Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?

It took me years to write, will you take a look?

The paperback of Probably Nothing is out one month today!

Cool, you might be thinking, but didn’t you make a whole big fuss about this same book eight months ago? And yes, yes I did. But unfortunately writing books is thirsty work, and we’re contractually bound to use each new print run as an excuse for some fanfare.

Plus there’s an element to which publishing a hardback novel is a little like being Paco Rabanne making a dress out of solid metal. It’s expensive, it’s heavy, you don’t expect anyone to actually buy it.

Paperbacks, on the other hand! A lightweight little treat! A flexible friend! Pop it in your handbag, your luggage, the inside pocket of your coat. It’s less of a commitment, prime for whims and flirtation. You can toss it in your trolley at Sainsbury’s. I just bought soup and a baguette in Pret and it cost as much as my book does in paperback (dare I quote Carrie and suggest it might feed you more??).

Probably Nothing is a book I wrote half while pregnant and half while delirious with sleep deprivation and postnatal anxiety, which I’m sure experts can agree is the ideal state. It has a wild-yet-not-implausible premise – man dies, his family believe the woman he was casually sleeping with to be his one true love, woman too polite to explain otherwise – and is at once both deeply silly and surprisingly serious. After a slew of sad girl novels exploring the murky truths of various anxieties and mood disorders, I wanted to add to the canon with something I hadn’t really seen represented on the page: health anxiety, and how our physical and mental health are not two separate entities but instead one and the same; a kind of psychosomatic CatDog. Where one goes, the other must follow.

There are also subplots about the ailing NHS, fertility and pregnancy, a wellness MLM (hello if you’ve finished Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix and need to fill a hole), ruminations on people pleasing and found vs biological family, and what I hope is an affectionate portrayal of rural Northamptonshire – somewhere I’ve definitely been and you can’t prove otherwise.

If you’re intrigued by all that but want to hear more, from a woman trying to sound intelligent while summoning enough core strength to stay upright on a stool, I’ll be doing events in Brighton, London, Manchester and Merseyside (details coming shortly), and anywhere else that will have me.

If you’re intrigued by all that but not enough to part with £8.99, you’re in luck – it’s also 99p on ebook all this month!

And if you’re intrigued by all that but prefer to try before you buy, allow me to offer the below extract like a little tray of crackers and chutney at a farmer’s market.

What’s that, you’re going to do a circuit then probably definitely come back and buy some? Wonderful.

x

Context: Kelly is a GP’s receptionist. Her husband’s brother has recently died.

Powering through and soldiering on

Everyone is pregnant. Absolutely everyone. Five expectant mums have waddled through the waiting room this morning alone. Friends are pregnant, colleagues are pregnant, cats are pregnant – even the autumn hedgerows are heavy with fruit, the trees lousy with conkers. All around her, swollen bellies bob up like lurid sea buoys in their stretchy yoga tops. At the supermarket, at the pub. Hovering level with her eye line in the hairdresser’s chair.

Kelly hasn’t noticed before now that they live in a place peopled exclusively by procreators; where coffee shops are no-go zones without an infant as visa, either somersaulting inside you, wailing in arms, or grizzling over a babyccino.

Is it bad, she wonders, for a person who wants a child so badly to feel irritated by every single one that she sees? What does it mean that last week she had a dream that she was running up and down Orford Road with a giant pin, bursting pregnant bellies like balloons – pop! pop! pop! – like something off a nineties late-night gameshow?

She never tells Leo any of this. Although the fact of their trying is well established – ten months, now, which puts them in an awkward holding pen, not being long enough to qualify as ‘issues’ but long enough to start getting worried – she prefers to maintain the illusion that she’s going to be fine about it either way. Que será será. Leo has always been proud of his wife for her straightforward nature, her unflappability, her chill, and she isn’t about to ruin her reputation in the lads’ group by becoming a baby-mad mess.

Besides, Leo is the mess now and a couple can only have one at a time. He has been in sweatpants for two weeks, watching all the most depressing televised sports with the curtains shut. Formula One, snooker, horse racing.

