The Honesty Box

The Honesty Box
Genre : Lifestyle
Published : 27 Feb 2025 - Bloomsbury

On National Divorce Day, my husband Steve and I decide to break up. After years of depression and mood swings (him) and hope and defeat (me) enough is, quite frankly, enough.

Until a chance remark triggers a chain of events leading to Steve's diagnosis of ADHD and autism. What follows is a year of discovery, denial, medication and salvation, as we, our teenagers and even our beloved Golden Retriever, Margot, set out to embrace this new reality. But will my plan to start an amateur honesty box business from our tiny Devon village be the catalyst to bring us together, or drive us further apart?

This is about what it is like to live with someone as they try to accept their neurodiversity. It is a funny, heart-wrenching, uplifting quest for truth, transformation and marrows.

I guess you could call it a love story too.

Reviews

I read this book in two sit downs! It is filled with compassion. An honest look at navigating life, marriage, family, neurodiversity and veg.

Anna Maxwell Martin

A truly beautiful, magical book - I urge you to give it to anyone having a midlife wobble, because Lucy is unashamed about showing her vulnerability and what it is to be human, a woman, a wife and a mum in the 21st century. Heart-breaking and heart-warming, but the ultimate message is one of hope: never give up on the one you love.

Veronica Henry

A beautiful and much needed book about what it is like to be in a relationship with someone who is neurodivergent, and the challenges it can bring! Lucy's story highlights just how life changing a diagnosis can be, and how it can truly save relationships.

Rich and Rox Pink

Astonishing.

Lorraine Candy

This beautiful memoir has everything: a raw and honest account of a marriage in trouble, a complicated love story and a glorious, season by season evocation of country living. It reminded me of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence - a cast of village characters you care deeply about and Lucy Brazier’s exquisite prose, equal parts funny and heartbreaking. Her unflinching look at life with a partner newly diagnosed with Autism and ADHD feels important and timely and it comes with gorgeous, immersive storytelling. THE HONESTY BOX is a triumph.

Clare Leslie Hall

Lucy’s extraordinary, funny, uplifting and deeply touching book is as important as it is brilliantly written. Despite its huge themes - love, difference, discovery, life - the pages turn as easily as a holiday read.

Mark Dianco

Touching, topical and brilliantly woven together, this love story of despair, food and redemption is utterly charming.

Dame Joanna Lumley

Entertaining, enlightening, shocking and soothing. The joy of gorgeous nature writing mixed with the guilty pleasure of enjoying intimate access to the ups and downs of someone else’s private life. I learnt a great deal about neurodivergence and now want to set up an honesty box.

Poppy Okotcha

Beautifully written, by someone who observes nature in all its glorious daily unfolding.

Dorset Magazine

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