41-love: A Memoir

"After winning her local tennis club tournament, Scarlett Thomas, 41-year-old novelist, decided to dedicate a year of her life to tennis. At 12, Scarlett discovered her father was not the punk photographer who'd brought her up, but was in fact the man she previously knew as her godfather. At 14, she was sent to Mexico to connect with her terrifying grandmother. She was sent to a conservative boarding school in the middle of nowhere, her only link with the outside world was movie-night each Saturday wherethey watched dance films that usually involved rebellion and teenage pregnancy. Fast forward a few years, and at 41 Scarlett was a successful novelist and a senior academic. She'd given up smoking, got fit, settled down. She had a lovely house and a wonderful partner. She'd had all the therapy. Then her beloved dog died, and she couldn't get over it. Of her three fathers (she'd acquired a step-father at 10), one died of a heroin overdose and the other two were diagnosed with cancer. Her sister-in-law become pregnant at the same time that she realized that she really was never going to become a mother. For the first time in her life, remaining a size 8-10 was hard, verging on impossible. She was supposed to grow up, but she didn't know how. So instead, she decided to regress: to go back to the thing she'd loved best as a child but had inexplicably abandoned: tennis. As well as being a compelling story of addiction and breakdown, 41-0 is a hilarious and disturbing look at tournaments, cheap hotels, small-town tennis clubs and the characters that frequent them. And Scarlett knows she's not the only person to have wondered whether, if you throw enough money and time and passion at something, you can make your dream come true. Answer: nope. But you can certainly die trying"-- A 41-year-year old writer confronts a mid-life crisis by returning to the thing she loved most as a child but abandoned as she grew older—tennis—and find she’ll do almost anything to win.