Watching Petals Fall is a memoir about losing a child, but with a key difference. Because I wrote it over twenty years, the experience filtered through my life bringing about changes which had simply not materialised at the point I finished the first draft, seven years after Juliette died.

 

This makes it a narrative not only about loss, but of putting oneself back together again. Of course it's a personal story about my family, Juliette, and me, but readers walk beside me, not as remote observers, but as companions - with me as I love Juliette, lose her, then lose my mind, before reinvesting in the life I'd forgotten could be golden.

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Juliette is a vivid, fearless five-year-old holding a crab, defeated days later by a complication of leukaemia and I don't shy from showing my raw grief, and the hard, messy years beyond it, including the breakdown that didn’t come until a full eight years later. Because it took me so long to write, I've been able to show what losing a child looks like over the longer term - how a memory of Juliette's gleeful expression holding that crab makes me brave enough to start working in prisons, writing with inmates - and how those times changed everything. The book therefore is a layered view of grief, showing how we can heal from something that seemed impossible, and rediscovering the things that really matter in our little human lives.

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