2003 - Thanks for the Vodka

A book of Raw Emotion and Unpretentious Humour


Follow the trials and tribulations of author Harpie, who having suffered a heart attack and double miscarriage the previous year, undergoes gastric stomach removal and heart surgery while trying to publish three books at the same time. Not to mention dealing with unscrupulous publishers.

But this book isn’t all it seems, for in true Harpie fashion she bleeds her life onto the page and before you know it an hour has gone by and you’re still reading, caught up in tales of the hard family she married into, the ups downs and bruises from her gypsy husband and his tyrannical mother.

Scottish poet, William Soutar, called a diary an "Assassin's cloak" because as well as betraying others we also betray ourselves, sharing “denigrations which we would be ashamed of voicing aloud,” and going on to claim that we wear this ‘Assassin’s Cloak’ when stabbing a comrade in the back with a pen.

Well, in ‘2003, Thanks for the Vodka’ Harpie doesn’t so much stab a comrade in the back with a pen, but turns informer on herself, selling herself for the price of a book.

Harpie’s deepest and most intimate feelings gush from her, revealing memories buried deep in shadowy parts of her subconscious. Stemming from the murder of her mother, Harpie is thrown into a life as far away from normal as Justin Bieber is from Ozzy Osbourne, leaving her with a psychological itch that burns like vaginal infection. In this book she pieces together further missing parts of her lost childhood.

More than a modern-day and quirky diary, this is the story of one woman’s life told with brutal and shameless honesty. 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. Unlike many writers, Harpie has no fear of words and will not hide behind them. She takes a statement, stripping it of bullshit or feeble excuses and laying it out for scrutiny. She can write her truth and miss absolutely nothing out, but always with that beautiful self-deprecating sense of humour common to the British.

It was Ernest Hemingway who said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” Well, this book is the truest sentence Harpie knows.


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