The Time After Now is Anne Freeman’s third novel and a particularly personal one as her main character, Olivia, is diagnosed with type one diabetes as a young woman, mirroring the author’s lived experience.
Living with a chronic disease requiring constant vigilance is challenging when you are young and keen to push boundaries and sometimes live outside the rules.
Digs deep
Freeman has a knack for writing about topics many of us long to talk about but are too polite or shy to bring up. Her books are always thought-provoking, challenging and not afraid to dig deep. While her third book is fiction, the author’s real life experience makes the book poignant and confronting.
The Time After Now is a page-turner on topics relevant to young women, anyone who has a serious medical condition or who has had experiences in their youthful past they might be confronted with later in life.
Protagonist Liv (Olivia) is a young, enthusiastic woman who plunges headlong into life and embraces risk, love and creativity with a passion. Her later life as a mature woman with two children, trapped inside a staid marriage devoid of romance and excitement could not be more different from her exciting youth.
As the chapters move in a non-linear narrative between now and twenty years earlier, you become desperate to know how this vibrant, confident young woman becomes someone filled with doubts, self-loathing and regret.
Two timelines
The novel’s two timelines increase the tension for the reader, though the brevity of the chapters makes the transitions less immersive than they might be.
The reader follows Liv’s highs and lows as her life unravels from poor decisions and circumstances outside her control. The plot takes a turn for the worse after Liv learns her first love, Drew has died. Her wild youth comes back to haunt her when a stranger threatens to publicise compromising, intimate photographs Drew promised to guard with his life.
Big questions
Who is this stranger, determined to destroy Liv? Why do they have explicit photographs of her and how will Liv navigate the complications of an ailing marriage, the risk of public scrutiny and her awakening desire to live life on her own terms?
Freeman’s book explores so many hot button issues ranging from recreational drug use, work-life balance, chronic illness and how women often get the blame for sexual exploits exposed in a public forum.
Freeman says the book asks the question: ‘What would life be like if you pushed away your soulmate?’
Author Anne Freeman. IMAGE supplied
The Time After Now would make for a lively book club read because it probes at the heart of what it means for a woman to stand up for and own the decisions she makes about her life.
The Time After Now is published by Hawkeye Books and retails for $34.99
