Topping and Tailing

Do these work as dedication and disclaimer? (I really don’t think I can get away with the disclaimer, but I record it for posterity!)

For Dixie Delicious. Because you loved her when she was Hapless

And you love her now she’s Annie.

Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction and, while real authors and musicians are characters in the book, they are in the role of imaginary friends and are the author’s interpretations only. Resemblances to anyone else living, dead or undead but still quite lively, are drawn as literary creations only.

One of my central characters isn’t actually alive, but is pretty frisky. Others are long dead but very much alive in Annie’s imagination and affect the way in which she marshalls ideas, thoughts and words. ‘Dixie Delicious’ is a character I hope readers will love and, of course, he nabs the dedication to the book because, if he existed (I reiterate that this is a work of fiction), I would throw myself in front of a speeding car, I would take a lightning strike and I would give my last for that man.

So then I started going over any copyright issues and sketching in a list of acknowledgements and it came out like this (incomplete; dates to add – as I’ve got to follow the MHRA Style Guide for attributions consistently……)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have quoted in the briefest possible terms or used brief paraphrase of the following: Albert Camus: The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus and Selected Essays and Notebooks; Louis MacNeice: ‘Meeting Point’, ‘Thalassa’, ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ and ‘Autumn Journal’; Simone de Beauvoir: Force of Circumstance; Sylvia Plath: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Collected Journals, ‘Words’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Cut’ and ‘Daddy’; Patrick Kavanagh: ‘Prelude’; Philip Larkin: ‘Faith Healer’; Dylan Thomas: A Child’s Christmas in Wales; T.S.Eliot: ‘Prufrock’ and ‘The Journey of the Magi’; Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient; Dorothy Rowe: Depression: The Way Out Of Your Prison; Samuel Beckett: ‘Happy Days’,‘Waiting for Godot’ and  Collected Poems; W.H. Auden: ‘Musee des Beaux Artes’; W.B Yeats: ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’; Dolly Parton: ‘Coat of Many Colours’ and My Life and Other Unfinished Business; Peter Hogan: Shirley Bassey. Diamond Diva (2008); John L. Williams: Miss Shirley Bassey (2010); Johnny Cash: ‘Down there by the train’; Abba:‘Waterloo’,‘Supertrouper’ and ‘Gimme Gimme a Man after Midnight’; definitions given on the NHS website for its mental health and associated medication information pages and from the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) 5.

If any other quotation or literary reference has piqued an interest, others texts referred to (or quoted but out of copyright) are: Dante: Inferno; Charles Dickens: Great Expectations; Derrida: Positions; Aristotle: The Poetics; Charlotte Perkins Gilman: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’; John Skelton: ‘On the Death of the Noble Prince King Edward the Fourth’; Walt Whitman; ‘Song of Myself’ from ‘Leaves of Grass’; Andrew Marvell: ‘A Horation Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’; D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers; William Empson: Seven Types of Ambiguity;‘John Keats: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘Collected Letters’; William Shakespeare: The Tempest; Kenneth Graham: The Wind in the Willows; Roald Dahl: James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox and Danny the Champion of the World; J.R.R. Tolkein: ‘Concerning Hobbits’ from The Lord of the Rings. The strange little poem about ‘Bucket Baby’ that you find in chapter one contains the first line of Richard Lovelace’s ‘To Althea. From Prison’ and the rest of the poem is a pastiche of its form, only; the first line is part of an extended metaphor in the book: that of the prison. Finally, The story about Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush being found in Calcutta, as signed by the author in memory of a walk on Dorset Cliffs with Ted and Vi […]is true and the book is on my shelves at home. Signposts, you see.

I think that when this goes back for edits there might be hard stares, because there’s rather a long list for a work of fiction – and I’ll have to suck it up. And yet it’s all in there. The content of the book and its storyline were necessarily tangled up with a number of people – singers; writers; divas! Because you see Annie is a great bookworm and at least partially detached from the real world. [Depending on one’s definition of ‘real’, of course.] Writers and their creations and also songs and the spirit and sentiment behind them: those are intrinsic to how she copes with any interaction in the world and how she comforts or defines herself; she sometimes uses others’ language to find voice. A slew of acknowledgements and what looks like a reading list would not, I think, find a place in my subsequent books, but in Killing Hapless Annie, this is truly how it went. Although of course it’s fiction; definitely fiction. As I’ve now said three times and I’m sure the lady doth not, ‘protest too much, methinks.’