Englischsprachige Literatur

Holden Wendy

Simply Divine

Headline BP London, 1999

Galbraith3

This is an astonishing first novel by 33-year-old Wendy Holden, a London socialite, who worked for  Tatler and put all her experience on the job in this novel.

The main character, Jane, works for a glossy women´s magazine. Her personal life is anything but glossy: Her boyfriend leaves her and their highly mortgaged shabby flat, she has trouble with her looks and her work. Her editor decides she is the right person to ghostwrite the diary of a glamourous socialite and wouldbe star, Champagne D´Vyne, who is a real bitch and changes her partners faster than her wardrobe. Jane, however, constantly on the lookout for Mr Right, collects one frustrating experience after the other.

Of course, in the end she finds him. But this is not  the point of the story and taken for granted by the reader from the beginning. What is really amusing and highly hilarious, is the way Holden writes about all her characters and the situations they find themselves in. There is Tally, her friend, who tries to save a crumbling manor house, and Tally´s mother, who succeeds in doing so by turning the place into an ashram. Holden´s puns, though sometimes laid on thick, make you laugh out loud.

You certainly see where Holden got her ideas from: Helen Fielding´s Bridget Jones. But it´s great fun reading the book. Holden´s second novel “Bad Heir Day” wears a bit thin in comparison to her first.