Caitlin Moran

0:00You must remember this. A kiss is just a kiss. But Rosebud? Well, that's really satisfying. That lasts. I mean, a kiss, it comes, it goes, and who knows where it leads. But Rosebud, well, I hope you know it's going to lead to an interesting hour with an unusual person who has a remarkable story to tell. Today is no exception. Cue the music.

0:43Every week on a Friday, I always say the same thing. I'm so excited by our very special guest. And I really am excited today. Well, I'm always excited, but I'm particularly excited because today we are talking to a writer whose work I have known for years, and is one of the few writers whose work regularly makes me laugh out loud. She is a very funny person, but she's also a fascinating human being and quite a complicated person, I think. She's called Kathleen Moran, and if you read her work, you will already be thinking, oh yeah, this is going to be a good one. If you know nothing about her, well, you're going to discover a person who had an unusual childhood.

1:28For example, she was homeschooled and lived a fairly chaotic childhood in Wolverhampton. But she wrote her way out of it. I mean, literally, this is somebody who wrote their way into the life that she now leads many years later. She won her first writing award when she was 13. She had her first book published when she was 16. She got a job for Melody Maker Magazine when she was a teenager. She then became a columnist for The Times, I think at the age of 18. She wrote, if you know her from her books, it's How to Be a Woman, which became a huge bestseller. Now, just out, she has a fabulous new podcast called Outsiding, which she does with Adam Frost, which I recommend without reservation.

2:15and I recommend without reservation the time she's spending with us today on Rosebud. You'll find her funny and moving, revealing and I think ultimately inspiring. This is a special edition, Kathleen Moran on Rosebud. Cue the music.

2:49Kathleen Moran? Yes. Pronounced correctly? Yes. Born Catherine Elizabeth Moran? Very much so. Changed to Kathleen when? Oh, probably about 1989. I thought I needed something that sounded more romantic and Celtic. And also I was into numerology. I was in the, there's a kind of spooky section in the local library that had things about witchcraft and palm reading. And one of them was about numerology in which every letter in your name has a numerical value. When you add them together, it tells you your future. Catherine Elizabeth Moran had a poor future, suboptimal. Catelyn Moran had a glittering future, so I changed it.

3:22And is it Catelyn? Yes, and it shouldn't be. So it is spelt C-A-I-T-L-I-N, which anyone else in the world should and would correctly pronounce Catelyn. But I saw it in a Jilly Cooper novel, and I did not know how to pronounce it correctly. I thought for some reason it was pronounced Catelyn. And so I've had to spend the last 40 years saying, I'm so sorry it's Catelyn. It shouldn't be. I'm really sorry. I've now become a problem to you. It's the biggest mortification of my life. If it's the biggest mortification of your life, we're in for a pretty dull time together. Oh, no, the thing is, all my other mortifications I'm pretty breezy about and have turned into copies, so that's fine.

3:56Good. Yes. OK, Catherine, born 5th of April 1975? Started the new tax year, yes. My first question is the same one I ask everybody. It's what is your very first memory? So the first actual memory is boring. it's being a baby and being more drawn to black and white zigzaggy patterns than the floral colourful psychedelic things that were in my parents flat and then about 30 years later when I had my own children reading that they'd done studies on this and there was a whole range of children's toys and educational stuff where everything was in black and white patterns because they'd found that that engaged baby's brains better than than something colourful and soft which is what we'd previously done for children so I was like oh yes I knew I can confirmed that as a as a baby I could have confirmed that for you.

4:38So can you recall what you were seeing in black and white? That was it was a rug with a sort of batik kind of black and white print on it and everything else in the flat at that time was very psychedelic and bright colours and swirly. So where exactly is this flat and who are your parents? So it was in Brighton it was a third floor flat and my parents are John Moran and Margaret Moran and they are at this point unmarried but a couple of months later they marry with me as the bridesmaid. Take each of them turn and describe them physically to me and their personality how if they walked into the room what would we be meeting back then you would be meeting I mean obviously it's weird me saying this about my dad but people have said this when they meet my dad an incredibly handsome man very charismatic like everyone my husband when he first met him went he's such a handsome man which is quite alarming to hear your husband saying that about your father and so he was um he was Irish Welsh very celtic piercing blue eyes huge mane of hair a hippie uh he was a drummer uh so he's very physical he's very fit like a lone preacher man type uh personality he would speak in huge long speeches all of his theories all of his knowledges all of his jokes all of his anecdotes very compelling man not perhaps an amazing father uh very low tolerance for children even ones that he created himself but uh definitely sort of you know the biggest noise in the room and then my mother uh we realized when we were of age to start looking at the albums that were in their house looked exactly like Mick Jagger circa uh The Satanic Majesty's Request but in a beautiful lady way you know I mean Jagger I mean Jagger looked like a girl didn't he so it's like huge lips um very long hair very thick hair and a sort of very gentle hippie lady she was from a middle class background very repressive and when she met my father he was a very charismatic working class how did they meet they shared the same flat and they said there was a payphone in the hallway and they would keep colliding as they went to use the phone.

