Problem: Women full of impossible contradictions. Result: Bewilderment. Misunderstanding. Anger. Solution: Not known. Complicated by fact that you are also full of impossible contradictions.
Down-but-not-quite-out advertising exec. Daniel Savage is one of the walking wounded – a casualty of the sex war. All his relationships have ended in defeat; one in divorce. Now he’s starting over. Starting with a blank sheet of paper, he catalogues all his past failures in order get to the heart of where it all went wrong. He ends up with ten infallible rules for making everything work out – the Love Secrets. All he has to do now is apply them to the love of his life – who just happens to be his best friend’s girlfriend …
‘The jolliest book I’ve read in a long time. Lott delivers depth with lightness. A book for every bedroom’
Spectator
‘Hits every emotional button of English urban male middle age by way of jolting flashbacks to teens, twenties and thirties. Laced with a devastatingly overarching irony’
The Times
‘Readable, funny and humane, well-paced and well-observed. A war report from the battle of the sexes’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Funny, sad, desperate and very well-told … a great read. I whizzed through this novel’
Scotsman
‘Bitingly witty’
She
‘Funny, invigorating, all-too-believable … to be relished’
Literary Review
This is how it feels to be me.
Imagine yourself standing on the wrong side of a high brick wall erected across a pitted, unmaintained highway.
Now imagine that highway is your life. It’s raining. You don’t have a ladder. And it’s getting dark.
This is what being me has come down to. Who put me here? They did, of course.
Here – to wrench myself from the figurative into the literal – being this small bedsit in Acton, West London, lacking enough space to put up my six-year-old daughter for an overnight stay. Without enough money to buy her a trip to the cinema. Without enough stuffing in me to want her here anyway, since to see her father like this, so bitterly shrunken, cannot be a good thing. And I want good things for her. Not bad things – bad things like me.
They put me here. Bad things like me. When was this person conceived? This martyred, myopic, self-pitying shadow. Thinking the kind of thing they would think. Saying the kind of thing they would say.
Them. They. Me. I. How coy. And I have always ventured to be straightforward. So allow me to be frank. Women put me here, capital ‘W’.
Allow me to be still more frank. They didn’t put me here by themselves. I helped. Bad choices, lack of courage, a wilful inability to see straight, selfishness, insensitivity.
Call me Spike. It’s been my nickname since I was thirteen-years-old, although of course I wasn’t aware of its Freudian implications then. Am I angry? I’m not angry. Not any more. I’ve been angry. God knows I have, angry enough to get myself the old Uzi sub, shin up that water tower and start popping away. Take that, honey. How’s that for a big kiss, Toots? Blam. But I’m not angry, not any more. I’m just old. Old and sad, and I want the battle to end. I want us all to be friends. I want us to understand one another.
Author interviews
