Getting Away With It
Wherever there’s trouble, there’s Liza Haven.
After years of misbehaving in the quaint country village where she grew up with her identical twin sister Lee, Liza escaped to LA for a thrilling life as a stunt woman. But when her job brings her a little too close to death for comfort, Liza has to go back to the one place she couldn’t wait to get away from—home.
Only, when Liza arrives she discovers that her seemingly perfect sister has run off, leaving behind their difficult, ailing mother, a family ice-cream business that’s frozen in time and a dangerously attractive boyfriend. And what’s more, everyone thinks Liza is Lee. This is Liza’s one chance to see how it feels to be the good twin. She might be getting away with it, but there’s no getting away from facing up to who she really is…
A hilarious and heartbreaking story about running away and finding your way home again.
Download a first-chapter excerpt from Bookdiva.co.uk here.
Read an exclusive extra chapter here.
Behind the Scenes of Julie Cohen's Getting Away With It from Bookhugger on Vimeo.
More About Getting Away With It
GETTING AWAY WITH IT is my first "big" book, my first stand-alone book that's not part of a line. My first book that's meant to be just from me. It is a big book—it's over 500 pages, for a start—and it deals with some big issues. Identity. Alzheimer's Disease. Loss. History. Forgiveness. Responsibility. And how to make beetroot and horseradish ice cream.
It took me about a year, more or less, to write, and involved research trips all around Wiltshire, where it's set. I also toured an ice cream factory, talked to stunt women, interviewed twins and trespassed in a crop circle. I ate far too much of this stuff and I might have watched far too much of this. The research was great.
How was it to write? Well, to be brutally honest—I was shit scared. In a very short time, I'd gone from writing 60,000-word romance novels with a tight focus on one relationship, to writing a 150,000-word women's fiction novel about several relationships and plot lines, not to mention an entire town as a character. I absolutely love a challenge, but this was a really, really big challenge.
Talking to stunt women put it in perspective. These women risk their life on a daily basis. On the other hand, what was I doing? Sitting in my chair, drinking tea, and writing a book. I wasn't going to break my head, or even my arm (though I did give myself quite a severe case of Repetitive Strain Injury).
Also, I learned what it means to have true nerve. Nerve isn't about being reckless; it's about being knowledgeable. These stunt women don't just suddenly one day get in front of a camera and jump off a horse. They train for years. They practise and they learn and they hurt themselves and they succeed and they try again. They push themselves harder, and gain more knowledge and understanding and skill, until they get it right.
Writing this book was like that, though obviously involving less actual sweat and explosions. It took lots of practice and learning and failing and trying again. Writing and revising and cursing and cheering. And I learned that it's good to be scared. It means you're operating on the edge of what you can do.
Liza, the heroine of GETTING AWAY WITH IT, and Lee, her perfect twin sister, have to learn about being scared, too. Liza has spent so long taking risks that she's deadened herself to the fear, the good fear, that helps keep you learning and helps keep you alive. Her twin sister Lee, on the other hand, is trapped by fear, unable to move without making a radical, frightening change. It probably wasn't a coincidence that my two main sisters both learned the same lesson I was learning, huh?
I'm proud of this book—not just because there are bits in it that surprised me, that came out right the first time and made me laugh aloud or cry with discovery. I'm mostly proud of the bits that didn't come out right the first time. Because I had to work so hard to produce it, and it nearly even says what I wanted it to.
Other Covers
Published in Germany by Diana Verlag as MIT DEN AUGEN MEINER SCHWESTER and in Holland by De Kern as DE STUNT VAN HAAR LEVEN.