Blog Tour ~ Love and Fame by Susie Boyt

✨Jaffareadstoo is pleased to be involved in the Love and Fame Blog Tour✨

Virago
7 June 2018

My thanks to the author, publisher and Random Things Tours for my copy of this book
and the invitation to be part of the blog tour

Susie Boyt's sixth novel is the story of the first year of a marriage. Eve a nervous young actress from a powerful theatrical dynasty has found herself married to an international expert on anxiety called Jim. Could it work? Should it work? Must the show always go on? This is a highly-strung comedy about love, fame, grief, show business and the depths of the gutter press. Its witty and sincere tone - familiar to fans of Susie's newspaper column - will delight and unnerve in equal measure.

My thoughts about it..

Beatrice, a bereavement counsellor, her sister Rebecca, a journalist, don't seem, on the surface to have anything in common with Eve Swift and yet, this nervous young actress, who comes from a well-known theatrical family are soon to meet, and when they do their worlds collide in fascinating way. 

From the start it is obvious that Eve is riddled with insecurities, never quite matching up to the ideology of her talented, and very famous, actor father, and even being newly married to Jim, who is an expert on anxiety issues, is for Eve both a blessing and a curse. Beatrice and Rebecca have their own deep rooted problems, closely bonded since the death of their mother when they were children, Beatrice has always protected and looked after Rebecca, they still have a strong relationship which has continued long into adulthood.

Mostly Love and Fame is about grief and loss and how we cope in so many different ways, not just with the loss of people who are dear to us but also in the shared grief of past traumas and missed opportunities. And yet, it's not a sad book, far from it, parts of it made me laugh and smile at the absurdity of people's behaviour and reactions, whilst other beautifully written sentences struck a deep chord of acknowledgment. Love and Fame is an altogether different view of living with loss, and, for Eve especially, of coping with that loss in the full glare of unwanted public scrutiny. 

Within the novel there’s skilful writing and some lovely observations, which, on occasion, I had to go back and re-read and like a comfort blanket, this sentence stayed with me "Loss lapped at her feet, it bit at her heels. She had made friends with it, bathed in it, wore it like an overall" Loss distinguished her.” I think we’ve all shared that emotion at one time, or another.

About the Author

The daughter of Suzy Boyt and artist Lucian Freud, and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. Susie Boyt was educated at Channing and at Camden School for Girls and read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford, graduating in 1992. Working variously at a PR agency, and a literary agency, she completed her first novel, The Normal Man, which was published in 1995 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. She returned to university to do a Masters in Anglo American Literary Relations at University College London studying the works of Henry James and the poet John Berryman.

To date she has published six novels. In 2008, she published My Judy Garland Life, a layering of biography, hero-worship and self-help. Her journalism includes an ongoing column in the weekend Life & Arts section of the Financial Times. She is married to Tom Astor, a film producer. They live with their two daughters in London.

Twitter @SusieBoyt #LoveAndFame

@ViragoBooks

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