Grey Matters – and all 
their associated mattering

Grey Matters by Danielle Barbereau

Pages by Peter

By Peter Newman, 
St Duthac Book and Arts Festival Commitee

Giving a book about the power of healing for women through defiance, shared experiences and the multigenerational need to be heard and secured to a privileged, middle class, middle aged, white man may seem an odd choice.


The author, Danielle Barbereau, has a fascinating background. After spending over 20 years in senior leadership roles in Higher Education, she retrained as the UK’s first specialist divorce coach and has spent the next decade and a half counselling, supporting and helping people to recover and thrive post-separation.


It is worth highlighting this broad background, as Barbereau’s first novel, ‘Grey Matter’, draws on all these professional experiences to create a world in which a reader can be thoroughly immersed.


Odile, owner of a successful textile business, is now in her late sixties. She has raised her daughter, Rowan, against a backdrop of fleeing an abusive relationship when her child was nothing but a babe in arms. Now settled in Edinburgh, Odile finds herself at a crossroads: Rowan is grown and resentful of not knowing her father. Society is bombarding Odile, and almost any other women of a similar age, with hammerblow signals that they are an inconvenience and no longer of value. First husbands are absconding with their thinning hair and beer bellies to younger yoga instructors: taking the money, the lifestyle and the life these older women are used to. Odile encounters women unwilling to act in solidarity, others suffering in silence: misogyny and misandry in equal measure.

Grey Matters is a clarion call for the power of women, friendship, bravery and the power of starting again. 


If I have a quibble with the novel, which is well written and well produced, it is the choice made by Barbereau for her characters to speak without use of abbreviations. This damages the dialogue as, by refusing to use an “isn’t” or a “mustn’t”, these people begin to sound stilted and artificial – something which is unfortunate as the dilemmas they have faced, the situations they have lived through and the sensitively handled material of often emotive subjects, deserves better.


Overall, however, Barbereau’s debut fiction is a charming and powerful statement about the need to stop treating people as disposable items and the truth that everyone should use their grey matter – because people matter, even if they are grey of hair.

Peter Newman, 
St Duthac Book and Arts Festival Commitee

As well as teaching, I have been a freelance journalist writing sports and
arts and have been reviewing books and interviewing authors on my website
for over a decade. Additionally, I have been a political candidate, a podcast host, a coach of various sports teams and am a co-opted member of the board of the Festival. I am really looking forward to trying to introduce our readers to some authors and topics which you may not have had the opportunity to encounter yet.