Eighteen Seconds

Family is the best thing in your life. And the worst.

My mother once said to me, 'I wish you could feel the way I do for eighteen seconds. Just eighteen seconds, so you'd know how awful it is.' I thought about it. Realised we could all learn from being in another person's head for eighteen seconds. Eighteen seconds inside Grandma Roberts' head as she sat alone with her evening cup of tea, us girls upstairs in bed. Eighteen seconds inside one-year-old Colin's head when he woke up in a foster home without his family. Eighteen seconds inside the head of a girl waiting for her bedroom door to open.

Louise Beech looks back on the events that led to the day her mother jumped off the Humber Bridge. She missed witnessing the horror herself by minutes. Louise recounts the pain and trauma of her childhood alongside her love for her siblings with a delicious dark humour and a profound voice of hope for the future.

'Upsetting, uplifting and inspiring.' - John Marrs

'Authentic, unflinching and moving. Written with compassion and humanity and a great deal of love.' - S. E. Lynes

'A powerful memoir making sense of a complicated childhood' Madeleine Black 'Haunting, brave and brilliant.' - Gill Paul

'A heart-breaking, heart-warming story - what courage to tell it, and tell it so well.' - Liz Nugent

'I loved every word of this haunting memoir.' - Amanda Prowse