About 'Secret Street'
The blurb
Known to all but herself as "Minty", royal-obsessed Araminta Cavendish pretends to be posh. Eighty-two, single and lonely, she plans to make friends and become her street's queen bee by organising a Platinum Jubilee street party. But when a last-minute knock on the door threatens to spoil everything, she discovers her neighbours have secrets of their own.
Secret Street recounts the tale of Araminta as she sets out on a quest to find friends. Each friend she makes tells her their secret story, and each story gives Araminta a gift of knowledge that helps her learn the only way to find peace - and friendship - is to be herself.
Secret Street is a fiction-based-on-fact novel. It represents the culmination of the author - who has a background in mental health nursing - spending four decades living and working with traumatised people, observing the relationship between adverse life experience and human connectivity. It blows apart the stereotype of comfortable middle-class England, personified by the infamous fictional letter-writer to The Times, "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells". The true stories woven into the narrative have psychosocial themes such as abortion, addiction, adoption, eating disorder, learning disability, sexual assault, and asylum seeking. These serious themes are approached with both gentleness and energy, creating light as well as shade.
Secret Street offers a discourse on the relationships between stigma, friendship, class, and identity, and will prompt juicy discussions at book clubs. These life-changing stories will stay with you.
The inspiration behind 'Secret Street'
Secret Street's author, Louisa Campbell, has a background in mental health nursing, and has always been passionate about reducing stigma. She often thinks about how people live side by side with each other, unaware of what's happening across the street, or the other side of the party wall. So, she chose a street in Tunbridge Wells with a variety of different types of housing, and put a letter through each door, inviting people to tell their stories.
Initially, Louisa suggested people could meet at the local pub for storytelling sessions, but, one by one, each person who responded asked if they could tell their story privately, for fear of shame, or stigma. There followed a period of secret interviews in back gardens, in living rooms behind closed doors, in quiet corners of coffee shops. Louisa recorded the interviews, moulded them into stories and anonymised them. Minty Cavendish (who is also based on a real live person) became the central character, whose journey to self-actualisation is interwoven throughout the book, and whose efforts to organise a street party allow the characters to interact.
The result is a satisfying read, with a structure a little like The Canterbury Tales, containing stories that will astonish, inform, and nourish the life of everyone who reads it.