A NEW NAME
By Emma Scrivener
IVP. 152 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 1 844 745 869
Emma Scrivener was just a normal girl from east Belfast growing up during the ‘troubles’. A prodigious reader, Emma excelled at school and, in particular, demonstrated a flair for creative writing. She was an able and dedicated student who earned a place at Oxford University before finally graduating with a degree in English Literature. But this is only half the story.
She describes her homeland as ‘battered but unbowed, terrible and beautiful’, perhaps echoing W.B. Yeats’s famous poem, Easter 1916. There is no denying the beauty of the Ulster landscape or the terrible events of our recent past, and anyone living through this period will identify with Emma’s experience of life in a divided society. This experience, along with the death of her grandfather, unhappiness at not fitting in at school, uncertainty about her body and confusion about boys all contributed to her unhappiness and her inexorable drift into the condition known as anorexia.
