AN award-winning Northside author has released another novel to add to her vast collection of work.
‘Dad’s Red Dress’, written by Lindsay J Sedgwick, from Marino, is a novel about a 13-year-old girl, the dad she loves and the embarrassing family she adores. Her kid sister thinks she has been abducted by the Virgin Mary twice, her stepmother makes erotic sculptures and her dad cross dresses.
“She’s not ashamed of them, she loves them to bits it’s just whenever kids at school find out about her dad the bullying starts and she’s sick of it.
“They’ve just moved from America back to Ireland and she’s determined to keep a lid on everything. It’s a comedy of errors with lots of heart because the more control she tries to keep the less control she has and it will all come to an explosion at the end,” says Sedgwick who came up with the idea as a teenager in the 1980s.
A person her parents knew was transitioning from male to female and she funded her surgeries through writing columns in a national newspaper.
“I remember as a kid trying to see these and my parents tried to stop me reading the details,” she says. “I always wondered how it affected his children and what it was like for the kid to go into school the next day. To me that was fascinating.”
Aimed at an age group of 10 and upwards, Sedgwick says the book can resonate with all ages and that “a lot of adults have read it and they love it”.
With a transgender parent at the heart of the storyline, Sedgwick discussed the importance of normalising such issues that are often under-represented in the media.
“All my work would be aiming to normalise. We’re all different, we all have different quirks, different needs, different attitudes and it’s only by telling the stories that it becomes something that people aren’t afraid of,” she says.
Much of Sedgwick’s work centres around the idea of normalising minority issues. ‘Punky’, one of her most popular creations, is an international award-winning animation series about a child with Down Syndrome.
“That was the first time this story had been told in the mainstream media, in animation, where the main character had special needs. To me that makes perfect sense. It’s a perspective that we don’t know and it becomes part of the general conversation now and it’s all about accepting differences,” she says.
Lindsay J Sedgwick began her career as a journalist, aged 16, and has since had a vast and successful career in writing. She has written screenplays, television and radio scripts, along with an array of novels.
‘Dad’s Red Dress’ is based on a feature script that was at the cusp of being co-produced as a German-Irish feature film before funding fell through. Six years ago, Sedgwick started turning her family feature films into books and this was “the one that jumped to the front”.
The novel is currently available as an e-book on Amazon and is due to be released in print in the coming weeks.
A young graphic designer, Aoife Henkes, read the first chapter of the book and designed the front cover. Further work by Henkes can be found at www.aoifehenkesgraphicdesign.com.
REPORT: Hayley Halpin
