Just Say It - Tessa Barrie
Tessa Barrie is my alter ego who came to life in my early twenties. I was writing a slightly risque column for the local rag, and I didn’t want my mother to know it was me. So, I brainstormed names with my late and much-missed best friend, Sarah, and we came up with Tessa, after my dog and Barrie, because despite being a rock chic at heart, I was a big Barry Manilow fan. :) My real name is Sally Edmondson, and I was born in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Despite my parents uprooting me at three years old and moving me down south, I am proud of my Yorkshire heritage. I now live on the beautiful Channel Island of Jersey, UK. Growing up on a farm in rural Gloucestershire, our household was more like “Little House on the Prairie” than “The Waltons” because there was always drama, which was, generally, diluted with plenty of humorous banter. Over the decades, I have had a shot at every genre of writing, including ten years of writing songs, but being made redundant triggered writing my first novel, pouring over 100,000 words of my post-redundancy frustrations onto my hard drive. Incorporating humour into my writing is very important to me. I do my best to capture the fragility of human emotion and coat it with a bit of humour. It doesn’t take away the pain but makes it more bearable. Starting writing novels later in life has made me more determined, and finally, I am doing something I love. I self-published my debut novel, Just Say It, a bittersweet family saga, in 2021. My second novel, The Secret Lives of the Doyenne of Didsbrook, a quirky murder mystery, is good to go. My third novel, The Rebuilding of Freya Michaels, is underway. It is about a woman turning sixty who looks back at how she rebuilt her life after two traumatic events in her twenties ripped her world apart.
GENRE: Women’s Fiction, Humour
Blurb:
Turning forty, Lisa Grant is broke, alone and hurtling towards an inevitable midlife crisis. Fearing for her sanity, she addresses the problem she has carried with her for the past forty years - her narcissistic mother, Elizabeth.
https://tessabarrie.com
