The Back-Up Plan

Description

At 27 years old, I found myself with a broken down marriage and two children under two to raise on my own. I had no other option than to survive. Nah, scratch that, I needed to thrive. But where would I begin? I wasn't sure if I knew how to live alone, let alone how to boss it solo with a couple of kids in tow. It's been a hell of a journey signposted with dating fails, money worries and ex-husband woes, but when was a Back-up Plan ever straightforward? This book is the one I needed to read in the lonely 3am darkness of an unfixable marriage, lying next to a man I was sure I didn't want to be tied to anymore but whom I was too scared to leave. This book is the one I needed to read when I picked up my first packet of anti-depressants and read Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation to feel off-the-cuff and cool (but just felt more depressed). This book is the one I needed to read in the infinitely long days that stretched ahead of me alone with two infants, minimal sleep and no hope. This book is the one I needed to read when shamefully I carted my two toddlers to Boots to pick up my very first Morning After Pill after my very first One Night Stand. This book is the I needed to read when my world was about to fall apart.

Alice Judge-Talbot is a blogger, writer and entrepreneur from Buckinghamshire, a quiet place she found herself in when she became a single mum to two under two at the age of twenty-seven. She started her blog in 2009 when she found herself pregnant in a group of friends where 'Mum' was a word used for the woman you called when you broke up with your boyfriend, knowing nobody in her real life had even an inkling of a baby on the horizon. Since then, Alice has written frankly, funnily and emotively on the subjects that affect mums the world over: from pregnancy and childbirth to post-natal depression, divorce and life as a single mother. She is now the thriving and proud mother of a five and seven year-old, writing a successful blog called More Than Toast as well as a column for the Telegraph, and she has thankfully worked out what day the bins go out.