Description

By Fatma Durmush

ISBN: 9781847479969
Published: 2009
Pages: 175
Key Themes: schizophrenia, fiction, womanhood, ethnicity, sexual experience

Description

This book is a mixture of fact and fiction. Fatma Durmush has experienced homelessness but she has never been to prison. Sex and Lies has an emotional truth about the under dog, which much of Durmushs writing has. Her stories are sharp and concise and her brevity is refreshing. Because Durmush has known many ex cons, her father spent six months in prison for a fight which left the Greek man in a coma Durmush also worked for the Big Issue and was regular there.

The book has many things of interest, the mother who abandons her kids. Well, when Durmush was growing up her mother was constantly dying in hospital, receiving the last rites, and these traumas come in useful now and these stories draw one into these hellish experiences. Without giving away much the book is a mixture of detail and comedy, unexpectedly the humor is dark but it is there. The book is alive with insights into the Muslim women. Durmush is a Turkish woman and she knows what it was like thirty years ago and now and what it means to be young and Muslim. In the 70s and 80s Durmush had suitors coming trying to force her into marriage but Durmush thought that the voice was the husband and so refused all the offers. Her being misguided, now she lives to regret, but in the stories the characters find their fulfillments or desires or like Durmush they go it alone but it is a question of choice.

About the Author

For thirty odd years Fatma Durmush wanted to write to succeed in writing. But she was stuck in the family business writing I Sit In the Light. She had no idea that she was dyslexic and writing is no fool to weakness. She wrote reams of stuff whom no one published. When she wrote the story which got published, She, Durmush was so surprised. She ran from the post office to the cafe and read the magazine with her story in it. Then she could not repeat the success and the voices took over, for many years there was nothing but work and writing and nothing.

Morley College was where she learnt how to be creative but it seemed with the voices that she could not succeed. Durmush went from course to course trying to repeat the She story experience, then she started to get better and joined the poetry class. But being dyslexic she did not read books, it took Durmush a long time to read. Her first book was Figure in Black and it is a poetry book. Then Durmush was attacked, knifed, pretty badly and she stopped working in the cafe and started painting. In 2000 Durmush became well enough to study GNVQ and then to get a degree and now she is finishing her Masters. She says that for all the schizophrenics out there, there is a place