I spend a lot of my time wishing I were better. Better at cooking, better at cleaning, better at making conversation with strangers. And people I know. But mostly, when I've got some hours to idle away, I like to spend them wishing I was better at being Norman's mother. That's the one that snores away in the background and regularly wakes up to jab me with a pointy elbow when I don't show up for parent-teacher meetings, or forget to buy ham for school lunches, or when he has to wear yesterday's underwear because I watched six back-to-back episodes of Come Dine with Me when I got home from work instead of doing the washing. And still couldn't cook a decent dinner.

If you could take all the thousands of random moments of poor mothering, dry dinners and crusty undies and knit them into a lovely warm blanket of denial to pull over your head for about a decade, you'd get a pretty accurate picture of where all my wishing has got me. Nowhere. And definitely not better.

But Norman's always been okay, in spite of me. He's polite, he's kind to old people and animals, he's got good hygiene (despite his poor, tortured skin and the occasional two-day-old underpants, neither of which is his fault) and he's smart. He can usually figure people out a lot quicker than they figure him out, which is a pretty handy talent that he definitely didn't get from me.

Being shorter, cleverer and a hell of a lot scalier than everyone else isn't exactly a recipe for winning friends and influencing people in the schoolyard, but since Jax came along, Norman's never needed anyone else. And as Jax always said, one really and truly best friend is a hundred times better than having a whole bunch that aren't quite sure.

So, apart from his chronic, bastarding psoriasis, the only other things I've ever really had to worry about with Norman are the almost certainly unhealthy amounts of cheese on toast he eats (see problem number one), and the most definitely unhealthy habit of worrying about other people. And by other people, I mean me. Because nobody tells you that when you sign up for single motherhood, do they? That while you're lying in your big old lonely bed late at night worrying about the rubbish job you're doing of being their only significant other, it's highly possible they're doing the exact same thing over there on the other side of the wall underneath their Ninja Turtle duvet.

* * *

When the boys came up with Jax and Norman's Five-Year Plan to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival when they turned fifteen, they were ten. Which shows you how serious they were about comedy. I mean, how many ten-year-olds do you know with a five-year plan? I'm thirty-two, and the closest I've ever come to a five-year plan is signing up for a sofa on Tesco no-interest store credit. Come to think of it, apart from Norman, that sofa is the biggest commitment I've ever made.

Their plan was so outlandish I actually believed they just might do it. Because the thing is, despite their age and lack of credentials, as a comedy double act those boys were funny. Honest, proper, not-just-because-you're-the-mother kind of funny. Jax had a presence, timing and quickness of wit way more developed than a kid his age had any business with, and Norman, well, Norman's got gravitas. He loves it when I tell him that, like it's the biggest compliment you could ever get. And maybe it is. I'm no expert. Sometimes I say it just to make him laugh, because that's the best sound in the world.

"Norman, may I be so bold as to say that your astonishing gravitas is only exceeded by your devastating good looks." Or something like that. He's always delighted to hear it, even if it's out of the blue and it's clear I'm just filling in a gap until the queue at the bank moves, or waiting around trying to get a couple of soft-boiled eggs over the finish line.

Ever since he was old enough to talk I'd forever be finding Norman out in the back garden rattling off a corny comedy routine in a very serious voice, or reenacting some sketch or another verbatim that he'd memorized from the telly or one of my dad's old BBC classic-comedy DVDs. It might go something like this.

Excerpted from The Funny Thing About Norman Foreman by Julietta Henderson . Copyright © 2021 by Julietta Henderson . Excerpted by permission of Mira. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.