My Life on a Plate Hardback - 2000

My Doris Day streak has come skipping and ginghaming its way to the fore in recent days . . . It’s what happens when your immediate family is a convoluted mass of divorce and fragmentation. At the end, deep down, you want to be the one to break the pattern . . . The Doris streak . . . makes me want to be neat and nuclear; sometimes it even makes me think that I wouldn’t mind being suburban.And, obviously, the Doris streak is often at odds with the rest of me, or at least with the parts that smoke and drink and occasionally spend a happy half-hour drying the dishes absent-mindedly while wondering what it would be like to snog strange people who really, really fancied you and were groaning with desire at the thought of kissing you. If they existed. And one knew them. Hypothetically.

"MY LIFE ON A PLATE is a wickedly funny and painfully honest comic novel. It comforts those of us who have experienced the misery of marital desertion and an infestation of headlice. It's a triumph. I intend to buy it for everybody I love. " -- Sue Townsend, author of THE ADRIAN MOLE DIARIES, THE QUEEN AND I, and REBUILDING COVENTRY

"India Knight's wildly funny survey of women's lives will leave you nodding in recognition and laughing out loud." --Regina Barreca

"[My Life on a Plate] is so entertaining and...moving. This novel...offers a candid portrait of a moribund marriage you won't soon forget."

- Carmella Ciuraru Newsday 12/28/00 Newsday

“A comic tour de force.”—Telegraph

“An enormously charming, often scabrously funny first novel . . . The irrepressible Clara is also irresistible: as she deconstructs and reconstructs herself endlessly, there are insights aplenty about making do, holding on, and letting go.”—Kirkus Kirkus Reviews

"Witty and raucous . . . entertains while animating many of the common misconceptions people have about marriage.” —Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly

“Witty commentary on middle-class mores and humor make this . . . novel an enjoyable read.”—Library Journal Library Journal

“At once realistic and hopeful.” Booklist, ALA

“Disturbingly funny . . . India Knight has a gritty understanding of the games married people play. This witty writer has written a snappy account of modern marriage with an underlying seriousness.” —Sunday Times (UK)

“Well-written, neatly constructed and . . . funny . . . Like her creator, Clara has a talent for seeing the farcically tragic in all that surrounds her.”—The Guardian (UK)

“Sharp, witty . . . Knight’s novel is groundbreaking in current fiction in that it attempts to investigate modern marriage: what it does to women, their sex drive and their sense of self.” Marie Claire (UK)

“Knight’s funny, assured portrait . . . combines chick lit with journalistic lifestyle-ese (and the power of YSL’s Touch Eclat).”—Independent (UK)

“So vigorous, funny and opinionated . . . Not only full of brilliantly funny and knowing sentences, but of heroically ghastly characters too." Evening Standard (UK)

“India Knight dishes us a helping of humour and heartache on the condition of the modern Mrs." Elle (UK)

“This novel makes a refreshing change from the ‘single girl seeks man with increasing desperation’ theme . . . The style is zappy and witty, with clever and perceptive dialogue…Clara is such a riotously outspoken and unpretentious heroine that you cannot help loving her.”—The Bookseller (UK)