Blog Tour: Becoming Liz Taylor – Elizabeth Delo

‘Val looked around. The baby appeared to be all on its own. There was no sign of a mother. No sign of anyone.

Val didn’t think about it. She didn’t even break her stride. She kicked the brake off the pram and pushed it as if she did it every day.’

Val, a widow living in Weston-super-Mare, spends lonely evenings dressing up as the movie star Elizabeth Taylor. It seems to be a way of coping with the loss and sadness she has experienced in her life. One day, when Val sees a pram left unattended on the seafront, on a whim she kicks off the brake and walks away with it…

Set in the present and the 1970s, Becoming Liz Taylor is a vivid and touching depiction of love, loss and bereavement – thought-provoking, moving fiction for fans of Rachel Joyce, Emma Healey and Ruth Hogan.

Elizabeth Delo trained as a teacher and has worked in schools in London, Birmingham, Paris and Somerset. After writing fiction in her spare time for many years, Elizabeth took a break from teaching to do a master’s degree in creative writing at Bath Spa University, graduating with Distinction. She runs creative writing classes and has worked as a freelance editor. She lives in Somerset with her husband and has three children.

My thoughts: still grieving her losses, Val Hinsby finds release by dressing up as her idol, Elizabeth Taylor. She does this in the privacy of her own home, knowing that it’s not easily explained. But even in her every day life she dresses with a touch of glamour in full skirts and carefully styled hair.

Walking home from the hairdresser, she sees a pram apparently unattended. And she takes it. There’s a little boy inside, and Val pretends he’s hers. Setting off on a madcap road trip first to Wales, she’s on the run and the whole country’s looking for her.

I felt sorry for Val, she’s suffered some terrible grief, and not dealt with it very well. She doesn’t seem to have much support or any friends, both in the past and in the present. No family around, no one to suggest at any point she get help. The same for her son Rafe, whose story is interwoven with hers in alternating chapters. It’s rather sad, two lives forever altered, two people who can’t connect.

Bits of the book are blackly comic, the B&B in Wales especially, poor sweet Howard, dreaming of a happy life, birdwatching and eating his dinner every night with Val and her “grandson”. But even he’s rather tragic, sad and alone. No one in this book is happy and they’re all so disconnected.

Although there is a little note of hope for Val and Rafe at the end, even if it isn’t conventional, perhaps they can rebuild their relationship, get some help with their past, learn to move on in some way. Who knows. A moving, haunting tale of grief, tragedy and delusion.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in the blog tour but all opinions remain my own.