Why Mummy Drinks – Gill Sims

It’s taken me a couple of weeks to write this and I’m not sure why. It’s easy enough to describe the contents. The day-to-day trials of a mother of two, with an emotionally absent husband, seeing her life slip away and her 30th birthday bearing down on her like a runaway steamroller. We’ve all been there.

Wait a minute. No, I’ve never been a mummy, inebriate or otherwise, but I have known a few and by page 10 I was laughing so helplessly I couldn’t swallow my breakfast.

From her ’bastarding’ kids, her perfect sister Jessica, and her hopeless hippy sister-in-law Louisa plonking herself down uninvited with partner Bardo and tribe of incontinent children, Ellen has only one consolation – ‘fuck-it-all’ Friday. Once a week she can escape with best friend Hannah and new friend Sam, he of the gorgeous, but differently sexually oriented arse. Together they find solace in alcohol.

That is until she submits ‘Why Mummy Drinks’, an app she has concocted while pretending to work at her IT day job. The turnaround in the family's finances is not without its turmoil. There is more hair-tearing frustration when Louisa descends again, now abandoned by hairy Bardo. Yes, Ellen will have to chuck her blender in which Louisa has been making smoothies with Bardo’s semen.

Out of it all there is growth and resolution for Ellen, and it is one of the funniest and most satisfying books I’ve read in a long time.