I’ve always been ‘bookish’. Not that surprising for a writer. What is surprising is how long I spent ignoring my natural ability for prose, preferring to shrug it off as something entirely unremarkable. Instead, I focused my efforts on Modern Foreign Languages, and a bit of Latin thrown in for good measure (still to this day it’s hands down the most useful O Level I ever sat).

I guess I took it all a bit for granted; carried on with university, then life in London for a bit, child-rearing. Until hitting my mid 40s, when peri-meno struck me like a bullet train; hard and fast. Like many women in this age group, I kind of ‘lost’ who I was. I knew my job was no longer ‘the one’.Yet I’d been on the conveyor belt of life for so long, I had no real clue who I was anymore, or what the hell I wanted to do next to put money in the bank and food on the table.

The 40-50 decade shook me to the core. Like many women of a similar age, I began to question everything. If forced to pick that one ‘pivotal’ moment when everything shifted, it would be the day I spent holed up in a room with 8 other mid-life women; participants in a ‘stand up for yourself and stop being a doormat’ workshop. My job was in account management / sales and my boss told me I was ‘too nice’. Needing me to get more ballsy with my approach, he put me on this course.

It didn’t work. Well, not in the way he wanted it to. For me, however, it was a turning point.

The very next thing I did was get myself into a coaching group focused on doing the ‘inner work’ of getting to know yourself. Talk about a pandora’s box! Back in 2017, when I started this ‘journey’ of self-discovery and reinvention, I had no idea it would eventually lead to me writing my first fiction novel.

The ‘messy middle’ is a story in itself. Suffice to say this novel found me, not the other way round. Stories have a funny way of following you around, even when you spend decades trying to ignore them.

This one waited patiently, brewing beneath the surface for over fifty years.

“Fragments of Her” (working title) is my debut novel. It’s the story of a woman whose ordinary life gets blown wide open when her mother dies, and a long-buried family secret comes clawing to the surface.

I wrote it for the kind of women I know and love: the ones who carry everyone else while quietly losing parts of themselves. The ones who are always fine until they’re very suddenly not. The ones curious about who they might have been – or could still become.

I’m Sara – a middle-aged woman on paper only. Garmin insists I’ve got the fitness of a 25-year-old, and I’m pretty sure my brain is stuck there too. I’m a copywriter and proofreader by day, and a fiction writer any time I can squeeze a few lines in.

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