Jane Fallon has produced TV series such as 20 Things To Do Before You're 30, the classic This Life, and Teachers. Getting Rid of Matthew is her first novel.
"Be careful what you wish for," says the old Chinese proverb.
Helen should take note of that. She's thirty-nine and lives (mostly) alone, and works as a PA at a PR company. She's also the boss' mistress, and frequently begs Matthew -- who is also her boss -- to leave Sophie and move in with her. But he has two teenage children, and she knows that that's never going to happen.
Until, unexpectedly, it does.
One evening between Christmas and the New Year, Matthew confesses to his wife that he's been having an affair, and that he wants to move in with his new love. Sophie and the children are devastated, but so equally is Helen. Matthew is twenty years older than her, and it's one thing for him to visit three evenings a week for intense sex and some desultory conversation, it's anotherthing when he moves several suitcases worth of possessions into her little flat and loses interest in sex because he's too tired from work.
Helen realizes that she didn't really want Matthew at all. But what on earth can she do?
Meanwhile she's been spying on Sophie -- the ex -- more out of curiosity than anything else. She strikes up a conversation using a pretext, gives Sophie an assumed name, but finds that they get along quite well. To her surprise, Sophie feels the same way. So once a week she becomes Eleanor. They meet for drinks, and then one day Helen sees Sophie with a young man. Sonny is young and handsome and opening a restaurant. And he's clearly as attracted to Helen/Eleanor as she is to him. He gives her a card, which she pockets without looking at.
Later, when she finds the card, she realizes to her horror that 'Sonny' is a nickname, and is Matthew's son by his first marriage. Lately Sonny has become friends with Sophie, since his father 'betrayed' her in the same way that he left his first wife for Sophie.
As Matthew and Sonny begin to seek a rapproachment, and Sophie expresses more and more curiosity about Matthew's 'wife-stealing' new woman, so Helen's stratagems to avoid hertwo worlds colliding become ever more desperate and farcical.
More and more she really wants to get rid of Matthew...if only she could get him and Sophie back together...
Jane Fallon has produced several TV series for British television, including 20 Things To Do Before You're 30, the classic This Life, Teachers, and the soap opera EastEnders. Getting Rid of Matthew is her first novel, and is both uproariously funny and at the same time toe-curlingly embarrassing, which is a testament to how sympathetic she has managed to make Helen.
Suite101 looks forward to her second novel.
