As promised, from today I’m giving you access to previews of the dark-debut hyperactive novel,
A Kick In the Gurus.
If you marked Father’s Day in the UK in any way today, I hope it passed well for you.
Please be warned: keep your kids away from these previews. It gets dark pretty quick, and there’s no way I’m going public with the interior of the novel – its themes are rich, but brutal and definitely for grown-up contemplation. In fact, much of the novel’s unhinged chaos results from the failure to protect the young.
With that in mind, your first preview includes the warning that comes at the novel’s extremely frayed ending.
I hope over the coming two weeks, you find the opening to a novel that will grow to be as meaningful and necessary to you as it is traumatic. I make no apologies for its trauma. Inhumanity is an ever present danger in every post code; no one is safe. We do well to prepare ourselves, to both avoid and attack its existence. Working as both a psychiatric care assistant and a primary teacher has given me privileged and upsetting access to young people’s pain that should never have existed.
I had to write A Kick in the Gurus. It was my own way to deal with and debrief from the experience of being a witness to so many people falling apart undeservedly. It took 6 years to write and another 3 years to edit. At times, having this story in my life has felt more like nursing than writing. So much care has been needed to get the plot to open itself up. It is as if the story was afraid to write itself, not only for the truth it had to reveal, but for the pain of disclosure itself. Opening up hurts. A Kick in the Gurus is 435 pages of opening up.
There’s another story to be told about how the main character, Maxi, literally broke into the book the book during an afternoon drive through a South-West Scottish village.
For another time, though.
Welcome to preview 1 of A Kick in the Gurus by Maclean Mottram. @macleanmottram
This is the warning that comes on the very last page of the novel:
THE END
To damaged children – it is not your fault.
Please get help. Break the cycle.
To those who damage children – it is your fault.
Please stop.
Tomorrow, we rewind to the opening. Thanks for sharing in the pre-release conversation of this novel.
Stay safe. Make the most & share this post.
Maclean
London, UK Father’s Day, 2018
Maclean Mottram 