Killing Hapless Ally, by Anna Vaught, is a fictional memoir exploring mental illness and how the protagonist, Alison, learns to cope with her life through the creation of an alter ego and a host of…
Day 3 of my alphabet – a gift for you, all about looking after ourselves. The letter C – for comfort
The Life of Almost. My very own Pembrokeshire Estella.
He, Roland, touched her wrong; he did not cradle her at night, not understand that her own beautiful scorn was from her pain, sea girl trapped, and if he had, what would it have mattered? He had her to set on his arm and place where he should and that was enough. He used her roughly; cursed her barren; not a mother, nor a soft gentle thing. He cast her out, within her home. I could not stand to hear it all and howled again and she clung and my God I cannot tell you how beautiful she was because it would be like…it would be like trying to beat the heart of a star with a warped broom; like lifting up prayers with dirty hands and biting mouths. That is something like it was.
We walked out through the woods and I gathered bluebells, pressed them upon her.
‘Forgive me, Almost.’
‘I already have’ I said; I fell on my knees in the stream and mud and the bluebells were crushed with her, I me, oh -and us, together: tremendous.
Her heart was opened then. I saw it.
Afterwards, I took her hand and I knew that there would be no shadow of another parting from her. I thought, also that there might be a way back to the sea.
Epigraph of The Life of Almost
For Ned. Because Almost is also a love story: Seren, Mfanwy, Perfection, Mammy, the sacred headland and the mermaids. And you are my story and my song. x
This is what it says at the beginning of my next book, The Life of Almost: wish me luck, as it has gone, by kind request, out to an agent who liked the writing in Killing Hapless Ally; the ms has also gone to a press; later in October, it is going out elsewhere and, to my utter surprise, a really lovely person at one of, you know, the big five, said they would look at it just to be helpful. I said it wasn’t really, as far as I could see, a commercial proposition, but then it is the next story I had in me. I know it’s ambitious and I do know about Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs. Ah, but bear with now. This one now is comical, I hope; indebted to Dickens and to Dylan Thomas; to generations in Pembrokeshire and beyond; to the coffin hatch in my own house; to the dead, who are legion and all around; to mermaid lore; The Mabinogion; Celtic Magic, Gwyn Williams, Danny Abse, the earliest Welsh poems, the Southern Gothic I married, books on sex, embalming and death practice, John Donne and Dickens again. And don’t you want to know who or what Almost is? How mermaids love? Why a child was found sleeping on a headland gravestone? Why moss creeps and sucks at your feet as you dare to tread? How a love story happens over the embalming table and how Almost feels, when he meets Derian Llewhellin, both fear and happiness and a blurring of his edges and how it is he begins to understand what he is capable of. The story begins this squalid summer, June 2016, but oh…it is old, old, old.
THE LIFE OF ALMOST OR,
A LIFE OF VERY LITTLE EXPECTATION
Anna Vaught
Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction, I swear on The Mabinogion and the sacred headland. Characters in this book are fictional, although I have drawn upon the history of my own Welsh family and diaspora and many things which to me seem normal and maybe which, to you, do not. I make no apology for references to the political situation in the summer of 2016 while a cunning clown and cohorts and a tide of rage pushed through the always unexpected rain. Real places named in the book are at least partly fictionalised and the dead and undead are somewhat mixed up. But enough: don’t you want to know about Almost? He was mine; now I am giving him to you.
All poems (unless otherwise attributed, but out of copyright) are by the author.
Lewis, the Younger, who went away
When I was a kid, Lewis took his own life.
I heard them say he took it, but where it went,
I couldn’t say or wasn’t told. Perhaps it had
been drained, in The Sloop, with all his pints,
or thrown gladly off Stack Rocks with a shout
that he married well and was a man they liked,
but I don’t know. For once, though I was very young,
I saw a look from out the corner of his eye as he shipped
off, went laughing with the pot boys and his girl:
that look it said, I think, that Lewis wanted rescuing,
but no-one came, as the sea foam danced in Cardigan Bay.
“Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son—more to me nor any son.”
Abel Magwitch, Great Expectations, chapter thirty nine.
Killing Hapless Ally by Anna Vaught (Fiction)
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The Emma Press Anthology of the Sea
Ta da! This is the next book I am in.
People’s Book Prize
LIKED MY DEBUT, KILLING HAPLESS ALLY? YOU CAN VOTE FOR IT THROUGH THE LINK BELOW X
http://www.peoplesbookprize.com/section.php?id=6
Killing Hapless Ally
By Anna Vaught
Published by Patrician Press
ISBN 978-0-9932388-6-4
Category Humour
Autumn 2016 (Sept – Nov)
Synopsis
This is a black comedy in which young Alison conceived an alter ego ‘Hapless Ally’ to present a more palatable version of herself to her family and others. Ominously, the alter ego began to develop autonomy. Alison deals with this helped by a varied catalogue of imaginary friends.
Author’s Biography
Anna is an English teacher, mentor and tutor for young people, copywriter and freelance journalist; she has self-published two previous books, been a volunteer nationally and internationally and now writes poetry (to be published by The Emma Press this autumn and Patrician Press in the spring), as well as working on a new novel and some short stories. Anna is also a mental health campaigner and advocate and the mum of three young boys.
Reviews
Contemporary Small Press May 2016 https://thecontemporarysmallpress.com/2016/05/04/darkly-funny-and-courageous-killing-hapless-ally/
Amazon (link as above) 7 Reviews
Price £10.00
Liked my debut novel, Killing Hapless Ally and want to offer a vote for it? Here’s a link.
Anna xxxx
The Life of Almost
Ah, I struggle with a synopsis, but here you go. THE NEXT (alongside the other stuff).
This is for you, Alex Campbell. x
Anna Vaught
The Life of Almost
or,
A Life Of Very Little Expectation
A synopsis
The Life of Almost is a re-working of the story in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, shifting its setting to a wild, mysterious and comical rural South West Wales, the West Country and the suburbs of London. Some characters are based on those found in its stimulus, but others are original —such as Evans the Bodies, keeper of the mortuary and devoted to his Dead Dears. And Muffled Mfanwy, who works with him and with whom Evans has been in love his entire life; their story in startling surroundings is a counterpoint to other love stories in the book, such as that between Almost and the cruel Seren, adopted daughter of the claw-handed spinster Miss Davies, at Clandestine House off the sea coast on the Cleddau Estuary.
Almost is a boy with poor beginnings, who begins his life shrouded by bereavement, the struggling, the bitter and those on the run from the law and from life; he is also surrounded by the hauntings of the undead of his family and the cliff-top communities around him. He plays in the sea caves, visits graves, like Pip, sings into the sea and likes to tell stories—and telling stories is a key theme of the book. Many strands of the narrative I took not from Dickens but from the oral tradition of my large Pembrokeshire family, such as accounts of poltergeists throwing furniture and vases from the fireplace, gibbering dead and moss that caught your foot and sucked at you if you didn’t move quickly enough; things that enthralled and terrified me as a small child. The drownings, skewerings and disappearances that have always rattled in my imagination find form in The Life of Almost.
Almost is dragged up by his sister Perfection, both of them kept in their place from beyond the grave by their mother and grandmother. Almost cries with the name his late mother gave him because he feels he will never amount to much, but gradually he begins to realise that, by calling to the world around him and by telling stories, extraordinary things begin to happen. For Almost is, really, an extraordinary boy.
Almost has, like Pip, a secret benefactor and a true love; he has his own convict and a cruel sister, but this re-working of the story adds more spectral, supernatural elements and more comedy in that Almost, through his story-telling develops the gift of moving through time and through form so as to come and rescue others from suffering, hardship and the loneliness of loss. It is at this point, at the beginning of the book, where we meet him, when as he appears to Catherine who begins the story, sitting, lost and stifled “in the squalid summer of 2016”.