6:24So they were in the same building. They had different rooms. Different rooms. They would meet in the hallway. Yes. And? And love blossomed over arguing over whose turn it was to use the telephone, which continued for another 30 years. And did he earn his living as a drummer? Yes. So at that point he was earning money from being in a band. They'd signed to Phillips Records. They had a demo album out. What was the band called at that time? They were called at that point Big Sister. And they had a record deal. They were being produced by Tony Visconti, who produced David Bowie. they had a tour of America lined up.

6:53Really weirdly, three days ago, my husband, who's a music journalist, managed to track down a copy of their first album, An Acetate. It was never formally released, but he found the acetate of this. And there's the writing credits on it. And the titles are so... I never knew the titles of any of my dad's songs. And they're called things like Anthem for a Reclining Adolescent and Excuse Me While I Tune My Harpsichord. It couldn't be more 1968 if it tried. But it's great, isn't it? It's amazing, yeah. And I said there were some sound clips of it and it was like their proper proggy psyche insanity.

7:22And was he the band leader? Was it his band? Well, he was the drummer and he did baffling vocals and he co-wrote a lot of the songs. And then as the letter that my husband found in this massive archive of music from the 1960s confirmed, the band had had a massive argument and the lead singer, Jeff Howells, had left after an argument. And I'd heard about that argument when I was a child and the basis of the argument varied depending on which anecdote my dad was telling. one week they argued over a Mars bar and that was why they broke up and another week they had argued over a woman and that was why they broke up but either way the band broke up and then I think my father always thought that at some point he would form another band and get back into it and be the man who was going to America and signing to another record label but that never happened and so we were very much brought up in a house where my father was for the first half absolutely presuming this was a temporary thing that we would not be living like this forever And then as the years went by, he became more depressed and bitter and resigned to the fact that he'd lost his chance.

8:18You mentioned the drugs. Yes. They were fun at the first and then they became a problem? Well, I think he saw himself as a psychic voyager, as many did at that time. There was a story my mum told about how he had a great quantity of acid in his flat. He was sort of helping other people out with their psychedelic experiments. And apparently the police came to bust him and they were knocking on the door downstairs. stairs and he decided that the wisest thing to do would be to consume the evidence and so ate an entire blotter of acid and then he would tell the story he was telling this this story when we were like five or six that he was taken to the police station and held overnight and he did a lot of yoga at the time and apparently he meditated for the whole night that he was in the cell so that he wouldn't start tripping and they finally released him because there was no evidence it was inside him and then as he describes it the church over the road just took off like a rocket and i don't really remember the next three days and apparently at that point he had a vision that he was a shaman and that he was beyond karma.

9:10And I can confirm that he definitely parented to someone he believed he was beyond karma. But you tell us that he told that story to you when you were five or six. Oh, yes. So he was quite open about his life. And how did you view him when you were a little girl? Oh, quite terrifying. We lived in his moods. And his mood was that he was he was a rock star. It was like a like it was like having a zoo animal in the house that we had a rock star living in the house. he thought he was John Lennon or Mick Jagger. And by this point, we were living in a three-bedroom council as in Wolverhampton on Benefits.

9:40And it was exactly as if Mick Jagger was having to live in a three-bedroom council. And did you call him dad, daddy? What did you call him? Oh, he was Big D. Big D. Yes, Big D. So you treated him as a phenomenon because he saw himself as a phenomenon. Yeah, we just, we lived in his, his moods ruled the house. And so we had to be very careful around him. So for instance, he set up a little recording studio in the shed in the garden. And for some reason, the electrics on it were really dodgy. So whenever he was doing a vocal take, he would just storm into the house and go, someone has turned a light on.

