'In Grade One, when I was given a fresh clean notebook in which to write something called "My autobiography", I wrote according to the certainty of the collective narrative: "I was born purple and dead. I was born in England", as if to imply that birthplace determined birth state. In fact, as my mother describes it, it may well have. I did not burst forth into being. I was pumped into existence by a machine. Although I was the result of premature ejaculation, I was not overly excited about being released into the world.'
Thelma is six years old. Her parents have a difficult marriage - they sleep in separate beds. Her father's games with her are unsettling and not entirely enjoyable, while her brother Willy is her mother's favoured child. When her parents move to Canada, she smuggles her imaginary friends with her in her suitcase. There she makes real friends for to first time - the girls next door - but Thelma's life is still mostly lived in her fertile and extraordinarily vivid imagination. And she still asks almost every adult she meets to adopt her . . .
'Mouthing The Words' tells Thelma's story through to adulthood and her return to England - to study law at Oxford - in a novel that is by turns harrowing, terrible and wonderfully funny. Through sexual abuse, anorexia and borderline multiple personality disorder, Thelma retains her spirit, wit and imagination.
