“We’re led to believe love is complicated. It’s not the love that’s complicated. It’s all the crap that we attach to it and put in front of it that makes it difficult. If you’re smart, you’ll realize this before it’s too late…” — Present Perfect, by Alison Bailey
West Ashley resident and Charleston native Alison Bailey never set out to be a writer. In college, her focus was on theater. Mostly back stage work, but it took her to New York after graduation and eventually brought her back to Charleston. At times she would write, mainly short pieces, but as life got in the way, she put the writing to one side.
“My husband would ask every once in a while if I ever thought about getting back into writing and I did, but I just didn’t seem to have the time for it,” says Bailey.
Instead, she spent her spare moments reading everything she could get her hands on.
Then one day, a friend of hers told her that she was planning to self publish a book.
“’You ought to try it; see if you still enjoy it,’ she said to me. And that’s how it started,” says Bailey.
But the idea of writing a full novel sounded intimidating to Bailey, to say the least, so she set out to simply write a chapter. Then she wrote another, and another.
“Then I wrote a scene out of sequence and worked it in, but I still didn’t think I would write a whole book. Then, after a couple more chapters, the thing just snowballed,” says Bailey.
When she finished, Bailey shared it with a few close friends to get a gauge on the quality, telling them to be completely honest with her. Every one of them encouraged her to publish it.
“I almost didn’t want to commit to it. It took me a long time to just pinpoint a release date. But once I did, the first few weeks after it became available on Amazon were just surreal,” says Bailey.
The book almost immediately started climbing the ranks and within a month it was a top-selling title.
“It was wild having people emailing me and messaging me who I didn’t even know, telling me about how much the book had touched them. Then, when an agent called me and asked about representing me and my book, it was almost too much,” says Bailey.
In three months, Bailey’s book, Present Perfect, had sold 15,000 copies and the number is still climbing.
The story of Present Perfect follows the life of two individuals, Amanda and Noah. Starting with a shared trick-or-treating adventure at the age of 6, the novel chronicles their lives though college. As she grows up, Amanda becomes obsessed with the idea of perfection and even though she feels that her relationship with her best friend, Noah, is perfect, it soon dawns on her that she’s fallen in love with him. And if he could have that type of power over her, to make her feel things and act ways that she couldn’t control, then she couldn’t let herself be with him.
As the author states in her synopsis, “Present Perfect is a story of how past events have present consequences and how perfect your present could be if you stopped fighting and just allowed it to happen.”
“When I first started writing the book, I knew I liked all of my characters, but by chapter ten I really knew all of them and had fallen in love with them. Writing the book was far more emotional than I thought it would be,” says Bailey.
With such a warm opening reception of her first novel, Bailey is already well underway writing a companion book, which will be released this coming February.
“I hope the emotions I felt when writing this book comes through to whoever is reading it. The best books, I think, are the ones I get lost in and feel. It was absolutely a pleasure to write,” says Bailey.
While Bailey doesn’t have any book signings planned for the Charleston area just yet, she is attending some book signings in Georgia and North Carolina over the next few months. To find out more or to get your own copy, visit Alison G. Bailey’s Facebook page or check her out on Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com.
