Secrets and Lives: Middle England Revealed

by Mary Loudon (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.25

  [A] Canterbury Tale for our times...Everyone has something of value to impart, even the humblest; in some, there is a shining nobility. - Valerie Grove, The Times . There is great ambition and equal skill in successfully communicating nothing more, nothing less, than the stuff of humanity. A real-life soap opera going on in Oxfordshire, with better stories by far than fiction . - Bel Mooney, The Times . As a writer, Mary Loudon has a precious gift. She can listen. And so, people tell her things they might otherwise lock inside their hearts. She follows in the footsteps of Tony Parker in Britain and Studs Terkel in America. Those men, like her, had ears as sharp as scalpels. At the end of her stories, the cliches have collapsed. Under the beeswaxed middle-class veneer, emotion eats into the woodwork: envy, pride, grief, ambition, despair. Above all, this is a chronicle of people's dreams; their hopes of what might have been and their regrets about what could have been. - Paul Barker, The Independent .

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.25

  Secrets and Lives is a totally unique, intimate and highly sensitive portrayal of other people's lives, and the ways in which they may speak of our own.This is a collection of 60 utterly comepelling true stories, each in the subjects' own words, taken from years of conversations with nearly 100 people from a typical English market town where the author herself grew up. The result is a portrait of the English as has never been painted before. The Middle England Mary Loudon so subtly exposes is an England of extremes and opposites: Middle England is, in fact, most of us. Through telling tales of their lives, her subjects speak of a whole century's worth of emotion and experience, and each other, with unparalleled candour. Morris dancing, hairdressing, hunting, selling shoes, standing for Mayor, getting divorced, contemplating suicide, forgiving the Japanese, shopping your son to the police, being the only Muslim in town, being ordinary, being famous, being invisible.