10:06And I can hear a clicking sound on my vocal track. So we'd have to like time turning things on and off in the house around him singing. And if we got it wrong, he would come storming in and just go, there's another number one hit single that you've all just ruined. So we'd all have to lie on the floor in the dark and not put the TV on until it finished singing. Before we get on to your long suffering mum, tell me about the sweetest moment that you can recall with your dad from your early days. The sweetest time. Sweet. A lovely time. he was good at he he would he said two things that at the time repeatedly that i never understood at the time but as i've got older i go those are actually quite valuable things to say the first one he would say over and over again be aware he would just stare at you with his terrifying eyes and go be aware and i had no idea what that would mean and i would cry and run away but what he meant was like i mean i guess it was almost like a terrifying kind of mindfulness like kind of look at everything don't let anything pass you by and understand what you're looking at So if we go for a walk through the woods, he would be explaining what the trees were, what would live in the trees, why the trees would have been planted there, who would have owned the land, what would have been happening there 200 years ago, 10 ,000 years ago.

11:11He was very angry about the Enclosures Act of 1773. So it was an anger which I've inherited now I know what it is. So yes, so be aware. So the sweet thing was him teaching us a poacher's tread through the woods. That's where you roll your feet so you don't snap any twigs, so that any nature that's around isn't alarmed and you get to see the nuthatch or the deer. So the nature walks, the telling of the stories were sweet. Oh, the man who taught you the poacher's tread. Yes. It's a great gift to have been given. It could have been a B-side to one of his albums. It will be. Yes, I'm sure it will.

11:44When we revive it. And your mother. Tell us about her. What does she look like? Well, apart from looking like a beautiful version of Mick Jagger. Yeah, I mean, I say this as a feminist and a mother, but her personality was mainly pregnant. She was just, she was full-time pregnant for a very long time. How many siblings? There's eight of us all together. Eight of us, all by your father? Yeah, all by my father. Yeah, no, he was around. I mean, he was in the house for all of them. It wasn't, again, his parenting. When I look at nature documentaries, there's a difference between the way that mammals parent.

12:12Mammals, you know, they have their young and they care for them and they keep them in the nest and they feed them. They teach them, protect them. And then there's the way that fish reproduce, which is just to spawn magnificently and then swim away. And he was more salmon-like in his parenting. name please describe your parents together while you're a little girl what can you remember of the pair of them as a double act so he was so he was very adorable they were very they would they would either be fiery and arguing and having massive arguments usually about money because we had none or they would be very adoring and very they were very sexual people i i'm i feel i'm free to say this because i remember david baddiel came on here and talked about his one of the reasons that me and david baddiel first bonded we met at a dinner party and we took it in turns to talk about who had the worst parents.

12:53And we sort of intend to top each other with the public displays of sexuality that both our parents said. Because what was interesting about David Baddiel's parents is there was clearly lust. Yes. There was a lot of banging going on in the next door room. Oh. But not love. It was done sometimes with anger. Yes. No, that wasn't. But that wasn't the case. No, no, there was not angry sex. So we would. Describe there. Well, we didn't. When you first became aware of your parents having sex, something I'm relieved to tell you, I was never aware of, I assume because I have three sisters and a younger brother, that it did happen because we all look a bit alike.

13:23Yes. But I don't think I was ever conscious of it, even though I saw the double bed they shared. Well, we were in a very small house. My parents were very sloppy about closing the door. We didn't know what the noises were. We referred to it as rowing because, not as in arguing, but there was a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and when Bugs Bunny is talking about saucy and sexy things, he goes, row, row. So that was our word for sex. It was like, row, row. So they were rowing. and my parents had, their bedroom was two mattresses on the floor and they would co-sleep with whatever was the smallest child at the time.

13:57So when we heard the start of the rowing, it was the job of one of the older children to run in and rescue the baby so that they would not be in the room when the rowing was happening. So yeah, so we saw more than we should have. And how are you with the other, your siblings? You're saying eight of us are you in order? Eight of us all together. Yeah, no, we're really close. You're the eldest. I'm the oldest, yes. So, and being the eldest, particularly of a big family, you're kind of you're not entirely a child you're in a kind of middle management position I think when I talk to other older siblings the oldest siblings you're kind of you're a go-between between the parents and the children you have more authority than a child but you don't have the ultimate authority of a parent so you're kind of middle management between the two generations um so yeah so I'm kind of there uh I'm you know I was the first I left home at 18 and I earned money and had a house so I would do things like go home and buy them clothes because they didn't have any.

