Goodnight, and Thanks for the Vodka [2002]

A book of Raw Emotion!

In Harpie’s wacky, psycho, screwball, demented book she bares her soul, revealing her innermost thoughts, slashing a metaphoric vein and bleeding onto the page

Harpie’s deepest and most intimate feelings gush from her, revealing anxieties ranging from her feelings for her mother, who died in tragic and suspicious circumstances, to her resentment towards her father. And then there were others who abused her physically, mentally, emotionally and sexually. All this is tied up and interwoven with her love of her young son, Mike.

Harpie has memories buried deep in shadowy parts of her subconscious that she’s never been able to reach. They include the mystery surrounding her mother’s murder. With the help of a clinical psychologist and regressive hypnotism, she revisits the past as she dips in and out of Now and Then.

In 'Vodka' Harpie uncovers the missing parts her lost childhood.

More than a modern-day and quirky diary, this is the story of one woman’s life in a typical English small town, encompassing the characters, texture and mentality of everyday living, told with brutal and shameless honesty while all the while cross-threading with a struggle for survival and acceptance.

This is no jump on the bandwagon 'pity me' story, as the vein of humour running through every chapter is testament. Harpie’s goal in writing ‘Vodka’ is to prove to the cynics that it can be done. She can write her truth and miss nothing out – heart attacks, miscarriages, beatings, blood gushing, sex, poverty, mayhem, men and vodka - and always with that beautiful self-deprecating sense of humour common to the British.

After suffering a miscarriage, followed by a heart attack and having stopped breathing in intensive care she signs herself out of the hospital, clothing caked in dried blood, because there’s nobody at home to see to the animals. The following day Harpie berates herself for just sitting about moping all day on the sofa, so scrubs herself up and goes down the pub. The next day she walks four miles to the hospital to pick her car up, reasoning that “the walk might do me some good.” You can’t help but admire and applaud her efforts to keep her life on track, staying in work and as a single mum ensuring her child has a safe home life.

This book began as a social experiment in honesty after a debate among authors about how honest it's possible to be. Harpie set out to prove that everything can be written, the good, the bad and the shameful. There is nowhere that this woman won’t go. If there’s a line to cross, Harpie will stick out her chest and limbo under it, jump over it or dance through it with a glass of vodka in her hand while never spilling a drop.

This is a book of raw emotion …. And it bleeds

KW