Almost is supported by his devoted mermaids, Dilys and Nerys, who follow him, changing form (I have drawn on extensive mermaid lore in my research for the book), and by a number of friends in different locations. But readers of Great Expectations, would recognise adaptations of characters, such as Pip’s friend, Herbert Pocket, Miss Havisham, Estella and Jaggers (the latter, for example, recast as a lugubrious but prosperous journeyman, basking in his gold and quoting Jonson’s Volpone from his gated community a long way from Almost’s Pembrokeshire!).
I have allowed some risk-taking with the novel’s form in its use of original poems as epigraphs, all of which key in to the themes in the novel, as they describe the dark vagaries of the Welsh landscape, which is itself a key character in the book, living and breathing and casting penumbra and surrounded by the sea. I have also offered two endings to the love story in my book because I wanted to bring to mind how Great Expectations might have been radically altered in its reception, had Dickens been encouraged to use his original ending, far more melancholy that that which replaced it.
Not the Booker, 2016
So…if you have read and liked my debut novel, Killing Hapless Ally, and it meant something to you; if it made you laugh; you thought it had weight; if it made you fall madly in love with Albert Camus or understand what mental health problems or mental illness might be like (my publisher makes it clear at the beginning of the book that I drew on many episodes in my own life; if you like semi colons, Dolly Parton, poetry and laughing at the dark things…go on, vote for it. The article that follows is from ‘The Guardian’ and below is the link you need to click on, register with ‘The Guardian’, then offer your vote. Actually, there should be two votes, but you need only comment on one of the books.
And look at all those indies! What follows, then, is from ‘The Guardian’; just underneath it, I’ve copied my votes.
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Not the Booker prize (very) longlist 2016: votes, please!
If you felt this year’s Man Booker selection was not broad enough, get a load of ours. And help decide which books make the shortlist
Last week the Man Booker longlist was announced. A little surprising, right?
OK, I’m happy to admit that the main prize has a few things going for it. But I always feel that its longlist is just as notable for its omissions as the books that are chosen. This year was no exception. A few good books sometimes sneak on there – but dozens more don’t make it. And you know what? The Booker’s so-called longlist isn’t even that long. Not like the Not the Booker. As you will see below, our list really is long.
There are well over 100 books, making 2016 a record year already. So thank you to everyone who has contributed so far. And I hope you stick around as the real work begins. Because we somehow have to whittle this mighty list down to a manageable half-dozen books.
And how do we do that? We vote! If you want to take part, all you have to do is choose two books from the longlist, from two different publishers, and accompany those votes with a short review of at least one of your chosen books. It would also be very helpful if you included the word “vote”.
The review should be something over 100 words long, although as our glorious and shining Terms and Conditions state, we won’t be counting that carefully. Just make it look like you care.
