Ever felt like running away?

Sometimes it's the only thing to do...

I’m thrilled to share exciting news today - the cover of my new novel, coming out in March!

Novels start in all kinds of different ways. It might be the lifestage I’m at, or something just pops into my head - like I really wanted to write about midlife dating (The Woman Who Took a Chance), and being rejected by your teenage kid/falling in love in your fifties (The Man I Met on Holiday).

One day I was chatting to my friend Jen on the phone when there was some commotion at her end. ‘R (her son) just said, “Daddy said the f-word!’” she explained. Indeed Daddy had uttered A BAD WORD as R had yanked out the cable from his computer. This was the era before auto-save, when such an act would mean an entire document being lost.

Jen’s husband’s outburst made me think, ‘Daddy said the f-word…. switch ‘mummy’ for ‘daddy’ and that’d be a great book title. It’s the only book I’ve written where the title came first, and I wrote a book around it - apart from this one.

The Woman Who Ran Away from Everything. The very idea was so seductive, I had to write it. Because doesn’t every woman feel like that sometimes? When she looks down at a sink of dirty dishes, or a fridge crammed haphazardly with foods in various states of decay - a fridge she’s supposed to keep tight control over, as well as her job, her body, the family admin and the running of the home?

I love the tagline of this book: She’s snapped. She’s cracked. And she’s never going back. I think it sums up how we all feel when a tiny thing flips us over the edge.

I had a moment like this during lockdown which saw me blundering out of the house with my bike, and pedalling madly (no helmet!) with no idea of where I was going. ‘I know,’ I decided. ‘I’ll go to Linn Park.’ One of my sons had mentioned how idyllic it was, with shady woods and a sparkling river somewhere on the Southside of Glasgow.

Well, let me tell you there was no river because the damn place didn’t exist. I skidded to a halt at three different parks - none of them Linn Park - finally arriving at a sign saying ‘Fairy Wood’, lost and cold and disorientated, my hormones swirling madly as I wondered what the 21 year-old version of me would have thought, if she could see how I’d ended up.

Crying in a fairy wood! There weren’t even any fairies. There was just copious mud, and a creepy man with a big beard, in stained grey tracksuit bottoms, staring at me.

If you start masturbating I’m going to kill you, I thought.

Freaked out now, I dragged my mud-caked bike back home, feeling very foolish, and apologised to everyone.

Running away, in my experience, is something that’s far better as fantasy than in reality. I did run away from home at 16, briefly - telling my parents I was going ‘over to the road’ to my friend Karen’s (we lived in Irvine, on the west coast of Scotland at the time). Then I headed down to Blackpool, on the group trip I’d been banned from going on - calling my parents from a payphone on the way down.

It was terrible, actually - pretending to be having FUN while trying to sleep on cold, wet sand under the pier, in a filthy parka, and then blagging a night in some stranger’s caravan and then, on our third and final night, finding an unlocked bus in a depot and sleeping in there. Plus, I was terrified about the reaction when I went home.

It was hardly the fun and japes of this:

As a kid I’d yearned to be one of the Famous Five, running free with no adult intervention. But that wet weekend in Blackpool, all I wanted was to be home and forgiven with a cup of tea.

But sometimes we crack and do the maddest things. I heard of one novelist who was having a hard time writing her book and flung her computer out of the window. Once, it a fit of uncontrollable range, I threw a babygro at my husband. At such moments isn’t it incredibly appealing to think that you could actually run away?

Maybe you burnt a cake and your family laughed at it.

Or someone stole your laptop charger (‘I haven’t seen it!’) and now it’s out of charge and you can’t work.

Or you can’t find a single pair of matching socks, despite having bought some (very pleasing) ones in Uniqlo just two days ago and now they are GONE.

Or your favourite jacket has some kind of horrible gunk on it.

I had a somewhat stressy family matter to deal with recently. I sort of ran away - although it was planned; I didn’t take myself off without telling anyone. But I spent three days with my darling friends in York, and it was wonderful. And there I bought I a scarf that was so expensive I’m still reeling from it - but it gives me great joy every time I put it on.

Three run away to York!

She snapped. She cracked. She bought an incredible expensive angora scarf and wears it, gleefully, without shame! It’s hardly the same as clambering out of the bathroom window - as my heroine Kate does in this book, which you can preorder here!

But the gist is the same. Sometimes, you just think sod it. There’s a bathroom window escapee in all of us.

Love,

Fiona xx

PS I should apologise to the man in the woods for assuming he was a pervert when he was probably just waiting for his dog, and to my dad for running away to Blackpool - because if any of my children had done that to me I’d have literally died.

(I’m not going to apologise for throwing the babygro because honestly it was only a scrap of soft velour and no injuries occurred).

This scarf! It was only £1.50!! *cough