Single Bald Female, Laura Price
July 2022
This isn’t a review I want to write, really. But I do want everyone to read my friend Laura’s book, and to know how smart and funny and lovely she is. I met Laura Price in autumn 2017 on my Faber writing course and she has been indispensable to my writing development, always offering honest critique and encouragement, and I’m pretty sure without her support and that of a few others I would have left the group pretty quickly.
Although her debut Single Bald Female came out in April 2022, I had read a draft so didn’t get round to reading it until the summer. It’s a heartbreaking romcom about a young woman looking for love while she has breast cancer, and it’s fiction but Laura went through the same thing. “It seems fitting that this book should be published on the tenth anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis,” she writes in the acknowledgements, “because it closes what was probably the most defining chapter of my life.”
I can’t read that line without sobbing. By the time I sat down to read Single Bald Female, Laura had been diagnosed with secondary breast cancer, which is treatable but incurable. That was six months ago and she has responded really well to treatment, but has to undergo major surgery in January on her chest. In the meantime, after watching most of her friends marry and have babies over the past decade, while she was recovering from cancer, she has met Mark and is planning their wedding.
But you’re here to hear about the book…which is glorious! Somehow, Laura has managed to turn such a potentially sad topic into a sassy, heartwarming pageturner. I’ve also seen how hard she’s worked on the book, all the waiting and hoping along the way, and how it’s evolved into a book so many people have been talking about throughout 2022.
If you make a donation to Coppafeel I’ll send you a copy, or buy it from one of the usual places - the paperback (£8.99) is just out