Böcker av Pamela Pickton

It has everything; familial hatreds, great love, romance and failed relationships, attempts by the character to change patterns of life -in fact all the ingredients of a page -turner. It is written in a highly charged poetic style and is full of fine imagistic writing and It should be published both because of all the above and because it is an individual experience which has universal significance. - By Siobhan Campbell, Tutor on M A Creative Writing Course Kingston UniversityDescriptionMad? Sad? Or Bad? the truth about Alzheimer's Disease.After a lifetime of coping with a very difficult - and sometimes nasty - mother, Patricia now faces her parent`s decline and impending death. As she guided her mother through family history, she tries to unravel what has always ailed the older woman.The story moves through darkness, to understanding and to skeletons in the cupboard. And ultimately to love.But Patricia reaches a mind- blowing conclusion about what she believes to lie behind old age dementia. About the AuthorPamela spent most of her working life bringing up four children and doing casual jobs.. she took a degree in English and at a local university and then taught in Adult Education and became a Market Research Interviewer. When her work dwindled in the Recession of the 1990s, she tried for a while to run her own private Adult Education business. She has always wanted to write and began in her twenties. She has broadcast her own talk on the radio, published some short stories and articles, and had prizes in a few writing competitions. Pamela lives in The Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames.Book Extract'....And she's got a perfect figure, you know.' For the first time I am listening to what the nurse is saying about my eighty-eight year-old Mother. 'I like her,' she had begun. What's all this? I asked myself. My mother's never got on with anybody, and probably nobody has ever liked her. She certainly doesn't like anyone much. We talk, as I scrabble around trying to remember how the conversation had started. 'She asked me where I came from. Tells me she has always wanted to travel...' Well, we all know that old story, don't we? '...And she's got a perfect figure, you know.' That's when my ears pricked up. I'd hardly been listening, having looked after my mother for as long as I can remember, having lived her life rather than my own... But now this, at nearly ninety and last week nearly dead. 'What do you mean, what do you mean? In and out - in and out?' 'Oh - everything,' the nurse laughs. 'And it is so good for you, because it's genetic.' Genetic? I am her, not exactly a case of symbiosis, since it has not been beneficial to me, but something like that. A week ago, I stood over my mother, having been summoned to what I had thought was her deathbed. She was asleep, but gasping in her sleep, and I thought, 'Are you gasping to stay alive in the hope that one day you will have a life? No, what I really thought was, you look like I feel. Gasping to stay alive in the hope that one day you will have a life. And now this, the perfect figure? A young girl's body beneath that weary face? The tune 'Beautiful Dreamer' comes back into my mind. I think she even used to sing it, way far back, or at least hum it anyway. Beautiful Dreamer, a Sleeping Beauty, is it really that? Is that old face weary with disappointment? Because the young girl's body has never been satisfied? Yet my mother has never shown any strong desires for such needs to be fulfilled. I am a Sleeping Beauty too, but I know it.

DescriptionWith thoughtless parents, two divorces and far from good experiences with the legal services, the author has not found life easy in fact at times felt victimised and even abused.But she has never let go of a sense of a relentless steel rod inside her - the thirst to learn, and belief in herself as a writer,Most of her life experiences she has fictionalised to a greater or lesser degree. Some stories are not autobiographical at all. But where she has just enjoyed following her imaginations, it has taken her down shady paths to at least the sad - sometimes sinister or very dark. About the AuthorPamela spent most of her working life bringing up four children and doing casual jobs.. she took a degree in English and at a local university and then taught in Adult Education and became a Market Research Interviewer. When her work dwindled in the Recession of the 1990s, she tried for a while to run her own private Adult Education business. She has always wanted to write and began in her twenties. She has broadcast her own talk on the radio, published some short stories and articles, and had prizes in a few writing competitions. Pamela lives in The Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames.Book ExtractYears later she was to remember how, in those days sitting in their garden she heard over and over again the same horrific sound. She had never heard anybody mention hearing this and repeatedly, daily, but she did. A shriek: a scream of a small animal she supposed, in the beak of a predator flying overhead. It was a sound of pain and terror, she thought at the time but not a call for help. It was the ultimate sound of utter misery and terror at a fate - destruction - where the one who cried had no hope or even thoughts of rescue. She would lie on a deckchair in those days, in some kind of pretence to the world (or neighbours?) or to herself that she was having a nice time. The deckchair...two deckchairs, sat in the garden of their house. He would like, require, that she be seen to be having a nice time. The screeching amazed and puzzled her for she did not remember hearing it before (and indeed has not since) and she almost hated it for its daily persistence, impinging on her world. For how could anyone nearby bear such hopeless terror and excruciating pain, and such helplessness?