Chapter One

You have a year to live.

How does that make you feel?

Are you going to sit around and think about what that means or are you going to think like Penny? Penny's attitude was "Right then, bring it on. I'm going to live every last second I have to the full."

When my mother told me she had 'a year' it took me a while to realise she meant a year to live – just a year. At first, I thought she meant she'd be ill for a year. I imagined a year of comings and goings to hospital, a year of radiotherapy, of chemotherapy, of losing appetite, losing hair, not having much energy, basically a year of illness getting in the way of life. But I thought there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Self preservation, I reckon.

I can't remember now exactly when the realisation came in my own case but I think it was pretty close to the end. I continued to believe that my mother would get better even when she was mostly bedridden, not eating, barely drinking.

Annie, too, believes in the wonders of modern medicine. She believes her mother will get better. Penny is a strong character. She is full of determination and she is damned sure that she is going to make the most of life. This illness isn't going to get her down.

Is Annie being unrealistic? Undoubtedly, but I'm not going to tell her that.

 

 

 

Origins

Between the lines of Dance with Me are two major themes, bereavement and achievement.

 

Firstly Dance with Me was my own way of dealing with bereavement. I have come to realise, lately, that I deal with most of my stressful situations through writing. Somehow, I find that writing eases the pain. I wonder if I have perhaps offloaded some of the pain I feel onto my characters. I have shed a tear or two in writing this story, but telling myself this is fiction has allowed me to blub while in the zone, and then pull myself together – because it is not me feeling this pain, it's my characters. Well, I think that's healthy even if it is a bit like writing in to an agony aunt on the pretext of 'I've got this friend who...'

 

Dance with Me was also a response to a personal need to explore my own life choices.

 

In coming to terms with the loss of my mother and my aunt and discovering the hereditary nature of their killer disease, as well as becoming a mother myself, I lost any kind of feeling of ambition, other than an overwhelming desire to stay alive long enough to see my two daughters to secondary school. So two interlinked issues I wanted to explore were ambition and achievement and how these fit into a post-feminist society.

 

Just because I can, does that mean I have to? How do I know I can, if I don't? Why do I think I can't because I haven't? Does any of this matter?

 

About Dance with Me

Dance with me is a book about life. It is a celebration of life, of love and of friendship.