It is a scorching May Bank Holiday and Caitlin Kennedy's marriage is in meltdown, her daughter dreams of being adopted by Britney Spears and her four-year-old son has just declared he wishes to be renamed Daphne. Where did it all go so horribly wrong? In a bid to find out Caitlin retrieves her long lost diary from 1984 and is sent hurtling back into her past. Back to a time where t-shirts urged everyone to 'Dig Deep for the Miners' and 'RELAX' and an angst ridden teenager embarked upon her search for a 'real' man.
As we journey back with Caitlin, we slowly piece together the events that transformed a fun-loving romantic into a wise-cracking cynic. But there are still pieces missing from the jigsaw; pieces that Caitlin has been too scared to search out before. Forced to confront her past for once and for all, she finally discovers the answer to the eternal question, what if?

As I've grown older I've been struck by how many people seem to be hostage to a previous relationship or hurt and haunted by the question, what if? In Frankie Says Relapse I wanted to try and capture the raw intensity of a young girl's first love and how over the years it has become a curse, blighting any chance of future happiness. I also wanted to demonstrate how a combination of fear and tragic misunderstanding can drastically alter the course of a person's life. By using the diary of the teenage Caitlin as a flashback technique I wanted to give the readers the pieces of the jigsaw one by one so that they could work out for themselves how a fun-loving romantic ended up quite so cynical. I also wanted to leave them with a twist that neither they nor the adult Caitlin could possibly foresee.

Quotes

"I thought from the cover that this was a chick-lit novel, but it is so much more than that. There is such depth to the characters and in the love story between Jed and Caitlin. Curham has an acute ear for dialogue, even in the various regional dialects she reproduces so apparently effortlessly and the evocation of the period and the observation of the teenage girls is just so perfect and funny too. Reading this book was a sheer delight."
- The Evening Standard.