Looking for Alison

Alison Paula Ewing was born Alison Paula May Jarvis in Chichester on April 29 1960 and died in Headingley, Leeds on April 3 2010 just a few weeks short of her fiftieth birthday. She had a promising start in life, yet she ended that life as a penniless and friendless, isolated alcoholic living in rented accommodation without electricity, her body discovered as her home burned down around her. She had suffered a cardiac arrest courtesy of an inherited heart condition exacerbated by years of alcohol abuse and had already passed away by the time the fire brigade arrived to extinguish the inferno sparked into life by the candles she’d been forced to light her home with. 'Looking for Alison' allows the spirit of the story’s heroine to retrospectively recount her highs and lows, with periodic interruptions from the voice of the author. It is both a damning indictment of a society that has few provisions for its square pegs and a poignant love-letter to a lost soul undeserving of obscurity.