Hi everyone,

If you’ve recently liked my page on Facebook, welcome to Zoe Reads! As you may have seen, my blog has been very quiet lately, having not really posted any reviews since before the start of summer.

Initially the reason for this is that I wanted to focus more of my time on a charity walk challenge, which I took part in at the end of June 2019. I have been reading still throughout this time (I’ve read or listened to about 25 books since the start of the year), however I’ve been feeling a niggling sense of self-doubt that also led me to quit a few of my regular Gloucester Book Club meetings until recently too. I lost the fun and the sense of purpose I had started to feel when reading and reviewing books online and in my face-to-face group. The whole experience felt flat and there’d be weeks before I’d even think of picking up a book.

It all started when I was reading May’s pick for the club – The Lido by Libby Page. The book is lovely, with some fantastic character studies and a strong sense of community spirit throughout. I initially gave the book 4/5 because it was a great holiday read, and I had the pleasure of reading it beside a pool in Majorca. I should have been happy…

…and yet…

turns out I was triggered into a massive anxiety spiral by what has described as

The most uplifting, feel-good summer read of the year

(source: https://biblio.co.uk/book/lido-most-uplifting-feel-good-summer/d/1108694829).

Oh the irony.

This is because Page’s depiction of anxiety in her protagonist Kate was so spot-on, it forced me to take a look at my wellbeing and realise much was lacking. As Kate spirals through one particularly intense panic attack in a shop changing room in London, I couldn’t help but think of similar times when I’d teared up in public for no apparent reason, yet felt like the world was crashing down inside.

Like Kate, I’m a 26 year old aspiring writer from the Westcountry, who struggles with self-esteem and anxiety issues. My favourite anecdote of the whole novel comes when Kate remembers introducing herself to her MA Journalism class as being from Bristol and liking cider, from each of them to immediately launch into a list of all their publications and achievements. I resonated with that very deeply, and it still makes me laugh now, because this sense of being completely out of my depth was ultimately what put me off pursing journalism and creative writing further as a postgraduate.

Unlike Kate, (spoiler alert here for those of you who still want to read the book), I have not gotten the job at The Guardian, the London flat, and the stable, loving boyfriend at the end of my self-care rainbow. I always thought my dislike of chick-lit as a genre was due to some internalised misogyny that books about women and their love lives aren’t as worthy for serious literary consideration (and maybe it still is to a certain extent), but also the problem I had with The Lido and other ‘feel-good’ books is that they don’t actually make me feel good. At all. Once consumed, they make me feel like crap for not achieving even a small part what my fictional peers do. I know romantic heroines are idealised as hell, but surely I can’t be the only person that has this problem of being jealous of fictional characters and their happy endings?  Happy endings in fiction give hope, yet “sometimes hope can be the most painful thing”, says Page in The Lido. Hope is painful in this context because it can also magnify the absence of thing you hope for, whether that’s the safety of your local lido, or just a sense of love and purpose in your own life.

I’m starting to realise that not to being able to achieve any of the heteronormative goals of perfect career, marriage, and family is not a judgement on your worth as person, but honestly it’s taken me a few months of not reading and going through some difficult times to gain this perspective.

If I could have rewritten the ending The Lido to make it a 5/5, I would have liked it to have been a little more realistic as to where Kate ends up within the space of a year, (none of the journos I know can afford to live in London with just their partners for a start) and kept Rosemary alive, because she was undoubtedly the lifeblood of the whole story, and once she died my interest in the story left.

Other than that, I’m in a better frame of mind now so will hopefully be posting a lot more reviews here soon. Also, if anyone would like to prove me wrong about happy endings with some genuinely feel-good book recommendations, I’d love to hear them!

Zoe x