Title: The Secret Life of girls
Author: Chloe Thurlow
Author: Chloe Thurlow
Genre: Contemporary Erotic
Pages: 220, published by Xcite, and
ebook
ISBN-13: 978-1907761904
Source: Amazon, bookshops and motorway service stations!
Published: September 2012
Author's Website: www.chloethurlow.com
The Secret Life of Girls
After
my tutor at Cambridge gave me a copy of A
Spy in the House of Love by Anais Nin, I read all her books and wrote my
first short story. It was about a girl going for a job at a casting agents
where she is seduced into taking off her clothes and then finds herself giving into
her pent up passions and desires. The story was published in a literary
magazine whose editor had studied under the same tutor at my college – the
erotic can be terribly incestuous.
This
little success encouraged me to write my first novel, which I called Bella, and was based on aspects of my
own life. I loved Nabokov's Lolita. I
made my character a few years older and too clever and worldly wise for her own
good. The book ended up too literary to be erotic and too erotic to be a mainstream
coming of age novel. The publishers all turned it down and I put the book in a
drawer and didn't take it out again for five years.
In
that time, I published four other novels with Nexus and Xcite and had the
thrill of A Girl's Adventure going
into the best-seller lists for about 5 minutes. When I took Bella out again, I rewrote it completely,
cut about 15,000 words – so painful but so essential, and gave the finished
work the title The Secret Life of Girls.
It was published by Xcite and is now my favourite book. I have been planning a
follow up which I will call Bella in
America – I just need to take a year off to write it.
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The Secret Life of Girls – to
quote the blurb – is a fictionalized memoir of Bella. She is 18 and attends finishing
school on the English coast. When her father dies, her mother remarries a man
who secretly buys the manor house left in trust to Bella to pay off her
father's debts. The betrayal cuts Bella to the core - the house is a part of
her. She has nothing left - except she is beautiful, bold and unafraid to
use sex to get revenge - as well as for her own pleasure. Bella also has some
success on leaving school as a singing star and plans to move to America – the
seeds of the unwritten follow-up.
I
had come to see through writing my other novels that, while it is character
that drives plot, the erotic must evolve through cause and effect. The erotic
is a literary genre and, for me, the first law is good writing. That's what I
work hard on and which is why each novel takes so long to complete.
Since
its publication, The Secret Life of Girls
has had loads of great reviews and I will end with just one, because it
cleverly sums up the book with a single line '...a potent blend of classic erotica, bubbling with modernity, Elizabeth
Woodham, on Amazon.
Kisses...Chloe.
