Dead Babies and Seaside Towns

Description

The world of dead babies is a silent and shuttered place. You do not know it exists until you find yourself there. When Alice Jolly's second child was stillborn and all subsequent attempts to have another baby failed, she began to consider every possible option, no matter how unorthodox. Dead Babies and Seaside Towns is a savagely personal account of the search for an alternative way to create a family. As she battles through miscarriage, IVF and failed adoption attempts, Alice's only solace from the pain is the faded charm of Britain's crumbling seaside towns. Finally, this search leads her and her husband to a small town in Minnesota, and two remarkable women who offer to make the impossible possible. In this beautiful book, shot through with humour and full of hope, Alice Jolly describes with a novelist's skill events that woman live through every day - even if many feel compelled to keep them hidden. Her decision not to hide but to share them, without a trace of sentiment or self-pity, turns Dead Babies and Seaside Towns into a universal story: one that begins in tragedy but ends in joy.

Alice Jolly is a novelist, playwright and teacher of creative writing. Her two novels, What the Eye Doesn't See and If Only You Knew are published by Simon and Schuster and she was the winner of the 2014 V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize for the best unpublished story of the year. Four of her plays have been produced by the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham. She teaches for The Arvon Foundation and on the Oxford University Master's Degree in Creative Writing. She has three children - a son who is twelve, a daughter who was stillborn and a daughter who was born to a surrogate mother in the United States. She lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire and is married to Stephen Kinsella.

"The miracle is that this powerfully written book is not only bearable but compulsively readable. It should be grim but it is absolutely not. Jolly's resolute determination to tell the whole, exhausting truth, however searing, emotional, unfashionable, unpalatable or savagely humorous, keeps is turning the pages, well into the night, and cheering her on." * Financial Times * "Her account is astonishingly moving and her prose nothing short of hypnotic." * Independent * "Beautifully written and brutally honest." * Sunday Times * "So beautifully written that you can't stop reading." * Woman and Home * "Alice's writing is so precise and courageous it transforms her grief into a deeply powerful sense of hope and defiance." -- Rowan Pelling