It’s Just Not Good Enough

It’s just not good enough – how many times have these five little words cut you to the quick?Lucie, a 60-something woman, has a part-time relationship with a man who all her friends are convinced isn’t right for her. Eventually she has enough of his sketchy behaviour but after a break, he returns saying those three little words we all long to hear. Of course, she’s devastated when he unceremoniously dumps her leaving her doubting her own worth. Shortly afterwards, completely by chance, she bumps into an attractive man. As she comes to realise he’s much younger than her, she wonders whether the relationship’s entirely appropriate, but his persistence plus incredible sex is too beguiling. After a wonderful weekend away, she discovers he’s been living a lie, but his plausible explanation persuades her to continue. Her world is rocked when she’s diagnosed with breast cancer; going through a mastectomy followed by radiotherapy. If all that isn’t enough Covid strikes the world which means that, in a heartbeat, she loses every bit of her work. Desperate for money, she takes in a transvestite lodger who proves to be a lifesaver in many ways. She’s suddenly faced by a dilemma with her new man – can she continue when his thinking about how a relationship should be conducted is so fundamentally different to her own?And then, out of the blue, her first love returns wanting to rekindle their romance. She agrees to meet him – will she accept his proposal?

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.