Extract from The Days of Judy B by Rose Heiney
I don't know what started all this. I can't pinpoint the moment when my job became a lie and my interest became an obsession. I can't name the day when my friends evaporated, my life started to crumble and Judy B kept on giggling across the rubble. I can't even remember when I last did laundry. There is no excuse for my being the way I am. But this much I know: it has to change, soon. I am in the mother of all ruts; with every week that passes another exit is being boarded up. One more year and I will be trapped, alone, forever screaming out neatly formed jokes from a music lined pit of shop-bought Battenburg cake and Sambuca ... I am a twenty-three-year old, overweight virgin with only three pairs of shoes. If I'd grown up in an impoverished Mormon village in rural Utah, I'm sure that I could be the subject of a heartbreaking documentary.