#Blogtour The Sunny Side of the House by David G. Bailey

It's my turn on the Blogtour The Sunny Side of the House: When Life Gives You Strawberries – Memories of a Fenland Boy by David G. Bailey.

About the Author

David G. Bailey's debut publication in 2021 was Seventeen, a football fantasy adventure novel aimed at and beyond young adults. Them Roper Girls (2022) returned to a world more recognisably our own, tracing in their own voices the lives of four sisters over more than sixty years from their 1950s childhood. 

A husband of a Roper sister takes centre stage in Them Feltwell Boys (2023). With the same gritty realism and sometimes dark humour found in its predecessor, this follows Ray Roden's crude attempts at teenage love in counterpoint to his cynical womanising as an adult. The Sunny Side of the House (2024) is a first venture into non-fiction in another projected series, When Life Gives You Strawberries - Memories of a Fenland Boy. The origin story of Seventeen appears within the clear-eyed narrative of a 1960s boyhood in East Anglia, where both David's contemporary novels are partly set. He currently lives in the Midlands.

To read more of and about David's work, including a quarterly newsletter and new content daily comprising extracts from diaries and other writing over more than fifty years, visit his website davidgbailey.com. Visit David Bailey on @dgbaileywriter on X,  @davidgbaileywriter on Instagram

About the book

You can’t choose your mum and dad, even when they choose you.

In my early teens I had a taste for horror comics. In one strip I read of a handsome young couple at last alone in their honeymoon suite. He is crisply suited, clean-cut. She, lovely in her wedding finery, offers him the chance to watch her disrobe.

The bride is not shy. She reveals herself, frame by frame, to be a hideous crone gloating at having tricked her new husband. He is unfazed, setting her to screaming as he removes his own head to stow it, grinning still, under his arm. Years later, when I thought of writing a memoir or fictionalised account of my parents’ marriage, the title I toyed with was ‘The Hag and the Head’.

If this gripping narration of a 1960s Fenland boyhood sometimes reads like fiction, the detailed evocation of characters and events, by turns humorous and traumatic, anchors it in remembered facts. The author does not soft-pedal the dysfunction at the core of a wide, supportive family in which the boy faces adult challenges, including jarring discoveries about his parents’ past and wartime history.

Review

I often feel in memoirs that brevity is the gatekeeper to the core emotions connected with memories. A coping mechanism that has become a life companion, and indeed one that is hard to detach yourself from. Behind the brevity - the gate - lies a certain level of disconnect or disassociation, which is the key to said gate. Everything seen through the coping mechanism and retold for self and scores more - it becomes a way of life.

That was my experience when reading, perhaps equally you recognise elements of self in the way you retell things or the way actions and words are framed for strangers ears or eyes. It's what resonated with me, and that in itself is testament, because any resonance with words, story, memoir is better than none at all.

I wonder also how often this picture of dysfunction that functions with often invisible threads of a greater socially, economic and familial expected connections, is actually the truth for the majority of us. Life, in general, isn't a picket fence adventure with a delightfully inspiring family and bountiful chapters of joy and peace. It's usually a roller coaster ride of trauma, pain and realisations with moments of laughter and snuck in for normality.

It's a story full of self- deprecation, humour and insightful observations. The magnifying glass observation from above, but in a way that doesn't sever heads or pass judgement - well perhaps a bit here and there. 

Buy The Sunny Side of the House at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher ‏ : ‎ SilverWood Books, pub date 17 Aug. 2024. Buy at Amazon com.