Nothing Without Me - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Helen Monks Takhar is the author of the novels Precious You and Such A Good Mother . She is also joint managing director of the production company Second Generation with her husband, screenwriter and executive producer Danny Takhar. Helen worked as a journalist, copywriter, and magazine editor after graduating from Cambridge University. She began her career writing for financial trade newspapers before contributing to UK national newspapers including The Times and The Observer . She lives in North London with Danny and their two daughters. Klappentext Includes book club guide with discussion questions. Leseprobe 1 Essie, the night of the awards My body floats facedown in my pool at Lotus Lodge. My dress is perfect: backless, bright white like the moon. The lapping water sends the hem towards the top of my thighs. Like the rest of me, my legs are spray-tanned nut-brown; my extensions are blonde, snaking across the surface of the water like they want to get away from me; my fingernails, black. My psychiatrist told me I suffer from a dissociative disorder and looking at my body now—its legs, skin, hair, and nails—I believe her. None of these pieces of me feel like they really belong to me now, if they ever did. Maybe that’s what happens when everyone from your mother down has their take on every part of you: long-lens beach shots of my legs’ ‘stubborn cellulite’; newspaper columns on the lines on my face and the procedures I apparently had in a ‘desperate bid’ to get rid of them; Twitter memes of my damp underarms on set at Daybreak . Wouldn’t these disconnect even a well-adjusted woman from herself? And with my family, I was never coming at the mad intrusion of fame into my body, into my entire life, from a place where I knew where my boundaries ought to lie. But none of that matters now. I’ve crossed a line. I can’t come back over it. I don’t want to. So, let’s pan out and look at the scene. It looks kind of like the start of Sunset Boulevard , only it’s me, the star of the screen, who’s facedown in the water. No chance I’ll be staring into a camera like Norma Desmond tonight, ready for my close-up. And the writer isn’t narrating this story from beyond the grave. She is alive, but she’s not well, not now she’s seen me. ‘NO!’ April shrieks from my poolside. She’s also in a white dress, her grey-blonde hair in its usual braid at her neck. Her palms fly to the sides of her head as she steps closer to the pool, before retreating to the sliding glass doors that divide it from my favourite living space in Lotus. Bent like a drinking straw, her hands against the glass, April hyperventilates as she speaks. ‘Oh god, oh god, oh god. No, Essie. Please, no.’ She forces herself to turn back to view my body once more. ‘What have you done!?’ April immediately assumes I’ve done this to myself and, in a way, she’s right. But millions of people are culpable. Every person who clicked on one of those stories about my body; everyone who piled on to make my name trend on Twitter for no good reason, posted some dark comment on Insta, or picked up a magazine at the checkout because I was on the cover crying over ‘my latest heartbreak’ or ‘the fallout from my shocking scandal’; every single person who shoved a smartphone in my face to steal another image of me, ignoring me when I begged them, ‘Please. Not today’; they have their share of blame for pushing me to this point. And if they could see me now, I know what they’d be thinking: Essie Lay has finally added herself to the rest: Amy Winehouse, Caroline Flack, Paula Yates, Marilyn Monroe . . . Last year, I fell off my throne as the queen of British light entertainment and into the gutter. Now, I’m one more famous female scalp they picked away at until it seemed there wasn’t enough left of Essie Lay worth saving.

Product details

• Authors: Helen Monks Takhar
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 06.02.2024
• EAN: 9780593596180
• ISBN: 978-0-593-59618-0
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 203 mm x 21 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Suspense