14:46Were you more responsible too as a little girl? Do you feel your mother was the hippie and you were the responsible child? You will see this time and time again in hippie families. They are flower children and so they remain quite childlike. So yeah, I was very responsible from an early age, but in a very cheerful way. The musicals that I was brought up on were characters like Annie in Annie or almost any character that Judy Garland would play, which were cheerful girls who would just kind of crack on and sort of, you know, I would sing a jolly song as I mopped the floor and peeled 17 kilos of potatoes every day in order to feed everybody.

15:16They've got mattresses on the floor and a small child with them. Do you have your own bedroom? Were you in one home for quite a period of time? Yeah, all my childhood were in the same home. So that three-bedroom house had eight children in Wolverhampton. So there we are in this house. Describe the house and where you are in it. So it's a post-war estate where nothing was too good for the working man. The roof's a tin and lined with asbestos. and it's an exciting day for us when the council come and remove the asbestos. We enjoy the beautiful white flaky rain that comes out of the sky as they remove the asbestos.

15:48Later I realised that this would have been a massive cancer risk but they were quite slapdash in their methods of removing it. So it has a tin roof where you can hear the rain. We've got sparrows nesting in the eaves and we are, even though we're on a council estate in Wolverhampton, we're the last row of houses in Wolverhampton and the border between the West Midlands and Staffordshire is in our back garden. so everything at the back is like living in Cider with Rosie. It's like a very beautiful, it's a farm, we can see all the way across to the Welsh mountains but at the front it's quite depressed, oppressive council estate in Wolverhampton.

16:19And in your head, which part of the house are you living in? Oh, I'm living... The Adiric side or the council house side? By this point I'm living in Narnia, like kind of like I've already discovered the local library so I am living in books. But no, I was very into the countryside. All the books that I was reading at that time were people, you know, I was reading Laura Ingalls Wilder and kind of being in touch with the seasons. I desperately wanted to find a maple tree that I could tap and drink maple syrup, but there weren't that many of them. And did you, from an early age, think of yourself as an independent individual, independent from these unusual hippie parents?

16:47I was, all the films and books that I read told me that if you were an unusual dreamy girl with a heart of gold, that something amazing would happen to you. So I was just waiting. And I was convinced that somehow some people, basically the BBC was my big thing. I was convinced the BBC would somehow find out where I was and would turn up outside my house and say, would you like to write a sitcom? So I would spend hours every day just staring out the window waiting for a car from London to turn up. And they would open the back door and go, come into this car. We will take you down to London and you can write a sitcom or write a movie.

17:21That was what I believed would happen. Well, you manifested it. I mean, I had to do it. It all came to pass. Yeah. I mean, in the end, I realized that watchful waiting was less useful than actually cracking on a writer's. But this council house, you said it was three bedrooms and eight children. so how how are we divided who are you sleeping with most of the time so i have the bed that my nan died in and i have my sister corinne in there because my mother was very old after she had her so corinne is my baby um and then all the other kids are on pieces of foam rubber which we've taken out the back of our volkswagen caravanets they should be the seats in the back of a volkswagen caravanet but we've made them into beds on the floor for everybody else and we stack them up during the day and bring them out at night for people to sleep on and my brother eddie who was the fourth child born it's the first boy gets his own room which is under the stairs next to the gas meter uh we put a piece of foam rubber in there uh balanced on some planks with some piles of thompson's phone directories underneath it to give him some height and a curtain is put across that for his privacy which we invariably use as a towel to dry our hands every time we walk past it who's your first friend outside of the home well that's a tricky one i'm i'm such a special girl but my special interest is not recognised by my classmates I'm sad to say for them so no I mean I'm a weird hippie girl turning up and talking there's a big phase where we don't have a television and we're certainly not listening to modern music we're just listening to my parents' record collection so I'm gossiping about Paul McCartney and John Lennon in the playground and they have no idea what I'm going on about And what do you look like?

18:46You say you're a weird hippie girl is that clear from your appearance? I'm almost wholly spherical I have a kind round face like that of a potato I'm wearing a poncho, crocheted, multicoloured instead of a coat. And when we have packed lunches, everybody else has a luncheon meat sandwich and a packet of crisps. And I have a screw top jar of muesli, which is not a phenomenon in Wolverhampton in 1986 and which my classmates retitled Poosley. And did you feel you were in the right and they were in the wrong? Or did you feel, well, these people are behaving one way and I live in a world that's quite other.

19:19I'm still so convinced that I'm going to get out of here at this point. I'm just like, this is temporary. I still haven't worked out how I'm going to do it, but I'm just, it's very, very clear to me. By this point, I've heard about London and that seems like the place to me. And do you have anybody you talk to about any of this? Who are you sharing these thoughts with or just with something in your head? Well, I'm attempting to share them with my sister, Kaz, who's now my co-writer. We wrote a sitcom about our childhood together, which was extremely cathartic. But I am an ebullient extrovert brunette and she's an incredibly introvert ginger.

