Waterlemon is the true story of a sudden unwelcome interruption to an ordinary happy life. One perfect spring day, when newspaper columnist Ruth Ritchie was playing at home with her three-month-old baby, she received the call that her husband had been in a road accident, and was being airlifted to hospital.
Waterlemon charts the days, months and years that follow in a narrative about trauma that is dark, subversively funny and totally different to anything you may have read before. As we follow her husband and her family struggle to return to an elusive normality, we witness the astonishing amount of love, courage, anger, good cooking and black humour that comes out of surviving, coping and living with brain injury.
Waterlemon is as surprising as it is moving, as Ruth turns the survival genre on its head. Ruth Ritchie is a freelance writer, playwright and ex-copywriter. A columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald for the last 15 years, Ritchie regularly savages everything from television to bad restaurants in print. Fans of her work will already anticipate a dark and entertaining take on the usually dour "brush with death" genre. Waterlemon explores the "triumph of human spirit over adversity" with a twist, and probably a vodka.
