Vivien Heim
After the ending of her marriage, abruptly followed by redundancy from the teaching job she loved, then two years later battling breast cancer, Vivien had to seize every opportunity to sustain herself and her daughter—hosting lodgers, teaching, training, consultancy, and life coaching. She even diversified into marriage registration which, it had to be admitted, went some way to allay her romantic cynicism. It was sharing her friends’ often painful amorous experiences as well as her own that inspired her to create this, her debut novel, It’s Just Not Good Enough, written mainly in the One Elm, one of her favourite pubs in Stratford upon Avon where she currently lives a mere stone’s throw from the town’s picturesque river.