The Days of Judy B
On paper, 23-year-old Judy Bishop is a successful journalist, the author of a first-person column in a Sunday newspaper, in which she documents the life of a fabulously social young professional: clothes, men, parties, laughs. In reality, she is a friendless depressive: living alone in Bethnal Green, teetering on the edge of obesity, wallowing in hard liquor and just about sustaining herself through a well-informed obsession with the golden age of musical theatre.
Judy is a woman in the mother of all ruts. With every week that passes, another exit is boarded up. Things have to change; and soon. Bracing herself to emerge from beneath her washed-out, single duvet, she gives herself 17 weeks in which to conduct the Great Overhaul, 17 weeks in which she can burst out into the functioning world in a flurry of men, wine, and song.
And that’s when things really begin to unravel. As Judy careers around London on a quest to change her life – from losing her virginity in a provincial Novotel to frying her hair with domestic bleach – she finds herself plumbing new depths of degradation and despair.
A stunningly accomplished debut from Rose Heiney, The Days of Judy B is clever, touching, disturbingly funny. This is a book for anyone who has ever felt their life teetering on the edge; it will take you from laughter to tears and back again – via the dark places of the soul where fear and insecurity lurk.
About the author
Rose Heiney is 23 and lives in London, where she works as an actress and writer. She graduated from Oxford University in 2006. This is her first novel