Freedom Found
A Memoir
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Scotland Street Press
Published:7th Mar '17
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What was it like to be married to Scotland's most famous prisoner?
Sara Trevelyan was independent, clever, and privileged. She was a qualified doctor who campaigned for penal reform. She fell in love with and in 1980 married Jimmy Boyle, a convicted murderer who had become a famous writer and sculptor. For the first four years of their marriage he was in jail, visits were few and their life lived under the scrutiny of the media. In this intimate memoir, we learn why Jimmy admits, “If it hadn’t been for Sara’s courage, I would still be in prison.”
She is a sure-footed guide through the extraordinary life they were called to lead. Her description of their eventual divorce is without bitterness or resentment, rather a tale of forgiveness and compassion. As a doctor and therapist, a spokeswoman for prisoner rehabilitation, and a wife and mother Sara is a courageous voyager. She realised what a journey it took to understand and to live into the quotation from Blake, “We are put on earth a little space, That we might bear the beams of love.”
For the past twenty-seven years Sara has worked as a psychotherapist and counsellor between Edinburgh and Findhorn.
A marriage made in prison and ended in solitudeThe former wife of Glasgow gangster Jimmy Boyle reflects on their love and demons, writes Gillian Bowditch
Sara Trevelyan did not set out to have one of the most notorious marriages of the 20th century. Unlike some who marry murderers, she did not crave the dubious celebrity that dances attendance on such relationships. The number of times she has spoken publicly in the last three decades can be counted on the digits of a three-toed sloth.
In possession of a medical degree and a family fortune, there was no shortage of options for her but her marriage on January 31, 1980, in Balfron register office at the age of 29 to Jimmy Boyle — known as “Scotland’s most violent criminal” — while he was still serving a life sentence in the now defunct Barlinnie Special Unit, has been the defining event of
-- Gillian Bowditch * The Times *ISBN: 9781910895078
Dimensions: 195mm x 130mm x 25mm
Weight: 342g
330 pages