Kelly had ideas about the kind of wife she would be in the face of family tragedy and has only discovered what they are by falling short of them. She thought she’d be unfailingly patient, she realizes as she snaps at Leo for forgetting to put the bins out. She thought her empathy would override all pre-existing arguments. She assumed she would draw on a bottomless well of love and self-sacrifice, strengthening their bond as they work through the pain. But now that the initial shock and tears have subsided, all of their interactions have taken on the tone of tight-jawed actors in a retro sitcom. Would you like tea darling? Yes thank you darling. I say, the sun is out, shall we go for a walk? No thank you darling, perhaps later. Yes of course darling, whatever you like. Shall we shower today? No thank you darling, perhaps later.

Sometimes she sits and watches the TV with him, holding his hand and staring at the screen until the cars or balls or horses all blur into an ambient mush. Is this supportive? Is this what he needs? Sometimes she invents a spurious reason to pop out – they need milk, they need petrol, they need badger traps, he isn’t listening – just to sit somewhere on her own for an hour and let her facial muscles drop into a neutral arrangement.

It is on one of these especially low days, scrolling the Outnet sale while trying not to notice she is the only woman in the room not cradling a bump or disinfecting a Sophie the Giraffe, that Kelly gets a notification. Her sister-in-law has tagged her in an Instagram post. ‘Are you well?’, it reads in flouncy cursive, bright green on a dusky pink background.

They’re innocuous words. Almost invisible words; just the ambient white noise of social convention. Who would ever answer anything but yes? You’re not really meant to answer at all, she has learned this.

Kelly looks at the words again, blinking on her phone. Annie’s post is a video for something called ‘Gel Lyfe’. It seems to be a kind of health supplement, though it could as easily be a religious sect or a Center Parcs advert – lots of clear-skinned women laughing at noth- ing, running through tall trees, hugging. The post is captioned with green heart emojis and sits on a thick thatch of hashtags. #gelibility #mentalhealth #smallbusinessowner #adaptogenius #womensupportingwomen #aloealoe #success.

Is she well?

Kelly rarely takes a sick day. She grew up with the kind of mother who thought anything less than viral meningitis was a pisstake, who believed nobody in the world had ever actually had flu. She would pack them off to school on a paracetamol even as they were still rolling the glass down their arm. To Kelly’s mother, illness had been an embarrassment; a sign of mental weakness, poor personal hygiene and probably hanging around with the wrong sort of lads. Even as she was dying of cancer a decade earlier, she had seemed less sad about leaving the world behind, more aggrieved at it ruining her holiday plans.

As a result, Kelly has spent her life powering through and soldiering on. Clubbing with streaming colds, date nights with diarrhoea. Taking every winter virus to work with her, covering up a chapped nose with industrial strength concealer. The fact she now works as a GP’s receptionist isn’t ironic so much as appropriate.

She books in with her own clinic for smears only. ‘They do my fanny, everything else looks after itself,’ she has said on more than one occasion. And generally, her body got the memo. Until now.

Is she well? The hollowed-out shape of that word. It’s an empty vessel you can pour anything into and draw anything out of. ‘You look well!’ is a dreaded phrase because everyone knows it’s code for ‘you’ve filled out around the face!’. Clients at the cosmetology clinic a few doors down pay thousands to have their buccal fat sucked out to avoid the compliment. They’re jostling for space on a waiting list to look less well.

Is she well in herself? She feels well out of herself most of the time at the moment, did even before Ed died. Tracking the monthly machinations of her body like a trainspotter or an astronomy buff, writing it all down in a nerdy little notebook. Waiting for the star that never falls.

Is she well? She must be, she owns five pairs of Sweaty Betty leggings. Her hair shines. She knows how to call a solitary salmon fillet and a logpile of asparagus ‘dinner’. There is a rose quartz face roller in her fridge. Of course she’s well.

Well. She’s fine – and that’s all anyone can really aspire to. Kelly likes the post, to be polite.