Second Skin - Hardcover

Perriam, Wendy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002254670 ISBN 13: 9780002254670

Publisher: Flamingo, 1998

Synopsis

The story of a woman who, at a turning point in her life, casts aside convention and embarks on a heady new existence.

Catherine Jones, conscientious working wife and mother, is catapulted into a dramatic life-change. As the shock waves subside, she realises that she’s never had the chance to be her true self, never even considered who that self might be. Over the years she has become her own gaoler, someone merely waiting to live.

Peeling off her ‘second skin’ of duty, guilt and fear, she starts living with a vengeance. She joins a bohemian flat share in Camden Town with people little older than her own children. She takes a job in Camden market – a startling contrast to suburbia. She meets a poet, Will, and embarks on her first ever affair.

But her heady new existence is threatened by her family’s demands, even, paradoxically, by Will himself. At this turning point in her life, will she succeed in her bid for freedom and become the person she was born to be?

About this title

Review

‘One of the many unsung novelists of her generation. Intelligent and accessible, she is fighting for the same bit of turf as Joanne Trollope, but she is probably the more accomplished and varied writer of the two.’
Sunday Telegraph

‘Perriam is a writer of authority and skill, with a wicked ear for conversational quirks.’
Sunday Times

‘She has a considerable command of her craft, and a shrewd sense of those aspects of contemporary life which are worth recording.’
Times Literary Supplement

From the Author

Researching Second Skin required some courage. Like Catherine in the novel, I swapped my neat suburban villa for the glorious squalor of a flat-share in Camden Town, where my twenty-something flatmates whisked me off to clubs, pubs, gigs and even a rave. I'll never forget the rave! It was run by a man in a microskirt and parachute boots, known as MC Teabag, and I was the oldest person there by several decades. As I stepped into the murky hall I felt I was entering a war zone, assaulted by flashing lights, clouds of smoke and the machine-gun-fire bombardment of the music. My first instinct was to flee - instead I stayed till almost dawn, and found myself stranded in the Holloway Road with drunks and druggies, the last train back to Surbiton long since gone.

However traumatic at the time, the experience was invaluable for the novel. I had to get inside Catherine's skin, see things through her eyes. Having reached a crisis-point, she's forced to face the fact that she's been stagnating; living through other people - as wife, mother, assistant in her husband's business. Fortunately she is given a second chance: to break free from duty and dependence, and discover her true self. But it isn't easy to live life on her own terms - there are many rival claims on her time, many conflicting demands.

This central theme in Second Skin also applies to the friends she makes in her new world - Nicky, a slave to her high-powered job in advertising; Will, a poet, whose father and ex-wife expected him to conform by getting a 'good job'; and Laura, the new mother, who has fallen for the seductive notion of 'having it all', but exhausts herself trying to juggle home, husband, baby and career.

Through these characters, I examine the relentless pressures of contemporary society - to be sexy, slim and successful; the perfect parent yet the single-minded career person. More choices and more freedom may not be the advantages they seem. And we can get so swamped by the overload of information that we never catch up or feel at peace. The UK has the longest average working week in Europe, so perhaps it's not surprising that some 270,000 people every day take time off work due to stress. And things are getting worse. One well-known doctor estimates that when the babies of today grow up, they're more likely to be admitted to a mental hospital than go to university.

Actually, writing itself is good therapy for stress. And it also provides an entree to many new and different worlds - the rave culture, for one, and Camden Market where, like Catherine, I ran a stall selling hats and waistcoats. I found the market an enigma - on the surface it's a cosy family in a friendly London village, but behind the scenes lurks a mafia of drug-dealers and Iranian gun-runners, involved in often fatal feuds.

The flat-share, too, had its highs and lows. Clothes soaking in the bath, deafening music thumping from each room, the fridge containing only beer and ice, and nothing in the larder but an array of exotic spices and a tin of Kit-e-Kat. But it was a relief to escape the tedious rituals of oven-cleaning and lawn-mowing, and I enjoyed the ambience of Camden Town. There are precious few tattoos or pierced nipples in Surbiton; no drug-pushers loitering outside Sainsbury's.

Drugs were frequently on offer at the flat. People over 40 seem to regard Ecstasy as one step away from heroin, whereas people under 30 see it as one remove from lager. Although I'm cautious myself after an addiction to barbiturates in my teens, I was impressed by the loving atmosphere at the rave. Despite my age and staid appearance (I'd been told to wear a crop-top and Doc Martens, but good heavens ...) I was instantly accepted and made to feel part of the community. And it really was a community - all sorts of people from anarchists and road protesters to nuclear physicists, seemingly at one.

Many of my novels express the deep-rooted conflict between restraint and wildness, safety and excitement - something I often experience in my own life. I'm both the staid suburban matron and the slut; the well-organised writer toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in her straitjacket.

Second Skin suggests that many of us are forced to live in a straitjacket, constrained by convention, duty, or society's demands, trapped in stifling relationships, or living by other people's rules. But the novel prompts the question: have we the courage to become our true, untrammelled self?

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0002254670
• ISBN 13: 9780002254670
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448