It’s that simple. So let’s get voting. You’ve got just over a week. The deadline is 23.59 on 14 August 2016. The contenders are:
Megan Abbott– You Will Know Me (Picador)
Lesley Allen – The Lonely Life of Biddy Weir (Twenty7)
Deborah Andrews – Walking the Lights (Freight Books)
Louis Armand – The Combinations (Equus)
Kate Armstrong – The Storyteller (Holland House)
Jason Arnopp – The Last Days of Jack Sparks (Orbit)
Jenn Ashworth – Fell (Sceptre)
Chris Bachelder – The Throwback Special (WW Norton & Company)
Jo Baker – A Country Road, A Tree (Doubleday)
Julian Barnes – The Noise of Time (Jonathan Cape)
Shirley Barrett – Rush Oh! (Little, Brown)
Kevin Barry – Beatlebone (Doubleday)
Louise Beech – The Mountain in My Shoe (Orenda)
Claire-Louise Bennett – Pond (Fitzcarraldo)
Bill Beverly – Dodgers (No Exit Press)
Lochlan Bloom – The Wave (Dead Ink)
Lisa Blower – Sitting Ducks (Fair Acre)
Megan Bradbury – Everyone Is Watching (Picador)
Caroline Brothers – The Memory Stones (Bloomsbury)
Liam Brown – Wild Life (Legend Press)
Rowan Hisayo Buchanon – Harmless Like You (Sceptre)
Tom Bullough – Addlands (Granta)
Paul Burston – The Black Path (Accent Press Ltd)
Jackie Buxton – Glass Houses (Urbane Publications)
Louise Candlish – The Swimming Pool (Penguin)
Joanna Cannon – The Trouble With Goats and Sheep (The Borough Press)
Emma Chapman – The Last Photograph (Picador)
Anna Chilvers – Tainted Love (Bluemoose)
Dan Clements – What Will Remain (Silvertail)
Clár Ni Chonghaile – Fractured (Legend Press)
Chris Cleave – Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (Sceptre)
Emma Cline – The Girls (Chatto & Windus)
Paul MM Cooper – River of Ink (Bloomsbury)
Mark Connors – Stickleback (Armley Press)
Isabel Costello – Paris Mon Amour (Canelo)
Jack Cox – Dodge Rose (Dalkey Archive Press)
Justin Cronin – The City of Mirrors (Orion)
Rachel Cusk – Transit (Jonathan Cape)
Shelley Day – The Confession of Stella Moon (Contraband)
Don DeLillo – Zero K (Picador)
Ruth Dugdall – Nowhere Girl (Legend Press)
Sophie Duffy – Bright Stars (Legend Press)
Ken Edwards – Country Life (Unthank Books)
Jo Ely – Stone Seeds (Urbane Publications)
Guillermo Erades – Back to Moscow (Scribner UK)
Pamela Erens – Eleven Hours (Atlantic Books)
Lyn G Farrell – The Wacky Man (Legend Press)
Julia Forster – What a Way to Go (Atlantic Books)
Harry Gallon – The Shapes Of Dogs’ Eyes (Dead Ink)
Ruth Gilligan – Nine Folds Make A Paper Swan (Atlantic Books)
Jules Grant – We Go Around in the Night and Are Consumed By Fire (Myriad)
Guinevere Glasfurd – The Words in My Hand (Two Roads)
Garth Greenwell – What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giraux)
David John Griffin – Infinite Rooms (Urbane Publications)
Michael Grothaus – Epiphany Jones (Orenda Books)
Lee Harrison – The Bastard Wonderland (Wrecking Ball Press)
Adam Haslett – Imagine Me Gone (Little Brown and Company)
Noah Hawley – Before the Fall (Hodder & Stoughton)
Matt Hill – Graft (Angry Robot)
Catherine Hokin – Blood and Roses (Yolk Publishing)
Anna Hope – The Ballroom (Doubleday)
Michael Hughes – The Countenance Divine (John Murray)
Dave Hutchinson – Europe at Midnight (Solaris)
Amanda Jennings – In Her Wake (Orenda Books)
Elnathan John – Born on a Tuesday (Cassava Republic)
Anjali Joseph – The Living (Fourth Estate)
Avril Joy – Sometimes a River Song (Linen Press)
Mireille Juchau – The World Without Us (Bloomsbury)
James Kelman – Dirt Road (Canongate)
Claire King – Everything Love Is (Bloomsbury)
Hannah Kohler – The Outside Lands (Picador)
John Lake – Amy and the Fox (Armley Press)
Jem Lester – Shtum (Orion)
Ashley Lister – Raven and Skull (Caffeine Nights Publishing)
Carol Lovekin – Ghostbird (Honno Welsh Women’s Press)
