The night continued. The place filled with rockers and smoke. Club patrons who I suddenly regarded as close personal friends played air guitar to KISS, Warrant, Poison, Motley cure and Ratt. We moved in the most primordial of ways. Stella, Declan and I thrashed about, growling lyrics in each other’s faces. Electrifying rock thrashed through our veins like Class B amphetamines. I was very, very happy and very, very drunk indeed.
After the breakup of her marriage, Lana Penrose flees Greece to go and live with friends in London, working in the music industry. Finding herself suddenly single in her late thirties, she takes to the bars and clubs of London in a quest to kickstart her heart. What follows is a heartbreaking, yet often funny, trip through a series of bad matches and wrong turns before she finds what she’s looking for in an unlikely place.
Kickstart My Heart is a poignant look at the world of a post-divorce single. Penrose’s honesty makes for humour amidst some shocking, confusing and just plain sad times in her life. Her encounters with rockstars, crack heads, vampires and toy boys,a long with her honest admissions about her state of mind and her broken heart make for an absorbing read.
Kickstart My Heart: A Carnival of Dating Disasters, by Lana Penrose
Viking Penguin, 2009
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