When I Ran Away by Ilona Bannister

Published by Two Roads Books

Available from West End Lane Bookshop, All Good Bookshops and Online

What They Say

This morning Gigi left her husband and children.

Now she’s watching Real Housewives and drinking wine in a crummy hotel room, trying to work out how she got here.

When the Twin Towers collapsed, Gigi Stanislawski fled her office building and escaped lower Manhattan on the Staten Island Ferry. Among the crying, ash-covered and shoeless passengers, Gigi, unbelievably, found someone she recognised – the guy with pink socks and a British accent – from the coffee shop across from her office. Together she and Harry Harrison make their way to her parents’ house where they watch the television replay the planes crashing for hours, and she waits for the phone call from her younger brother that never comes. And after Harry has shared the worst day of her life, it’s time for him to leave.

Ten years later, Gigi, now a single mother consumed with bills and unfulfilled ambitions, bumps into Harry again and this time they fall deeply in love. When they move to London it feels like a chance for the happy ending she never dared to imagine. But it also highlights the differences in their class and cultures, which was something they laughed about until it wasn’t funny anymore; until the traumatic birth of their baby leaves Gigi raw and desperately missing her best friends and her old life in New York.

As Gigi grieves for her brother and rages at the unspoken pain of motherhood, she realises she must somehow find a way back – not to the woman she was but to the woman she wants to be.

What I Say

Over recent months, the role of mothers in the home has never been out of the spotlight as women have been juggling home life, professional life, home schooling and keeping everything going whilst attempting to process what has been happening in the world around us as we deal with the pandemic.

I read Ilona’s novel a few weeks ago, and can hand on heart say that I have never read a book that more perfectly gets right to the heart of what it means to be a mother. It is funny, heartbreaking, unflinching and true, but it also absolutely articulates what it is like to have a baby when you are a stranger in the country you live in, and you don’t have the in built support system it is assumed by the medical professionals that you must have to function.

If I also tell you that a lot of the action takes place in a single day in a London hotel while our protagonist Gigi is watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey, and you know how much I love the Real Housewives, I don’t think it’s difficult to see why I loved this novel so completely.

Gigi Stanislawski is caught up in the aftermath of 9/11, and it is there as she tries to get home to her parents that she meets Harry, an Englishman who she knows from coffee shop. It is when they eventually stumble to her parents house that she discovers her brother has lost his life. Harry and Gigi part, but fate brings them together ten years later, and they fall completely in love.

After losing her brother Frankie, Gigi discovered that his girlfriend Danielle was pregnant by her new boyfriend, and with no one willing to take the baby, Gigi did and became a single mother. While she works incredibly hard to balance her working life with looking after Johnny and dating Harry, nothing seems to phase her. When she marries Harry and they decide to move to London, and Gigi discovers she is pregnant, it finally seems like Gigi has the perfect life she has always deserved.

The brilliantly constructed dual narrative means we see Gigi holed up in a London hotel very close to where she lives watching Real Housewives. We don’t know why she is there, what has prompted her to run away, but what we do know is that Gigi is not coping with motherhood. This means that Gigi can share with the reader how she came to adopt Johnny, the reality of moving to a new country with a whole set of customs and social niceties that no one has explained, and most importantly how her experiences of being a mother have led to her running away from her husband and children

One of the many things I loved about this novel are the excruciatingly accurate scenes where Gigi has afternoon teas with other local mothers. However much they try and convince themselves and each other that they are completely supportive of every choice each parent makes, the passive aggressive statements and transparently superior side swipes that effortlessly fall from their lips were all too familiar. Gigi feels at a double disadvantage to these women as she has come to the UK from America, but also had a traumatic and difficult birth with her son Rocky. Ilona innately understands the social conventions and moral complexities of these events, and the language and dialogue is completely unforgettable.

As the novel moves through Gigi’s world, little by little the pieces fall into place and we understand what made her pick up her keys and phone and leave. Ilona draws us close to her, and as we see all her worries and internalised pain, Gigi is so real and relatable that you just want to reach her into the book and tell her it will be okay. The narrative moves forward and brings us along with it, and I read every single line because it resonated with me so deeply. You absolutely feel Gigi’s sense of not fitting in, and her bewilderment as to why she is not enjoying motherhood as everyone tells her she should.

When I Ran Away starts so many difficult and necessary conversations about the realities of motherhood and parenting. Ilona unflinchingly shows us the repetitiveness and absolute mundanity of motherhood, but also for me highlighted the incredibly common assumption that you automatically have an inbuilt family support system ready to leap in when you need it. If you do, that’s wonderful, but those who face parenthood without it need to be heard and understood too. If you take one thing away from this incredible novel, it should be that motherhood is not a competition, and that the most powerful thing we can do as women is to acknowledge that. To truly try and be real about motherhood, rather than falling into the trap of filtering and editing our world to give the illusion of being the picture perfect version we have been made to feel we should project is hard, but necessary if we really want to start talking about motherhood.

I absolutely loved it.

Thank you so much to Rachael Duncan at Two Road Books for my gifted proof copy.

You can buy your copy from West End Lane books here.