This blog tour is slightly different than others I post. This one isn’t a review but an exclusive note from the author.
In the authors own words
In a generous review of my second novel, The Man Who Broke into St Peter’s, (Church Times 11th January 2019), Fiona Hook commented that it was the first book she’d read ‘in which anyone has considered the life of a woman priest and how she manages the sometimes conflicting demands of family life and parish’. I was grateful that she felt I’d understood something of what it means to be a woman in ‘a man’s world’. Having three women in my life – my wife of 53 years and our two daughters, now both in their forties – it would be an abject failure on my part if I hadn’t learned something from them!
Two years on, I’ve seen enough to know that misogyny remains a blight on our society. I hope I’ve never been guilty of the kind of prejudice and hatred towards women that is sometimes exposed on the news. But encouraging though Fiona Hook’s comment was, I began to examine my own attitudes in the face of the sexism and discrimination that is so prevalent. My introspection was given greater urgency when our elder daughter was diagnosed with ovarian cancer after dealing with endometriosis throughout her adult life. I realised for the first time that something I’d glibly dismissed as ‘women’s trouble’ was in truth a painful and disabling condition. Even more disconcerting, I had a strong sense that, if men had been affected by endometriosis, we might have discovered ways to alleviate it or even found a cure for it long ago.
Talking to Calippa Cumberland emerged from that time of reflection. Anyone who has read the dedication in the book will know, that it’s both my Christmas gift to the reader and my promise to three special women to be a more sensitive husband and father. The decision to write a Christmas story with a woman as the central character, and to tell it in the first person from the perspective of that woman was an easy one to make after the journey I’d been on. Carrying it out was a lot more demanding.
The most obvious challenge was that to tell the story of Lori Bloom from her childhood to her mid-forties with any degree of authenticity meant enquiring into matters of which, as a man, I had no personal experience. It led to one unforgettable exchange in which my daughter looked me in the eye and said, ‘Dad, I’ll answer this only once. But don’t ever ask me again.’ I leave you to imagine the rest of that conversation!
But the greatest hurdle to overcome was looking at life from a different angle, and constantly asking myself, ‘What would a woman do or think at this stage of life?’ How far I succeeded others must decide. But here’s how one reader has responded:
‘I am so wowed by the way Chick has written as a young girl and then as a young woman experiencing her periods each month and that first flush of sexual attraction.’
Not words I ever expected to see in a review when I started to write fiction. But I’ll take them as a compliment.