Alan Saunders

Tessa Novak Alan Saunders

For women being a young adult in the 1970/80s wasn't easy. Changing fast were the traditional expectations of early marriage and motherhood with the juggling act of career, relationships and planning for your own future the new norm. This was the world Tessa had to confront, one dream of a gymnastics career already over by eighteen, stuck in a dead end cycle of part time work and with no great career prospects in life until a chance meeting opens a most unlikely career path. Set initially in post Thatcher England and then variously in Oxford, France, Majorca and romantic Bali this largely fiction, partly fact story will be instantly familiar to those of us that lived through the era. It is a story of photographers and photography in the classic film days, of unexpectantly becoming a model and trying to make sure those professions didn't turn into the career choices from hell. It's a story of finding your place in a world changing beyond recognition, seizing opportunities and moving on from the disasters that invariably hit us. The rather carefree dating world of the 70s will be instantly recognisable to those of us that lived through them as will the battle of finding the balance between career, work, romance and ultimately marriage and children, and the story has a very modern twist when, decades later, a combination of a diary entry and the internet throws up a very outrageous skeleton from Tessa's past for all to see.