Lily – Behind the Book
The moment our daughter came into my office to say that her lift had arrived to take her to Bangkok, where she would start a new life at university, I looked at her in a new light. She seemed so small and fragile. She has always been small, in the same way that I have always been large.
One day, years later, I was sitting with a new teacher at the local school. My daughter came to say that tea was ready. I introduced her to the teacher, who asked why they had never met before. She could barely believe that my daughter was not 14-15, and was in university.
Problems teenage girls might suffer
With that memory in mind, I bade her farewell. As soon as she had left, I started making notes on the problems that she could encounter as a person of smaller stature.
1) having to prove her age in bars and cinemas… Well, that would happen, but all Thais carry ID, so it would not be a problem.
2) Fashionable clothing had never been a real problem, but she had to wear teen fashion rather than the adult styles. She was used to that.
3) Unwanted attention from paedophiles? That might be a problem, and one that she would never tell me about because of embarrassment.
A story was hatching
A story was born. I kicked it back seven years in history, and called her Lily. Lily is a very strong person, although the sexual abuse that she suffered had a lasting effect on her. That is a mainstay of the stories. One thing stands out like a sore thumb from the feedback that I have received: most women love the story, so do a lot of younger men, but old men tend to hate it. I don’t suppose for one moment that all those older men are paedophiles, but could they be railing unconsciously against the power that women have rightly gained recently, whereas younger men have already accepted it?
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