Seeing Me Naked (Liza Palmer)***

Before you get excited, Elisabeth Page has no problems with being literally naked. Almost the first thing she does it to wander into her boyfriend’s kitchen without any clothes on and give the cleaning lady a fright. The book is more about learning to be emotionally naked. Well, it’s supposed to be, but it actually seems to be more about Elisabeth’s attempts not to be a superior bitch.

As you’ve probably guessed, Elisabeth is not the most sympathetic of characters. Like Elizabeth in If You Could See Me Now, she has no social life, Elisabeth/Elizabeth apparently being the standard name for women who don’t have any friends. This characteristic in itself isn’t unappealing. We’ve probably all felt lonely at least once in our lives.

But the reason Elisabeth doesn’t have any friends is probably because she’s a snobby bitch who sneers at everyone she meets. I have no idea why she has such a problem with lovely Margot, who is always so kind to her. And so what if Margot’s friend doesn’t pluck her eyebrows and shaves her legs? Maybe she just has better things to do, like looking after her new baby and being nice to people. When Elisabeth starts talking about what a bitch her workmate Julie is, I did actually end up agreeing with her, but by this time I was rather disinclined to rely on her bitchy judgement.

Elisabeth isn’t the worst person in the book. Her father, Ben, is absolutely dreadful, looking down on Elisabeth because she’s ‘only’ a pastry chef in a top restaurant rather than an award-winning writer like him and her brother. I was interested enough to hope this got resolved in the end, which it did, but I wish it hadn’t happened in the slushiest and most tear-sodden way possible. Maybe the Page family should forget writing and baking, and start solving water shortage problems. I almost began to understand why people use that phrase, usually so inexplicable to an emetophobe, ‘I want to vomit’.

Elisabeth seems to think her life isn’t great, and it certainly isn’t perfect. And, to some extent, it doesn’t matter how good her life seems: if she’s not happy, it’s not the right life for her, and maybe she needs to consider a change. But, having decided she needs a change, great opportunities suddenly start to fall into her lap. She doesn’t have to do anything: they just appear. Maybe I’m just as much of a bitch as she is, but I prefer to see my heroines suffering a bit more, and working a bit harder to make things happen.

Elisabeth meets a guy called Daniel and decides to start an affair with him – even though she has a boyfriend. Yes, her relationship with her boyfriend Will is far from ideal, but it still would have been nice to let Will know she was interested in seeing other people before dragging Daniel into bed.

It would also have been easier to identify with Elisabeth if her relationship with Daniel wasn’t instantly perfect. They have a few problems later on, yes, but it’s a bit surprising Daniel goes along so trustingly with her attempts to seduce him. But Daniels, (see also PS I Love You) are drippy types who fall in love at the drop of a hat and like nothing more than being bossed around. The book says it’s Daniel who helps her to be emotionally naked but Elisabeth seems very much the dominant one.

Then Elisabeth is offered the chance of an alternative job – her own TV cooking show. Of course, her father doesn’t think this is good enough either. But apart from that, it all goes brilliantly. The TV people think she’s adorable. She is a ‘natural’ at speaking to the camera. The book is supposed to be about Elisabeth overcoming her insecurities, but we don’t see many signs of them, and when she does overcome something, she doesn’t really let us in on the process of overcoming it.

But I’m giving this book three stars because Liza Palmer is very funny. You don’t need to like Elisabeth to see the humour in the book. Even though nothing much happens in the first half, there are lots of funny moments, some of which might make you cringe, but in a Shopaholic way, not a Me and Mr Darcy way. Seeing Me Naked is occasionally slow, but not boring, and I did want to know what happened to the characters. There are some great characters you do like and care about – Elisabeth’s brother Rascal (brilliant name, although he’s so sappy, it hardly suits him); her fellow chef Samuel, and, of course, his endlessly kind and friendly wife Margot.

Palmer also deserves credit for not making too much of the fact that both Rascal and Ben are novelists, although Ben’s view that novel-writing is the most superior career of all is something I hope Palmer doesn’t believe herself.

Another strength of this book is that Palmer manages to make cooking seem interesting and creative. Now I don’t dislike cooking, I’m just a bit slow at it and I’m a bit scared I might poison myself because I keep getting confused between the cooking oil and the washing up liquid. However, this didn’t stop me from wondering vaguely if I’d enjoy pastry-making. I’m quite sure I wouldn’t, and I know I’d be terrible at it, but it seemed quite interesting when I was reading the book.