Fran Littlewood's debut novel is a tragi-comedy about a middle-aged woman who snaps while stuck in a north London traffic jam.
On her way to collect a cake for her daughter's sixteenth party, menopausal soon-to-be-divorced Grace Adams abandons her car and embarks on an epic journey from Crouch End to South Hampstead.
After collecting the cake from Dunn's, Grace hauls the disintegrating sponge on a roiling hot walk across the Heath, Highgate Golf Course, and Finchley Road, punctuated by increasingly extreme encounters.
Littlewood knows every inch of her route, grounding the action in a single day in her north London neighbourhood, while heightening Grace's dilemma. A past tragedy has blown her family apart, and while she walks away from her car, she is walking towards repairing her fractured life.
"I've lived in north London for 30 years so it was the natural place for me to set this book," says the mum-of-three.
"It has a strong sense of location, I've mapped the walk that she takes; she's going to get this Love Island cake across London to this birthday party that she hasn't been invited to. Somewhere around Park Road a man leers at her, she snaps, and illogically sets off on foot. It veers into absurdity, and she's bloody and battered by the time she gets there carrying this cake."
With its vivid scenes, Amazing Grace Adams has been optioned for TV, with a writer already on board. Littlewood's book plugs into "something zeitgeisty" about mid-life women experiencing perimenopause while parenting teenagers and suffering career and marital problems.
"She's at this point in her life where she has lost everything, husband, daughter, job," says Littlewood, who in one chapter lists every menopause symptom so readers realise "it's not just itchy vaginas".
"Everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong, and she pushes back. Menopause is an extended metaphor for this long, hot day. I wanted a raw, unvarnished representation to specifically tackle the perimenopause head on with a wink of humour."
It's inspired by Littlewood's own experience and resentment that this life stage "isn't talked about". When symptoms started in her early 40s, she recalls "having to cope while feeling you are going slowly insane" while health checks "never once mentioned perimenopause."
"There are a few courageous voices Mariella (Frostrup) Davina (McCall). But as I was writing this in 2020, there were suddenly lots of non-fiction books about menopause. Even in two years, things have changed around the taboo of ageing. Brilliant women in the pubic eye have started to bring it into the light. This conversation is starting to happen."
She also realised that many women around her were "at this mid-life point living with simmering rage".
"It's the impossible, unfair beauty standards, and the 'calm down dear' narrative; it's socially unacceptable to look your age or to show any anger. It's much more acute in mid-life, that feeling of failing, the shame of ageing.
"It was so cathartic to write this mid-life woman as an action hero who's rampage across North London builds to this hysterical stand. It's about wresting back control, Grace is my fantasy self who rips up the social contract and says and does all the things I ever dreamed of. It's an absurd situation, rich in dark humour, but also about the real emotional cost. It was so much fun to write. I hope women who read it will be punching the air."
Grace's daughter Lotte has problems at school and has grown distant from her. As mum to three teenage daughters Littlewood understands the "toxic social media" culture and "bloody awful timing that you are getting these symptoms just as they reach adolescence."
"It's a terrible clash of hormones. Her child is living this life away from her online that she can't access. There's a real grief in your child becoming a stranger."
The former Times journalist is now working on a second book about sibling rivalry and wrote her first after an MA in creative writing during which she was taught by ex poet laureate Andrew Motion.
"It was hugely intimidating producing your chapter for him to critique, but he was a brilliant teacher who made me feel I could do this."
She feels the book is "rebranding" mid-life women.
"The women around me they aren't the women you see represented at this age. So many interesting women are having a renaissance, setting up businesses, doing the creative thing they always wanted to. There's more of a f**k it attitude, it's a moment of reclaiming, breaking yourself apart to be put back together, a return to that pre 12-year-old authentic self before you are straightjacketed by self-conscious adolescence.
"There's an awful lot of hope in this book."
Amazing Grace Adams is published by Penguin Michael Joseph.
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