In Let Me Make Myself Plain, Catherine Cookson may be said to have broken new ground as an author. The title echoed her first surprised reaction to a television producer’s suggestion that she undertook a series of late-night Epilogues.
She accepted the challenge with results so successful that many who heard the talks wrote asking for their publication. Here they formed the core of a remarkable collection of essays and the poems she modestly described as “prose on short lines”, into which she had distilled over the years a deeply personal and hard-won philosophy.
Uncompromisingly honest and free of illusion, but with an ultimate message of hope and encouragement, the book is imbued with characteristic down-to-earth common sense and humour. Whether writing of priests or doctors, or looking back to episodes in her Tyneside childhood, she constantly displayed all the qualities that had made her one of the world’s most widely-read and best-loved novelists.
She accepted the challenge with results so successful that many who heard the talks wrote asking for their publication. Here they formed the core of a remarkable collection of essays and the poems she modestly described as “prose on short lines”, into which she had distilled over the years a deeply personal and hard-won philosophy.
Uncompromisingly honest and free of illusion, but with an ultimate message of hope and encouragement, the book is imbued with characteristic down-to-earth common sense and humour. Whether writing of priests or doctors, or looking back to episodes in her Tyneside childhood, she constantly displayed all the qualities that had made her one of the world’s most widely-read and best-loved novelists.
