Former Magazine Employee Says A Psychic Predicted She Would Write A Novel And It Came True
Hattie Holden Edmonds laughed when a psychic told her during a reading that she would one day write novels that would be “funny and spiritual”, she paid that prediction no mind and even thought of it as a “load of nonsense”. Fast-forward several years after that visit and the music journalist turned author is in the midst of debuting her first novel. It is titled Cinema Lumiere and just as the psychic predicted, it is actually funny and slightly spiritual.
Edmonds began her career with a German music magazine as the London correspondent. “I was interviewing all the boy bands, everybody from Michael Jackson to Meat Loaf. But when I was 35 I found myself stuck in a rut and it wasn’t fulfilling me at all- I found it all quite superficial,” she says.
“So a friend of mine said ‘I’ll pay for you to go and see a psychic’. She told me I was going to write novels and they’ll be funny. I said to them, ‘look, I have never written fiction and I am certainly not funny’”.
“But then weirdly within nine months I was the in-house comedy writer for Comic Relief- then I started to think, maybe there is something to what she said, because it’s unusual for someone to suddenly become a comedy writer. Then about two years after seeing her I had this idea for the novel, which came from a true life story.”
While Edmonds was working at Comic Relief, she met a woman who told her the story of her near-death experience. She told her that she was in a coma at one point in her life and while in it, she saw a movie of her life in 3D and that it was very deep, very holographic and very life-like, so life-like that it felt like she was reliving those moments with all the emotions she was feeling. Moments that were so far in the back of her mind that she had forgotten all about them. The woman told Edmonds that she remembers thinking ‘it’s not enough, I need more time’ at the end of the film and at that moment she awoke from her coma.
Her novel, Cinema Lumiere was born after hearing this story and thinking to herself, ‘what if we could see a film of our life before we die, would we like it?’
The novel is set in three different cities, Paris, London, and Portobello and follows a woman named Hannah Bailey who feels she is stuck in a job that is going nowhere and has pretty much succumbed to the idea that she will never find true love. Then one day she came upon a little theater with a single seat.
This theater is unlike any other theater though, Cinema Lumiere plays an edited movie of the viewer’s life and Victor, the French owner, is trying desperately to get Hannah to sit in the single seat.
Movie aficionados might know that the name of the book is in reference to the Lumiere brothers who were considered pioneers of cinema. They would travel to different cities and play shorts that moved the entire audience. Edmonds even included them in the book to add some historical perspective and depth to it. She really knows what she’s talking about when it comes to cinema and even ran a grassroots cinema at one point.
“I’ve been mad about films since forever. When I was in Berlin, during the winter it was freezing and to save money me and my friend used to go to the cinema, which was just down the road. Over there you could buy tickets to see a series of films and we would take our duvets with us- as you could do that- and just sit and watch films all day to keep warm. They showed a lot of European art house cinema, which I love.”
“Also me and a very good friend of mine ran a pop-up cinema under the Westway in Portobello, for six years, which had about 80 seats that we bought from Ebay and a huge screen. We screened a lot of European films like Cinema Paradiso, In the Mood for Love, Amelie, and Wings of Desire. I’d go on BBC radio often too to talk about quirky cinemas- so it all fitted in well with the book.”
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