Review: More Confessions of a Forty Something F**K Up

 There is no magical land you finally arrive at where everything is figured out, fixed and sorted. Life, like us, is a sum of moving parts, and if we’re lucky, we get to keep f**king up, figuring it out and laughing in the face of it all.

Nell’s back. Her life still isn’t going to plan. And she’s still asking the big questions and getting none of the answers. Like, for example:

1. Why is falling in love so easy, but staying in love so hard?

2. What do you do when your friendships are put to the ultimate test?

3. Can we ever really live in the moment and leave the past behind?

4. When everything goes tits up, do you fall apart or jump on a plane to LA with Cricket (an eighty-something widow and your BFF)?

5. And when all else fails, will celebrity-scented candles, smashed avocados and Instagram filters save us?*

In this hilarious, un-put-downable follow-up to the bestselling Confessions of a Forty-Something F##k Up, now the basis for the major TV series, Not Dead Yet, there are laugh-out-loud lessons to be learned, truths to be told, adventures to go on and joys to discover.

But first, Nell has some more confessions . . .

*#onlyjoking #sortof #LOL

Review: It was great to be back in Nell’s world again after having LOVED Confessions a couple of years ago, but a little different to be reading a sequel to a book almost directly after having watched the TV adaptation of the first book, I kept having to bring my head back to ‘book Nell’ world and not what I had just watched on the small screen. 

I love that this author heard my pleas and wrote a follow up to catch up with all these characters, especially Nell and especially these characters post-covd. I like the way Covid was mentioned as something that had happened and changed the lives of the characters but it wasn;’t something that was the main focus of the book and I don’t think it pulled me away from this imaginary world and into the real world too much. I think this author found a nice balance of keeping it real for the integrity of the characters and being fictional enough to be escapism. 

Of course Nell has grown older and slightly wiser but she is still getting the wrong end of the stick and still flailing around trying to conform to normality when she is just too unique of a person to have a ‘standard’ life. I sometimes wished I could go into the book and tell her to just go her own way and do her own thing. Luckily for Nell she has the wonderful Cricket who helps keep her weird. Her other friends are wonderful and I like that we get to catch up with them and where they have been too but they do have rather ‘normal’ lives. Cricket does her own thing and helps to show Nell that we don;’t all have to be the same and not to really care what other people think which I adore about her. 

I love the fact that Alexandra Potter never fails to make me laugh. There are some serious issues tackled in this book and yet there’s a great balance between that and Nell messing up for comic value. I laughed a lot, I cried a little, I worried a bit, but overall I really enjoyed being back in Nell’s world and seeing that a happy ending isn’t really the end, a bit like Grease, it’s only the beginning.

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