19:49And so I will hurl myself on her bed at the end of a school day and go, oh, my love of Lee Veltman grows. Oh, my heart yearns for him to touch me. And she will just go, could you please leave the room right now and just push me out of the room? So that was the basis of our relationship for many years, me desperately trying to overshare. And were you keen to leave school? Because you weren't at home there and they were not welcoming you? Yeah, I didn't know it was an option until my parents in 1986 said, would you like to leave school? We could home educate you. And I just thought of how much I would like to not go to school and wake up early in the morning.

20:23And I just went, yes. So in 1986, we were all taken out of school and home educated. All of you? All of us at that point. All eight of you? Yes. And so they started a little school at home, did they? Well, you'd think. How did it work? How did the school work at home? Well, there's two kinds of home educating parents I found over the years. The first are the ones that want to home educate because they don't think school maximises a child's educational potential enough. And they're kind of like, well, if you were at home, a cooking lesson would be a lesson in chemistry. and by you know and looking after the dog would be a lesson in biology and the nature walk would be going i would maximize in school isn't maximizing our children's potential enough and they kind of hot airs you at home and then there's the second kind of home educating parents who just really cannot bother to get eight children to school at 8 30 in the morning and the minute they get their children out of school are just like well that's it we're done that's the end of that and and they call it child-led education it's the the principle is theory is that a child after a certain time of being de-schooled where you stop seeing learning as something you're being forced to do and you sort of detox and you start to regain your natural curiosity that every child has after about six months to a year you'll want to learn and you'll pack yourself off down the library and you will work out what you are interested in and you will become driven and specialize in what you you enjoy and the annoying thing about my parents is that that is was what happened we did all after spending a year of lying around eating cheese and watching Bugs Bunny movies, just all find what we were passionate about and start studying it.

21:45So it worked? It did work, yes. I'm peevish about having to admit that they were correct, but it was correct, yes. What's the worst thing about your childhood? What's your worst recollection of this very unusual childhood? The worst moment, not a general feeling, a specific incident? Yeah, it was all pretty grim, to be honest, Giles. We were very, very poor. My dad was disabled and a lot of pain. He'd got some, after the band didn't work, he got work as a fireman and a rescue went wrong. So he was disabled after that and he was on benefits. He was like a fire officer. Yeah, yeah. He went to fires.

22:17Yes. So he was risking his life. So he was a brave person. He was a brave man. But he also told me the key fact. Every time you see a fire engine go past, I'd be sort of like, God bless those brave men and crossing myself. Like, Godspeed you brave rescuers. And he would go, no, 50 % of the time we put the blues and twos on. It was because we'd gone to the chip shop and we wanted to get them back to the fire station before they got cold. So he's become a rather tragic figure, having been this heroic figure to begin with. Yeah. He now is a broken man physically. He's living entirely off benefits.

22:44Yes. And there's not much money. And you are conscious of there's not much money. You, as a child. Yeah, and this is the time of Margaret Thatcher's reform of the welfare state. So there's this constant thing of our benefits might be cut. It might get worse than this. And often we do run out of food. There's a six-month period where I don't have shoes. I don't have a coat for three years. I'm using a dressing gown. And we were just very poor. And there was just this sense of how are we going to get out of here? I don't want to, or I do want to press you for a moment that comes into your head of this, a Christmas day or a birthday, when nothing happened, where you would hope for one thing and another thing.

23:22Because it's quite easy to be general and to say, you know, we were poor. Yeah. And it was grim. Oh, actually, OK. I can tell you the apogee of the worst day. like this so on my 13th birthday uh obviously as i'm the oldest child i'm in charge of everyone's birthdays including my own so my parents give me five pounds and there was one girl at school who i had been friends with um who i've kept in contact with by uh writing her letters and i invited to my house i haven't seen her for three years i invited her out in my house on my birthday so i'm baking my own but i take my five pounds and with that i buy all the ingredients for a cake and a party i bake my cake i buy some jamboree biscuits and some crisps i lay it all out on a table.

23:58I'm waiting for my friend to come over. And about half an hour before she's due to come over, my mum comes downstairs and goes, your dad's decided he wants to have a bath and he doesn't want to be getting out of the bathroom with your friend bobbling around in the house. So I just ring her up and tell her it's off. And so I have to ring my friend and tell her that my birthday party is cancelled. And then I had a picture of me taken. I was wearing a jaunty baker boy cap and a pink cardigan and I'm leaning on the table sort of proudly showing my spread. And then 10 minutes later, I'm told the party's off and I just ate the entire spread.

