"Out of the nine weddings that my friend Fiona went to in 1995, five of the marriages had failed within three years"In late 1995 Kathryn Flett seemed the epitome of a successful woman of the 1990s, with a glamorous media job, a London social life and a new husband to boot. At the age of 31 she had married the man with whom she had fallen in love just a few months previously. But by late 1997 the happy couple were going through the final stages of divorce, Flett's husband having left her earlier that year for another woman. Flett, a journalist with the Observer, used her Sunday column as an outpouring of grief. Week by week readers witnessed the disintegration of her relationship, as Flett "dipped" her pen "into a convenient jar of vitriol". Now the column has become a book, The Heart-
… read more...Shaped Bullet, which painfully scrutinises the breakdown of Flett's marriage to the "commitment-phobic" Eric, her subsequent meeting with "the Boy", a younger man who also leaves her, her final inability to cope and the brief time she spent as an in-patient at a private clinic.The new millennium seems to embrace such naked confessionals as Flett's, confusing though the mix of feelings they create might be: sympathy, perhaps even empathy, riddled with the guilt of the eager voyeur. One would hope that producing such a book has been cathartic for her; she writes with both poignancy and humour about her sorrow, yet despite the upbeat(ish) ending of The Heart-Shaped Bullet, it is evident that Flett's journey to healing is far from over. --Catherine TaylorRead More read less...