Love, Death & Trousers: Fifty Stories from a Nearby Life
By Laura Francis and Alexander Masters
Stories gathered and edited from the lost diaries re-discovered in A Life Discarded

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Digital
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Hardback
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Read with a Friend
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Original Sketch
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Guest Editor
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A nice day in general; just enjoying myself. No particular thoughts, except perhaps I’d like to change my life.
Laura Francis, now 81 and one of the most prolific and eccentric diarists in history, was a live-in companion and domestic servant to an ageing professor of IT — ‘like his wife in every respect except the sex (thank goodness)’.
She barely knew how to cook and had no time for tidiness. On several occasions during her decades of service, she grabbed a knife and was vicious to the old man’s furniture. She was also funny, self-sacrificially kind, and a profound observer of loneliness and disappointment.
In 2016, she was tracked down by the award-winning investigative journalist, Alexander Masters, after 148 of her anonymous journals were rescued from a skip. The story of his pursuit and discovery was told in his book, A Discarded Life. But until now the million-plus words of Laura’s diaries haven’t been available to read.
Love, Death & Trousers is a collection of fifty exquisite, deeply personal short stories extracted from the diaries by Laura and Masters. (The first eight stories, published in The Paris Review, were anthologised in The Best American Non-Required Reading).
Feel pretty sure I’ll have something published sometime in my lifetime — is inevitable really, even if hard won.
Quick select rewards
Early Bird Hardback
PLUS:
- Hardback
- E-book
- Your name in the back of the book
- Only 50 available

Transcriber
PLUS:
- Hardback
- Signed bookplate
- E-book
- Your name listed in the back of the book as a transcriber
