Meet Nell in Confessions of a Forty-Something F**k Up by Alexandra Potter. Her life is a mess. Her business goes falls apart and her fiancé with it. Nell moves back to London to start over. A lot has changed since she’s been gone. All her single friends are now married with children, and a sky-high real estate market forces her to rent a room in a stranger’s house. Starting from scratch, she feels like a f**k up . . . a forty-something f**k up.

Landing a job writing obituaries, Nell meets the fabulous Cricket, an 80-something widow with challenges of her own. Together they begin to help each other heal their aching hearts, cope with the loss of the lives they had planned, and push each other into new adventures and joy. With Cricket’s help, Nell is determined to turn her life around. First, though, she has a confession . . .

This story reads like a self-help book and memoir wrapped in a fun fiction book. I had hoped more would be featured about her obituary writing. The overall story was okay, not a real page-turner, but a fun read for the weekend. However, the ending was confusing, along with the asterisks and symbols and trying to piece them with the right paragraph, and this left the story feeling flat, unfinished, and disjointed.

#ConfessionsofaFortySomethingFkUp #NetGalley @HarperPerennial

I have some mixed feelings about Confessions.
I wanted to see what the book was like so was happy to find it on NetGalley and get approved. The show is super uneven but a cute idea. I really wanted to know if the book had ghosts. Alas, it does not.

I thought the main character was a little odd when it came to her friends. She had basically been away for most of her 30s and into her 40s and they all got married and had kids in this time. I get that the main character liked kids and was the “godmum” to at least one of them but why would a single woman be dropping everything to babysit children she barely knows and who’s parents, she makes clear, barely acknowledge her existence and spend virtually no time with her that isn’t a party for them or an event for their kids. They don’t ever take an interest in her life even though she is clearly struggling with having to move back to a country she hasn’t lived in for a decade, the break up of a long term relationship and failure of her dream business.

The rich woman her friends all glommed onto when Nell was in the US was awful, as was her child, but she “apologized” for literally injuring Nell (her child also was physically attacking her god daughter) and then they all were friends. What? Cut this woman loose! Even if she and her child were upset because she was getting divorced, they were both literally attacking other people! I don’t know how you get over that.

Finally they listen to he podcast (without knowing it’s her!!) and talk to her about it but wow. They are some bad friends. They never really improve, she keeps seeing and helping them on their terms right up to the final New Year’s Eve party.

Cricket is a fun character. A little too saintly but she was cute and helped push some of the plot along.

I kept hoping that she would make an effort to find new friends and activities other than Cricket. I did like their “bring little free libraries to London” subplot but I kept hoping she’d find another friend while she was out and about. She did a lot for everyone (including Cricket who at least took her to Spain) and nothing for herself. Even her mother was pretty horrible; fixated on her getting back together with her ex who she left in California and then ignoring her when her immature brother quickly got married and impregnated his new girlfriend. I could have done without the dad getting sick subplot. The book was already over long and we didn’t need that drama. Let her have one person in her family who actually seemed to like and accept her,

I would have liked more about her obituary writing and less about babysitting. After she met Cricket, she talks about how that how she makes money but we never see her work really ever again.

This is not important but I can never understand UK real estate. Why does she keep saying that she rents a room when she has full run of the apartment? Or maisonette (I know what that is). And yes, Edward is technically her landlord but isn’t he also her roommate? She insists on calling him her landlord all the time and makes it sound like she thinks she’s lying when she tells a date that he is her flatmate and not that he’s her landlord. I mean, it’s a little weird to live with the owner of the property but not that weird in big expensive cities. Then she is able to buy a place of her own after Cricket hires her to do some work. One, how much does Cricket pay?? Two, doesn’t she still have to pay the mortgage? She seemed to be barely scraping by with a loan from her dad and her part time obituary work. Even if she could cover the seemingly small percentage-wise down payment, the mortgage must be huge! Is the podcast making money? It’s not super clear if it is or how much.

I know I’m always talking about timelines but how old is this woman? The book came out in 2020. She talks a lot about being a child in the 1970s, including being in school plays. Wouldn’t have most of her childhood been in the 1980s? We know she is a few years away from being 47. By my calculations she was probably born at absolute the earliest in 1976. How much could she have remembered about the gender roles of the 1970s as basically a toddler? She talks about music of her youth and it is all very early eighties which while it is is possible she was a huge Prince and David Bowie fan in nursery school, it seems off. Can’t anyone do some math? Why drag any sort of firm dates into the book at all? It made it seem very dated already.

I did like a story of a woman who didn’t have kids and was trying to scrape together a new life after her plans didn’t work out. I thought the obit writing was a really cute idea but it wasn’t fleshed out at all. I wanted something sort of easy to read and it was that. It really needed to be tightened up. I kept hoping she’d realize her friends were trash or they’d improve but they didn’t. Does the author think this is what the friendships of childfree people are like? The only friend who was kind of nice was the one who, ironically, was the one who was having a baby. She had some spark but still let the rich acquaintance of the other mutual friend run all over her.

I really didn’t understand the point of the obituary at the end at all. The footnote explaining it was a mistake was silly. It would have maybe worked if there were other obits in the book but there were not.