audiobook listening, reading, writing, guns, ( NOT A FAN), politics, riots, racism, worrying about the vast amount of people around the world hurting, childcare, pet care, cigarettes, ( not a fan), living in Los Angeles, her British family, television and movies, and eye-opening insights about clothes, ( her points of view were quite interesting),

Life in Pieces is a candid and very personal account, a reflective look at these strange days we now live in, through the eyes of a mother, wife and friend, through the eyes of the wonderfully honest and outspoken Dawn O’ Porter.Female friendships, family, marriage, sex, friends, parenting, cooking, eating, eating cooking, eating, drinking, ( margaritas, or wine: evening pandemic pleasure), a little marijuana & edibles, home activities for the kids, art projects with macaroni noodles, home schooling their boys ( boy, this must be hard to keep up during this pandemic), Snippets like 'Jesus, did I just write a paragraph about putting sunscreen on my kids? RIVETING STUFF' had me smiling. Her honesty around parenting is hilarious, she will have you in stitches. Yet it shaped her. “It’s part of who I am. I can’t imagine a different existence without that terrible thing having happened to me. It makes you a certain kind of person when you begin life with the worst thing that could ever happen. It was devastating but it’s affected me positively – in the way I reach for things, in the way I cope, the way that I love, the way that I’m loyal.”

What should you expect? Tears, belly laughs and to come out the other side wanting Dawn O’Porter to be your best friend’ Marie ClaireDawn O'Porter is a novelist, blogger, presenter, and actress, born Dawn Porter on 23 January 1979 in Scotland. She was raised by an aunt in Guernsey in the Channel Islands after losing her mother at age seven. O'Porter is a British writer and TV presenter. She happens to be married to Chris O'Dowd, the Irish actor, or O'Dowd is married to her. They have two young children and live in LA. O’Porter is a warm, bright, sunshine-filled person. She and her sister Jane were raised by their aunt (an interior designer and beekeeper) and uncle (a pilot) in Guernsey, after her mother died aged 36, days before her seventh birthday. Following her parents’ divorce when she was one, the sisters and their mother moved to the island. “My dad stayed up in Scotland but we’d go up for all the holidays.”

From all the cooking, eating, munching crisps, and daily alcohol consumptions, that Dawn shares with us, I was expecting to see a warm-hearted- slightly chubby-woman. Fearless, funny and unflinchingly real, Life in Pieces is a diary of a time we'll all remember forever - laughing through the tears, finding comfort in the chaos and (in Dawn's case, at least) discovering the life-changing properties of a midday margarita. Because it's written in a very intimate way, it's very easy to read, and I found I raced through a bit more, and a bit more, until quite late at night. It's very much in blog-style writing, so accessible and day to day. It chops and changes a bit, so sometimes letters, sometimes a sort of mini column/essay, and even the odd recipe. I guess that sort of reflected what life was like, muddling from one thing to another within the same 4 walls day in day out. I enjoyed the rhythm of varied stories and emotions in this book — what’s not to like when a person is being true to who they are?—unflinchingly honest...funny, real, unguarded, but appropriate, goofy one minute, serious the next....and sincerely grounded in kindness and compassion for the world and people at large. Hercule Poirot is travelling by luxury passenger coach from London to the exclusive Kingfisher Hill estate, where Richard Devonport has summoned him to prove that his fiancée, Helen, is innocent of the murder of his brother, Frank. But there is a strange condition attached to this request: Poirot must conceal his true reason for being there.

Losing a Friend

Her writing style flows effortlessly that it feels like talking to a friend with a glass of wine in hand and having one of those candid off the record chats. In addition to her television career, O'Porter wrote a monthly column for Glamour magazine. Her articles have also appeared in multiple publications. She currently writes blogs on Patreon. The writer has also published six books. As soon as I saw the many photo images of them both... I immediately recognized Dawn’s funny-guy-comic-talented actor husband, Chris O’Porter, from several offbeat great movies he stars in. An intimate, honest account of the first three months of isolation . . . Her book is a paean to what is truly important’ Telegraph Parts of the book were funny and slightly relatable, such as some parenting moments but the rest of it, not so much.

He's also had a successful cinematic career, with roles in movies like Gulliver's Travels (2010), Bridesmaids (2011), This Is 40 (2012), The Sapphires (2012), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Friends with Kids (2011), Cuban Fury (2014), Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016), and The Cloverfield Paradox (2018). The book just screams ME, ME, ME as I read and I couldn't find a way to connect meaningfully with the self obsessed entries. Her sadness is rationalised. She feels she was young enough to have “scraped through”. “It’s a different kind of grief. It’s an unexplainable gap in your life where you always wonder, but it’s not like I lost her when I was older and have someone to miss.”I related to how grief is a part of Dawn’s life ( her very closest friend committed suicide), my grief is associated with our older daughter....