma of her childhood alongside her love for her siblings with a delicious dark humour and a profound voice of hope for the future.
My Thoughts
This really is a case of my thoughts rather than a review. I’m not sure how I can a review such a personal memoir of someone I know through the crime writing world. But I do have thoughts.
Last week, I watched a documentary on iPlayer with Sammy Woodhouse about babies born through rape. She spoke to children now grown up and to women who had been raped, sometimes by their own fathers. This doesn’t fit with the narrative of Louise Beech’s book but there was an element in that programme that did – no more silence. Breaking the silence, breaks the power. This is evident throughout Eighteen Seconds.
Having read some of Louise’s books before, I can now see where bits of her life have been threaded into her stories. But it’s not a thread of darkness; rather it’s a thread of hope, and daffodil yellow in colour. And that’s what we have in Eighteen Seconds. Against the darkness, is the light of hope and freedom shining through. A determination not to be defined by the horrific neglect and abuse that Louise and her siblings endured. There were times that this book made me so angry with everything that Louise has gone through. But I was left with the overriding bond and love that Louise has with her sisters and brother.
If you only read one memoir this year, make it this one.
You can buy Eighteen Seconds here.
The Author
Louise Beech lives in East Yorkshire and grew up dreaming of being a writer but it took many years and many rejections for her to finally get a book deal in 2015, aged 44. Her debut, How to be Brave, got to No4 on Amazon and was a Guardian Readers’ Pick; Maria in the Moon was described as ‘quirky, darkly comic and heartfelt’ by the Sunday Mirror; The Lion Tamer Who Lost was shortlisted for the Popular Romantic Novel of 2019 at the RNA Awards and longlisted for the Polari Prize 2019; Call Me Star Girl was Best magazine’s Book of the Year 2019; I Am Dust was a Crime Magazine Monthly Pick; and This Is How We Are Human was a Clare Mackintosh Book Club pick. In 2023 her new novel, End of Story, will be published under the pen name Louise Swanson. Louise regularly writes short stories for magazines, blogs, and talks at universities and literary events.
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