Have you ever dreamed of fleeing your current life and spending weeks or months or even a year living on an island in the Mediterranean? This is what Susan Johnson longed for and did, taking her mother with her to the Greek island of Kythera. Reading Johnson’s new memoir Aphrodite’s Breath while taking myself off for a month of writing near Naples was my second experience of living in a synchronicity of sorts with Johnson.
Johnson is just a few years older than me; a writer, mother and divorcee who has always – from a distance as we’re yet to meet – been well ahead of me with books, success and family. For a while we had the same literary agent and I’d hear of her latest publications and wish that I too had the tenacity and grit to finish my own books with such (deceptive) ease.
