S  E  C  O  N  D      S  K  I  N

"It seems crazy that in all that time
I never stopped to think what I
was actually cut out to do or be.
But I'm sure I'm not unusual.
There must be hundreds of people
stuck in jobs they hate, or married
to the wrong partner, or trying to
be someone they're not. It's such
an awful waste."

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?    

Wendy Perriam was born to write.     
She looks at the world with       
a different eye from the        
rest of us. Her work refreshes        
and exhilarates. She gets to the       
heart of the matter, and there,     
lurking beneath the seriously mundane,   
we discover the spiritual underpinnings  
of the universe. I am her greatest fan. 
Fay Weldon   

Perriam dramatises her heroine's      
dilemma with verve and humour,        
and her descriptions of metropolitan           
types are enjoyably larger-than-life.           
The Times             

It would be hard not to warm to              
the life-enhancing spirit of this tale               
of one woman's journey to self-discovery               
through thoroughly bad behaviour.              
Good Housekeeping              

Required reading for those who feel            
that there is more to life than the         
cards they've been dealt.     
Deborah Moggach   

"Like my heroine, Catherine, I left the safety of suburbia to join the glorious squalor of a flat-share in Camden Town with 3 twenty-something friends who whisked me off to clubs, pubs, gigs and even a rave (where I was the oldest person by a good 20 years).

Despite their hectic social life, my flatmates worked extremely long hours, and Second Skin examines the relentless pressures of contemporary society - to be sexy, slim and successful; a perfect caring parent who can also hold down a 9 to 5 (or like as not 9 to 7) job. More choices and more freedom may not be the advantages they seem. Stress increases as the tide of information increases; our need to play a dozen different roles. 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.

The novel poses the question: have we the courage to break out of the straitjacket of duty, convention, or society's demands, and become our true, untrammelled self?"