I went to a book launch this week and it was a big night for author and award winning journalist Diana Cambridge who was celebrating her first total immersion in fictitious prose after a lifetime of dealing with facts!
On that score it was also a special evening for me as Diana and l go back a long way. Back to a time when we were both apprentice journalists on local newspapers – me on the Weston super Mare Mercury and Diana on the Clevedon Mercury.
We would meet up on day release courses down in Taunton where – as callow youths – we were grappling with law, local government, Pitman’s shorthand and touch-typing.
We haven’t seen each other since then so there was a fair bit to gossip about – but the main point of the evening at Waterstone’s in Milsom Street, was for Diana – who lives in bath with husband David – a former editor of the Bath Chronicle – to launch her book entitled ‘Don’t Think A Single Thought.’
Having spent much of her professional life writing facts, l asked Diana why it had taken longer to produce a work of fiction.
Sue Kaufman was the author of five novels – incising Diary of a Mad Housewife which was made into a film – AND a collection of fifteen short novels.
She committed suicide at the age of fifty by jumping from the balcony of the eighteenth floor New York apartment in which she lived with her husband and son.
Diana Cambridge writes about her via http://thresholds.chi.ac.uk/author-profile-sue-kaufman
Diana is an award-winning journalist who has written for many national newspapers and magazines, gives regular writing workshops, and is a Writer-in-Residence at Sherborne, Dorset.
