PS Olive You Book Tour
[amazon_link id=”B013AK2QDA” target=”_blank” ]
[/amazon_link]Today, I am delighted to be kicking off the tour for Lizzie Allen’s new book, wittily called ‘PS Olive You’ so sit back and enjoy an extract from the exotic tale.
PS Olive You By Lizzie Allen
-Chapter One-
On the Christmas before the credit crunch exploded in our faces, my mother-in-law bought me a spectacular vanity case. A leather studded Versace with enough capacity for ten litres of age-defying products.
The following Easter she bought me a course of Botox. Clearly the ten litres had not been enough.
Bridgette was the sort of person who gaveth with the one hand and tooketh away with the other. Still desperately clinging to the notion I might conceive after four failed IVF attempts, she somehow conflated looking-younger with fertile-eggs.
Behind my back she worked on Andrew to leave me for a younger woman and have a second go at gene proliferation. Who could blame her? I was only thirty-two but my ovaries were at least two hundred. Andrew was ten years older than me and needed to get a move on, or else he’d be mistaken for a grandfather on sports days.
How ironic that he’d selected a younger model to settle down with after screwing just about everyone his age in Greater London and the Counties, only to discover the younger model was a dud. It irked Bridgette beyond belief. I knew this because whenever I came into the kitchen and interrupted them over the Aga they’d both go silent.
Andrew leaving me was something I secretly feared myself although I never dared raise it. We didn’t share our insecurities.
Politics
Economics,
The couple next door.
They were all up for grabs, but never our anxieties, our hopes and fears for the future. Especially not my ovaries. That would have been ‘dreadfully middle class’. Instead I tried to compensate by being the most pleasing wife in Chelsea. As long as other men desired me, Andrew would want me too. Vast quantities of money were dedicated to this end. I cooked haute cuisine, kept an immaculate house and dressed in a style that said effortlessly-classy-yet-sexy.
Glossy well cut hair
Plumped breasts.
Flawless skin.
On the night we left for Greece I packed enough sun cream to smear around the stratosphere three times and block out solar radiation for a year. I had no intention of returning from our little Hellenic adventure looking like a sultana.
Of all the places to buy a second property, a deserted goat infested island in the Cyclades was not one I would have earmarked. What was wrong with Brittany where the weather was a shit as England and you had less chance of dying from skin cancer?
But after fifteen years of marriage, the penny was finally starting to drop that choice didn’t come in to it with Andrew. You simply got swept along on the tsunami of his enthusiasm, and woke up a few months later feeling resentful and irrelevant. His was the footprint in life we followed. He carried me on his back so that I needn’t get my feet dirty and leave any footprints at all.
The Greek adventure was partly prompted by the social circle we moved in. Andrew’s ex-Marlborough crowd were a well-healed mob, the descendants of lords and ladies and cotton barons. Andrew was the son of an accountant. My dad owned a hardware store. That was before a multinational chain muscled its way into town and bankrupted him. That was before he developed depression, then cancer, then died and left me and my mum to fend for ourselves.
You can buy [amazon_link id=”B013AK2QDA” target=”_blank” ]PS Olive You from Amazon [/amazon_link] and will be available to buy from good bookshops.
If you enjoyed today’s stop on the tour, then check out the other websites that are taking part.
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