PK Lynch – Armadillos (Legend Press)
Martin MacInnes – Infinite Ground (Atlantic Books)
Kevin MacNeil – The Brilliant and Forever (Polygon)
Seraphina Madsen – Dodge and Burn (Dodo Ink)
Brooke Maganti – The Turning Tide (W&N)
Ayisha Malik – Sophia Khan is Not Obliged (Twenty7)
Michael J Malone – Bad Samaritan (Contraband)
Iain Maloney – The Waves Burn Bright (Freight Books)
Sarah Ladipo Manyika – Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (Cassava Republic Press)
Alex Marwood – The Darkest Secret (Sphere)
Colum McCann – Thirteen Ways of Looking (Bloomsbury)
Tiffany McDaniel – The Summer That Melted Everything (Scribe)
Ian McGuire – The North Water (Scribner UK)
Elizabeth McKenzie – The Portable Veblen (Penguin Press)
Wyl Menmuir – The Many (Salt)
Sarah Meyrick – Knowing Anna (SPCK Publishing)
Dan Micklethwaite – The Less Than Perfect Legend of Donna Creosote(Bluemoose)
China Miéville – This Census Taker (Del Rey Books)
Kei Miller – Augustown (W&N)
Alan Moore – Jerusalem (Liveright and Knockabout)
Alison Moore – Death and the Seaside (Salt)
Claire Morrall – When the Floods Came (Sceptre)
Yelena Moskovich – The Natashas (Serpent’s Tail)
Sarah Moss – The Tidal Zone (Granta Books)
Sylvain Neuvel – Sleeping Giants (Del Rey Books)
Carl Neville – Resolution Way (Repeater Books)
Suzy Norman – Duff (Patrician Press)
Claire North – The Sudden Appearance of Hope (Orbit)
Barney Norris – Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain (Doubleday)
Edna O’Brien – The Little Red Chairs (Faber & Faber)
Paraic O’Donnell – The Maker of Swans (W&N)
Maggie O’Farrell – This Must Be the Place (Tinder Press)
Harry Parker – Anatomy of a Soldier (Faber & Faber)
Sarah Perry – The Essex Serpent (Serpent’s Tail)
Cherry Potts – The Dowry Blade (Arachne Press)
Laura Powell – The Unforgotten (Freight Books)
Christopher Priest – The Gradual (Gollancz)
Lucy Ribchester – The Amber Shadows (Simon & Schuster UK)
Mary-Jane Riley – After She Fell (Killer Reads)
Adam Roberts – The Thing Itself (Gollancz)
Lou Rowan – A Mystery’s No Problem (Equus)
Amanda Saint – As If I Were a River (Urbane Publications)
James Sallis – Willnot (No Exit Press)
David Savill – They Are Trying to Break Your Heart (Bloomsbury)
Anakana Schofield – Martin John (And Other Stories)
Helen Sedgwick – The Comet Seekers (Harvill Secker)
Lionel Shriver – The Mandibles (The Borough Press)
Karin Slaughter – The Kept Woman (Century)
Ethyl Smith – Changed Times (ThunderPoint Publishing)
Francis Spufford – Golden Hill (Faber & Faber)
Sarayu Srivatsa – If You Look For Me I Am Not Here (Bluemoose)
Elizabeth Strout – My Name Is Lucy Barton (Viking)
Emma Claire Sweeney – Owl Song at Dawn (Legend Press)
M Suddain – Hunters and Collectors (Jonathan Cape)
Graham Swift – Mothering Sunday (Scribner UK)
David Szalay – All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape)
Jonathan Taylor – Melissa (Salt Publishing)
William Thacker – Lingua Franca (Legend Press)
Yusuf Toropov – Jihadi: A Love Story (Orenda Books)
Anna Vaught – Killing Hapless Alley (Patrician Press)
Dan Vyleta – Smoke (W&N)
Natasha Walter – A Quiet Life (The Borough Press)
Simon Wan – Love and a Dozen Roast Potatoes (Urbane Publications)
Eleanor Wasserberg – Foxlowe (Harper Collins)
Jemma Wayne – Chains of Sand (Legend Press)
Aliya Whitely – The Arrival of the Missives (Unsung Stories)
Chis Whitaker – Tall Oaks (Twenty7)
Hugo Wilcken – The Reflection (Melville House UK)
Matt Wilven – The Blackbird Singularity (Legend Press)
Charlotte Wood – The Natural Way of Things (Allen & Unwin)
James Yorkston – Three Craws (Freight Books)
I’ll be back here on 15 August to post the results – and no doubt feeling slightly frazzled from all the counting. Let’s go!
