Items related to The Laughter Class
Synopsis
In this, her fourth collection of short stories, Perriam explores the secrets and lies that entangle people’s lives; the dreams and disappointments we often choose to hide. Many of the characters are struggling for release, seeking an escape from rules, restrictions, confinement or control. This freedom is achieved in surprisingly diverse ways – through the companionship of a plush pink Laughing Pig, or the succour of a stray mongrel abandoned in the street, or by the chance encounter in a charity shop of two desperate brides-to-be. The age-span is similarly diverse, ranging from a teenage girl, determined to disengage herself from her coercive mother’s custody, to an intrepid octogenarian who hitchhikes up to Inverness, to avoid the dreaded prospect of stair-lifts and grim wardens in a sheltered housing complex. Food is a recurring theme. One woman resigns her job to concentrate full-time on eating; another stockpiles chocolate HobNobs for her flatful of tame mice; a third gorges herself on grapes, to fill her drab existence with pulsating purple passion. The fact that this feast is imaginary does nothing to dilute its power. In Perriam’s world, fantasy is highly therapeutic. Her quirky but courageous characters build gingerbread houses or castles in the air, to fill the holes in their lives. Many battle with fears and vulnerabilities, or with the absence of long-lost partners, yet still search, heroically, for love.
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About the Author
Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column. Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’
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- PublisherCB Creative Books
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 1782923128
- ISBN 13 9781782923121
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages272
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