Love Lies by Adele Parks: book review

Cindy Moritz talks to Adele Parks, author of Love Lies, about her latest book and life in general…..

The best part of the Cape Town Book Fair is meeting the authors, in my humble opinion. You can get your book signed. You can hear them speak at a scheduled talk or debate. Or you can get to interview one of your favourites in a one-on-one.

That’s how I met Love Lies author Adele Parks. Just the two of us, nattering away like the girls that we are, for a precious hour, in a private space at a really nice hotel.

The story

Love Lies is a real "girl-fantasy". It is a romance story, but not in the way you'd think.

It's the story of Fern, an almost-30 florist who shares a small flat in Clapham with her best friend Jess and boyfriend Adam. Fern and Adam's four year relationship has reached a crossroads - according to Fern. She's turning 30. They barely see each other anymore. She wants to get married. So she offers Adam an ultimatum: a ring for her 30th or it's over.

Adam is a hardworking rigger (or something) in the music business. What he musters up for the big day is surprise freebies for British pop sensation Scottie Taylor's live concert. Fern is furious, but, as it turns out, it's her all-access pass arranged by Adam that gets her into Scottie's dressing room and into his life.

What follows is a whirlwind 'what if' story, where Scottie whisks Fern away from her so-called dreary life, to the glamorous, celebrity studded world of Los Angeles, USA, which, incidently, Scottie hopes to conquer with his new album.

It's every girl's fantasy... or is it?

'What if?'

Adele is big on the 'what if' moment in her writing, and in Love Lies she explores the reality of living the dream of being swept off your feet by the hottest celebrity musician around.

But is fantasy not best when it remains just that: fantasy? "We're all not meant to be extraordinary," Adele says, "and the expectation that we should be makes us dissatisfied with what we have."

And is turning 30 really such a big deal? Why, Adele asks, do women get into such an emotional turmoil at the prospect? Having just turned 40, Adele wants to send this message: "Have a ball! Your 30s are great," she says, "You'll become the woman you always wanted to be."

Adele certainly gives the impression of having done just that. She's lived through a series of ups and downs, but this is what has led her to the envious place she's in right now - best-selling author, mother of Conrad and wife to Jim. Of course, it's not so simple.

Adele Parks was once fearful

If it weren't for Adele having been in a really bad space, she would not have put fingers to keyboard for her first novel, Playing Away. While she was married to a man of whom she won't speak badly - they both had great jobs, had moved to Botswana for a few years and later had a son together - just before she hit the big 3-0, things started to go pear shaped.

"I started to lose family members," she tells me. "Eight deaths in a year. Suddenly I had the rug pulled out from under me. And I became quite scared of the world. Nothing could make me feel safe. My husband and I had been good in the good times, but we didn't handle the bad times together."

Adele had become fearful. "It's a terrible feeling. My husband must have felt scared about where his confident wife had gone."

So she confided in her grief counsellor that she couldn't see when she would feel safe, or enjoy this world again. The counsellor suggested they find the thing that would trigger some sort of happiness, and Adele replied, "Well, I do this thing...I write." Advice going forward? "Do more of that then!" And so she did. "I started structuring writing into my day, on planes, alone in hotel rooms, and I wrote like crazy. It was great escapism."

She pitched her debut novel to an agent and the life-altering call came on on her 30th birthday. He liked her style. And so her life as a published writer began.

Suddenly single

"Things were going well," Adele continues. "I got pregnant while on holiday here in Cape Town," she says with a grin, "Conrad was born and all was good. I wrote Game Over while I was pregnant. Then my husband met someone else before our son was a year, and he left."

Adele admits that she was a bit of a 'supermum'. "I did it all. I'd clean the house, work, I was too competent actually. So much change had happened to us. He left me in a position I'd never expected to be. Suddenly, seven years ago, I was a single mum."

Having Conrad around meant Adele had no real chance to let this situation get her down, and soon she joined a mom's group in her neighbourhood through an intiative organised by the National Childbirth Trust in the UK, where you get matched with mothers who have children of a similar age in your area, and get together with them for tea and chats. One of her new mum friends 'forced' her to come to a birthday party one night, and there she met Jim, who is now her husband and makes up their very happy family of three.

The perfect love, life?

Her most autobiographical novel, she says, is The Other Woman's Shoes, where two sisters, Martha and Eliza, together make up various parts of Adele's personality. In it, she explores whether there is in fact such a thing as the perfect love, the perfect life.

If there's no such thing as 'perfect' anything, though, there is always romance. And it's back to romance we reach when we're searching for hope. "I'm the most realistic romantic... or romantic realist," says Adele. "There is genuine romance out there, but you have to work at it."

On that note of wisdom, Adele grabbed her wrist and, seeing the time, gasped, gathered her things, and fled, with a dramatic over-the-shoulder farewell. She was late for her session at the Book Fair, and they couldn't start without her.

In that she reminded me a bit of her Love Lies character Fern, who did her fair share of fleeing, literally and figuratively. But Adele, thankfully, is not really running anywhere we can't find her. She's so in the moment. And I suspect she can't help being that little bit extraordinary without trying too hard either.

Buy your copy of Love Lies by Adele Parks on Kalahari.net here.

Author info: Cindy Moritz

Cindy Moritz is All4Women's contributing editor based in Cape Town. She spent ten years in magazine publishing, and was editor of fashion business title Pursuit for most of that time. She went on to edit popular parenting title Cape Town's Child, drawing on her own experience as mother of two young children. Deciding to practise what she preached, after a couple of years Cindy gave up the office job to pursue that fine balance of work and life which freelancing offers, and after having features published in a number of local magazines including Elle, Longevity, Femina and Strictly Business, she discovered www.all4women.co.za and online publishing. She's never looked back.