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And here are my two votes:
My two votes. PK Lynch’s Armadillos (Legend). Aggie’s voice clear as a bell and has stayed with me; excellent, sustained narrative. Admittedly I did find elements of this difficult to read because of experiences I share with Aggie, but I am glad I kept going. One of the biggest compliments I can give to this book is that she has (and I want to qualify that I am a huge Faulkner fan and of Southern literature in general plus it’s my second home and I’m married to A Georgia Boy!) pulled off the voice, the vocabulary and the nuance, which is no mean feat and something I have seen done poorly elsewhere. The settings are haunting and there are elements of joy and humour in the blackness. It reminded me of a book that is too little known – Erskine Cauldwell’s God’s Little Acre – with its grisly portrayal of the characters PK has as ‘subs’. I think Armadillos is a skilfully written book and its prose is spare but allusive. At least, that is how it seemed to me! I felt I knew all along what the ending would be. Knew it inchoately. Didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the story at all. A familiar -oh yes- and beautiful book.
Book two. Duff by Suzy Norman (Patrician Press). Skilfully done; restrained prose; funny; love the journey and the landscape – its sweep of places, visited and remembered. It is sweet, sad and moving. I felt the rhythms of Dylan Thomas, prose and poetry, moving within it.
I’d love to discuss both these books with their authors. Both are debut novelists. Right, I am off to read A Country Road, A Tree, Solar Bones, The Blackbird Singularity and Sometimes a River Song…I am only sorry I cannot nominate more books. It has, for example, been such a brilliant year for smaller presses!
Anna
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To keep going…
I am crying a little bit here. But read on. It’s fine, really.
Do you know, I am nominated several times for ‘The Guardian’ Not the Booker prize, I am entered for the Goldsmith’s Prize, the new Republic of Consciousness Prize and The Wellcome Book Prize. I also put in a poetry pamphlet for ‘Mslexia”s annual competition.
Do I have a shot? Naaah, not really.
Well, frankly, only a tiny one, at best.
I’m small fry; I’m a newbie and pretty unrefined, still. I blundered into this in the same naive way I have blundered into most things in my life! I sort of…had a go when theoretically it wasn’t supposed to be possible with all my other commitments. I’m a hard worker because, I think, I have had so much experience compromised by mental health problems, illness and bereavement that it has made me more imaginative and keen to seize the day in case we are hit by an asteroid or I go bonkers again (which I am not planning to, obviously). If this is you too, be collected; be encouraged: you would be amazed what is possible and at the way which can be made from no way and from despair.
AND SOMEHOW
In two years, I have written and published a novel, a poetry pamphlet, guest blogged, authored ten articles or so and at this point I am approximately two thirds of the way through a second novel and have poetry and short story publication this autumn and in the spring. So HOLY F*** three kids and a day job and the volunteer stuff. I have to keep going now, don’t I?
On, blunder on. xxx
The Google Frog (by my five year old)
Bit of a departure here.
Yesterday, I found this little story which my five year old had written in bed. It is way better than anything I could do. Please forgive me any sentimentalism here. It’s the original spelling.
THE GOOGLE FROG
The frog saw googleplex fleas
The fleas sukt all his blud BUT THEN
They got batulism and they were poisond amytoontly.’
Like it?
Anna Vaught Writes - Dr Anna Vaught: teacher, mentor, author, campaigner 
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