"TELL ALL THE TRUTH BUT TELL IT SLANT" by Linda Gillard

A LIFETIME BURNING   (Kindle 88p/$0.99)

I've just re-published my second novel, A LIFETIME BURNING on Kindle. First published in 2006, it was one of those still-born books torpedoed by its cover and ignored by reviewers, perhaps because it belonged to that non-genre, accessible literary fiction. My publisher had no idea how to market the book (neither did I) and it sank without trace. 

Well, not quite. 

Readers loved it. (And a few loathed it.) A LIFETIME BURNING has only 5-star reviews on Amazon (twenty-five of them) and over the years its devotees have described themselves as haunted - even disturbed - by the book. A few have complained they were up all night finishing it and one man told me he read all 410 pages in one sitting.

I started making notes for A LIFETIME BURNING even before I’d finished my first novel, EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY. I didn’t have a publisher then. I hadn’t even thought about trying to find one, I was just writing to amuse myself. I'd just written a novel where people were basically nice. EG was a celebration of a close-knit Hebridean community, the solace of creativity and finding love in middle age. It was ultimately a feel-good read. I wondered if I could write something very different, something more ambitious? Could I actually write bad people? Or rather people who behave very badly? Could I write tragedy?...

My maternal grandmother

With the innocence of a beginner, I set out to write a big dynastic novel about family and the changing role of women in the twentieth century - their different attitudes to sex, marriage and motherhood. I took five women from three generations of the same family and used their interwoven stories as a vehicle for looking at what it has meant to be a woman at different times in the latter half of the 20th century, what choices, opportunities and limitations they faced. (What you could make of your life depended largely, it seems to me, on when you were born.)

In an attempt to free myself from the distinctive rhythms of my first novel's narrator, I opted for a very different narrative voice in A LIFETIME BURNING. Flora, my middle-aged protagonist, would tell her own story, but she would tell it looking back, at the end of her life. Then I decided she would actually be dead, telling her own very colourful story from beyond the grave. There’s a line by Emily Dickinson that I had in mind while writing:  

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” 

Flora tells you all the truth, but she puts her own slant on it and she doesn’t tell you things in the right order. You have to piece her life together, like a jigsaw. She is in every sense an unreliable narrator. The narrator from Hell, in fact.

My family  (LG seated)

A LIFETIME BURNING is a book about family and the many different kinds of love. In particular it asks what it is to be a good father and whether love can ever be unconditional. Some characters have to face appalling dilemmas and those dilemmas lead them into moral grey areas. (ALB is a good choice for reading groups. There’s plenty to get your teeth into, including one incident that gave rise to a real blood-on-the-carpet discussion, from which, I heard, the book group in question never quite recovered.) 

ALB is essentially a love story, but it's no romance. I present my characters, warts and all. I show the choices they make and why they make them. I don’t defend them, nor do I condemn. This lack of authorial condemnation might have been why some readers disliked the book. A guiding hand through the plot's moral quagmire would perhaps have made for a more comfortable read.  

My father

 A LIFETIME BURNING wasn't meant to be a comfortable read (though it contains plenty of humour.) I wanted to explore how much damage you can do, trying to do the right thing. I wanted to show how the road to Hell can be paved with good intentions. As Flora says of her husband Hugh, a troubled clergyman: 

"I believed Hugh to be a truly good man. I still do, if one accepts that it’s possible to be good without being honest; that in fact it’s sometimes necessary to be dishonest in order to do good."

Re-packaged on Kindle, with an appropriate cover, garlanded with 5-star reviews (and a bargain at 88p), it's my fervent hope that A LIFETIME BURNING will now find its readers. 

Better late than never.

~~~

Linda Gillard

Linda Gillard has four indie e-books on Kindle: 

EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY
HOUSE OF SILENCE
UNTYING THE KNOT
A LIFETIME BURNING. 

EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY on Kindle

HOUSE OF SILENCE was an Amazon Editor's Pick BEST OF 2011 in the Indie Author category. 


EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY has been selected for the reading list of the book bloggers' Mental Illness Advocacy Reading Challenge 2012 

You can find Linda's website here and her Facebook author page here.