It is my great pleasure to welcome Ruth Leigh to my blog today, as part of her blog tour. She has written a fantastic novel, which I couldn’t put down. It is a sort of Bridget Jones for a new generation!

Almost as soon as I had written the first few paragraphs of my novel, The Diary of Isabella M Smugge, I realised that I had created a woman who was a past master at pretence. Having endowed her with a gigantic Georgian house, an immaculate garden, a thriving career and happy lute-playing children in the original blog back in April last year, I had the foundations on which to build a story.

THE ART OF MASK WEARING

I knew my heroine would be extremely good at talking the talk, and so indeed she proved to be. However, it was the little asides that started to betray Isabella. Quoting her mother’s advice about marriage, she comments, ‘Not that it worked out for her and Daddy, but that’s another story.’

Isabella has learned to accentuate the positive, to shine a light on the successful and push anything which might detract from that under the beautifully vacuumed carpet. ‘Naturally’ she’d thought about going for private education, ‘Of course’ her son has been down for a place at her husband’s old school since before he was born. She peppers her diary entries with hashtags, drawing us into her perfect world. 

Sharp-eyed readers will have noted that her parents’ marriage came to grief, and very nearly at the end of the first chapter, she reveals another sadness, triggered by her youngest child’s first day in Reception. Sent away to boarding school at seven, she recalls her mother’s advice to be a brave girl. However, seeing her little sister running down the drive after the car sobbing helplessly is still a painfully vivid memory. ‘Funny,’ she muses, ‘I haven’t thought of that for years.’

THE NEED FOR ‘PERFECTION’

You could say that life as a successful influencer and aspirational lifestyle blogger comes with the need to construct and wear masks. Isabella’s followers are complicit, clicking on perfect images of smiling children, beautiful interiors, parties which never go Pete Tong and wholesome family holidays on sparkling snow-covered slopes. There’s no place for nits, verrucas, sickness bugs, dandruff, ingrowing toenails or anxiety in this blissful world. 

And yet Ms Smugge is as human as her followers, as flawed as we all are, just much, much more practiced in covering it up. It really matters to her that her readers are on the right path, the one which leads to a tidy, sparkling kitchen, a playroom with beautifully arranged toys and a garden with a trampoline, a swimming pool and elegant flower beds, plus a Victorian greenhouse. Isabella has got everything our consumer society tells us we should have, and yet, and yet…

Gin plays a significant part in our heroine’s life, mostly consumed by her mother, ‘Mummy’. Musing about her childhood, presided over by a loving, non-judgemental figure paid by her parents to look after her, Isabella remembers bad days when her father came home to find a gin-soaked and angry mother waiting, ready to have a row. On goes the mask. ‘I wouldn’t want to give you the impression that we had a bad childhood. We had lots of toys, a treehouse, lovely parties and our ponies in the paddock. Nanny would whisk us off upstairs if Mummy and Daddy had one of their arguments, but often, when we were supposed to be asleep, Suze and I would creep out of bed and sit at the top of the stairs, listening to the voices shouting and the doors banging.’

Painting sad little vignettes like this one – two frightened little girls listening to a huge domestic kicking off downstairs – helped me to understand Isabella. She’s worked so hard to get to where she is. All the boxes are ticked, but underneath the shiny veneer, something isn’t right. As the novel goes on, her perfect life begins to unravel and the people who stand by her aren’t the ones she would have expected.

LETTING MY OWN MASK SLIP

When I joined the Association of Christian Writers and went along to my first writers’ day, one of the books I bought was one of Claire’s, Taking Off The Mask. As I read it, I found myself nodding in agreement, saying, ‘Yes. That’s exactly how it is.’ It spoke to me and I read it at a time in my life when I was ready to start allowing my mask to slip. I’m so glad I did, because without that frightening step (and it is scary, no doubt about it), Isabella would never have sprung into life and I wouldn’t be sitting here now, surrounded by tubes of Love Hearts and book wraps, rejoicing that I finally have my heart’s desire.

Isabella certainly learns some lessons as her life progresses and I have too. We all wear masks, to a certain extent, but the joy and the empowerment which comes with taking them off is hard to better. Here’s to a life lived honestly, or, as Isabella might say, #takingoffthemask.

Ruth Leigh is a novelist, blogger and freelance writer based in beautiful East Suffolk. This is her first novel.