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SOMEONE NEW: Blog Tour Day 5
I’d like to say a huge thank you to Chloe for being part of the blog tour for Someone New and I’m delighted to be featured today as a guest post on her blog, Chicklit Chloe Blogspot.
Today the guest post looks at the question of keeping up a perfect façade, one of the themes in Someone New. So many of us maintain a perfect front to put out there to others, sometimes keeping other sides of ourselves away from even our nearest and dearest. We don’t always know the true colours behind the façade people present to the world. It’s a theme I find recurring in a lot of the novels I’ve written - after all anything can be going on behind closed hall doors, or our closed-off selves, or the veneer of an impeccable mask; the potential for human drama and tension as the writer delves beneath the mask or unveils the truth is limitless, for both protagonist and antagonist alike. We don’t know what anyone is going through until, as the saying goes, we’ve walked a mile in their shoes, and that applies to the characters we read and write about as much as ourselves.
In Someone New, Grace Bailey, the thirty-year-old lead character, had been giving her family and friends the impression she was quite happy with her lot and her boyfriend Gavin, and all was well in her world. Likewise her sister Lucia, who has, according to Grace, always accomplished everything perfectly and according to the golden rules.
In some respects it can good for ourselves and our well-being to keep up appearances, to put our best foot forward, to meet the world with a smile. We all need to keep certain boundaries around ourselves, and keep our hearts safe from those who might treat them less than sensitively. We don’t always need to allow people access all areas of our lives, never mind our thoughts and feelings. Sometimes little white lies can be useful to spare someone’s feelings or safeguard our own.
In Someone New, however, we soon find out that behind the happy impression she had been giving out, Grace had been living the kind of life she felt she ought to be living rather than the kind of life that was true to herself. She’d been living under the weight of other peoples’ expectations, doing things she felt she should be doing, conforming to other people’s opinions of what makes up a happy, successful life, until she began to feel she was drowning. In the opening scene, Grace feels she has hit rock bottom. It’s Christmas time, she’s met Gavin, her (now) ex-boyfriend for a drink, and somehow he manages to push all the wrong buttons and make her feel guilty for breaking it off with him, particularly now in the run up to Christmas, which for some, can be the loneliest time of the year instead of the most wonderful. Grace has lived behind a façade for so long that she feels remorseful for breaking free.
Then she meets Danny.
Writing about Danny, and the way he explodes into Grace’s world and helps her to sweep away the cobwebs of other peoples’ expectations and begin to live a life true to herself was enjoyable and fun. It was more surprising fun however, discovering the effect he had Lucia, when he couldn’t help but shake the silk-covered walls of the life she had constructed around herself.
The problem with putting up a perfect façade is that it can collapse down around us when we least expect it to, and in Someone New that’s exactly what happens…
Thank you Chloe, for having me as a guest on your blog today.
Zoë xx
About Someone New
In her heart, Grace knows the perfect, reliable, good-looking Gavin isn’t right for her. Then she meets Danny. Unpredictable and spontaneous, he turns her world upside down. All of a sudden, Grace is seeing life differently and doing things she never thought she’d do.
But tragedy strikes when Danny dies in a motorbike accident, shattering Grace’s world. As she struggles to come to terms with her loss, she becomes more and more convinced that she’s being followed – sighting a motorbike exactly like Danny’s everywhere she goes. And she starts to wonder if Danny’s death was really an accident.
When she finally voices her suspicions to her family and the police, though, no one seems willing to believe her.
Meanwhile Grace feels ever more under threat as sinister things begin happening to her. What was Danny hiding from her? And what kind of danger is she in now?
About the Author:
Zoë Miller writes contemporary novels laced with suspense and intrigue. She was born on the south side of Dublin, where she still lives with her husband. She has two daughters and a son. As a child, Zoë was always the one with her head stuck in a book and she enjoyed reading so much that it compelled her to write. ‘Someone New’ is Zoë’s eighth book to be published by Hachette Books Ireland, and Zoë fits in her writing between family time and the day job.
Website: www.zoemillerauthor.com
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