Are you a woman on the edge of reality?

I love reading, I guess it’s one of the things that makes me want to write.  I love to read anything from non-fiction books that teach me something I need to know or challenge my assumptions about this thing we call life to fiction works of many authors from Jostein Gaarder and his philosophical conundrums and questions, through various characters of the unique Alexander McCall Smith books and right up to the works of authors such as Joanna Trollope, Erica James, Rebecca Shaw and Judy Astley.  

If I’m honest it is the latter group that I find a turn to when I need something that is light enough to read at night but will also make sure I don’t want to put the novel down until I have got to the last page and finally have the whole revealed to me.

I’ve spent many long years wondering why my reading is so eclectic and I put my last group of favourite authors down to the fact that they are, like me, telling tales of women who are on the edge of a reality within their life.  Their characters are all in one sense or another stepping off a precipice that will precipitate change and in the doing will find themselves becoming the people they were always meant to be.

Perhaps that’s the reason that when I was writing the novel that now has the title of this blog for its own, Woman on the Edge of Reality, that I too was drawn to such a character in Rosemary.  We can all identify with the women who present themselves in the novels of Judy, Erica, Joanna and Rebecca because on so many levels our life experiences are not so far removed as to be completely different from theirs, they could easily be us and we could so easily be them too.  In fact, if it weren’t for a few small details, we could even think that these authors knew something about us that we had never shared with anyone else.

I will continue to read widely and pick up new authors that I think will entice me but I will probably always come back to my old stalwarts, those novels that hold a strong woman at it’s heart who is ready to embrace the change that is beginning to happen in her life.

Tags: cornwall, love, marriage, relationships, romance, self awareness, woman on the edge of reality, womens fiction