My Life on a Plate

by Knight, India

• ISBN13: 9780618093977
• ISBN10: 0618093974
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-11-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Optioned for film and published in sixteen countries, this British sensation explodes the myth that all people need to be truly happy is love and marriage. Meet thirty-three-year-old Clara Hutt: irreverent, sometimes unkind, always self-deprecating. Clara is a part-time magazine writer with a perpetually mysterious husband and two small boys, and some days she wakes up with the feeling that her life isn't all it should be. Her extended stepfamily is forever making demands; her sons are constantly "murdering each other"; all the other mothers at the school gate are perfectly groomed, but Clara is in her pajama bottoms and her husband's sweater. With razor-sharp wit and a healthy dose of insight into married life, India Knight takes readers on a continually entertaining ride through one woman's bumpy search for fulfillment.

Author Biography

India Knight used to write a weekly column in the Observer Life section, and is a regular contributor to a number of magazines and newspapers. My Life on a Plate is her first novel.

Excerpts

My Doris Day streak has come skipping and ginghaming its way to the fore in recent days . . . It's what happens when your immediate family is a convoluted mass of divorce and fragmentation. At the end, deep down, you want to be the one to break the pattern . . . The Doris streak . . . makes me want to be neat and nuclear; sometimes it even makes me think that I wouldn't mind being suburban.And, obviously, the Doris streak is often at odds with the rest of me, or at least with the parts that smoke and drink and occasionally spend a happy half-hour drying the dishes absent-mindedly while wondering what it would be like to snog strange people who really, really fancied you and were groaning with desire at the thought of kissing you. If they existed. And one knew them. Hypothetically.