Sleepwalking in Daylight
Elizabeth Flock
Contemporary Fiction
September 2011
Once defined by her career and independence, stay-at-home mum Samantha Friedman realises her life has become a routine of errands, car pools and suburban gossip. She deals with a husband who shows up for dinner but is too preoccupied for conversation, an increasingly moody daughter who won’t talk at all, and wonders, Is this it?Since finding out she was adopted, seventeen-year-old Cammy Friedman has felt like an outsider. Unwilling to reach out to the parents she once adored, she shields herself behind black clothing and begins to drift into dangerous territory with questionable friends and risky behaviour.Mother and daughter indulge in their own respective escapism –for Sam, clandestine coffee dates with a handsome stranger, fuelled by the desire to feel something; for Cammy, a furtive search for her birth mother punctuated by sex, pills and the need to feel absolutely nothing – until a pivotal moment in an otherwise average day alters their relationships forever.
