Alison says
By: Suzanne Hawley
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Milsons Point, NSW
Language: eng
Number of pages: 220
ISBN-13: 9781740513487
Subjects: Primary school teachers; Fiction; Psychotherapy
Description: Margaret ("Maggs") is a drama teacher at a respectable girls high school who is chronically depressed as she's recently been dumped by her boyfriend Jamie. Alison, Margaret's shrink, suggests that she keep a diary in a bid to help her "reshape those destructive thought patterns and re-align them to a more productive way of life". The problem is that whatever Alison says, Margaret ignores. Instead, she deviously plots ways to win back Jamie with hilarious and disastrous results. Margaret's "diary" is replete with a range of colourful characters - Dana, Margaret's two-faced, shallow "best" friend, her well-meaning teaching colleagues, bratty pupils at school and last but not least, the new school janitor - an irritating yet dangerously sexy bit of Irish rough trade who is the bane of Margaret's existence. Like Gordon Graham's loser character Gerard Oakes, Margaret is on the slippery slide to losing it big time - the star attraction in a reality of her own making as she lurches from drunken one- night stands to humiliating episode after humiliating episode. Will Margaret win back Jamie from the slutty parvenu Lorelie? Or will she succumb to the devilish charms of the Irish "odd job man"?