24:26I ate all my birthday cake. I ate all the jamboree biscuits. I ate all the crisps. And then I went up to my bedroom and I sang Yesterday by the Beatles really sadly and then did a sick out of the window. Why do you think your father did this? Why did your mother allow him to do it? He just didn't like people in the house. He was very paranoid. Like when the gas man came to read the gas meter, we all had to hide. Like kind of like it was quite Waco-like. There was sort of cult elements to it. They just didn't like people in the house. They just sort of, I think at the time we thought it was because our dad was taping records.

25:00You know, you weren't supposed to tape vinyl records and put them on cassette, home taping his killing music. And he'd done that with a lot of his records. So we thought it was maybe he was worried he'd get busted for that. But I suspect now the ferocious quantity of acid and believing you're a shaman. I think shaman don't want to get busted. Did you understand it? Did you forgive it? Did you hate it? What was your feeling about it? Just, I never really dwelt on it. I was just like, I am getting out of here. I need a plan and I'm getting out of here. And then in the books, the books finally gave me the answer, which is that in The Way Away Children, when they need money, mother starts to write.

25:37And in Little Women, when the family needs money, Jo starts to write. And I was like, okay, that's the thing that you do if you're a poor girl. Like kind of the one thing you can always find is a pen and a paper and you can write. So I'm going to write my way out of here. So I started writing a book when I was 13. And I believed, because I'm a very fast reader. What was the book called? Did you have a title for it before you began it? I didn't before I started writing it now, but I believed I was a really fast reader. I could read a book in a day, still can. And so I believed if I could read a book in a day, I could surely write a book in a day.

26:05And by the end of that first day, it was very apparent that I would not be able to write a whole book in a day. But I finished it and I called it the Chronicles of Narmou, which is Narmoune Grave Moran. And it was a very thinly disguised comedic telling of a crazy family who were all home educated in Wolverhampton. And I started sending it off to publishers and they published it.

26:33now hold on that means you went to the library and got out the writer's yearbook yes and found all the publishers and sent it off and how did you type it up by that point I'd won another writing competition because I was just entering every competition available so I'd entered the Observer's Young Reporter of the Year competition. And so I entered that and I won it. And part of the competition was a sort of electronic typewriter. So I typed up, I'd written, handwritten the whole thing, and then I typed it up on the electronic typewriter. You sent off this article to The Observer. What was it about?

27:09So you were supposed to write a serious news report, it was Reporter of the Year, about sort of a local dignitary who'd visited the town or a sporting event. But I was not allowed to leave the house. And also, nothing happens in Wolverhampton. So I decided I was going to write it funny. Funny will always get you out of everything. And I was going to write it in the style of war reporter Kate Adie depicting the bloody battle that would always ensue when we tried to give my brother a hair wash. So it was written in the style of a breathless war report by Kate Adie, just sort of like, we've isolated the target.

27:36He's now being marched into the bathroom. Shrapnel is flying. Many people are being splashed. People regret this action. Are you now aware or conscious of where this bit of genius in you comes from? Is it from your father, the songwriter? Yes. He can tell a story. He can really tell a story. So you were telling a story with high verve and with the desperation of someone who needs to get out of here. Perfect combination and also the origin story of almost anyone I've ever interviewed. And when the letter came from the Observer saying you have won, can you remember that moment? Yes, and it was an immediate problem because you had to go down to London to accept the prize.

28:11And we, you know, they didn't presume that they were going to send a letter to a family that could not in any way afford to get their daughter down to London to accept this prize. so we um very shamefully in the end i had to ring the observer and go i'm so sorry i really want to come down and accept my prize but like could you could you do us the train fare like kind of and that felt incredibly humiliating um they did they sent me the coach fair yes that's good it was your introduction to journalists expenses yes which has served you well as it has every other journalist in the history of writing still a beautiful phrase that lightens my heart every time i hear it and by this point i'd read maureen lipman's biography i thought this would be a good way to study what life in London would be like and she made it she was like and every every time you meet someone you must give them a present like you know just like a lovely box of chocolates or some flowers or something but this is this is what we do in London we give each other gifts so I'd made a huge cream cake um and at home and I'd put it in a small red suitcase that I'd bought at a jumble sale and I carried it down to London it didn't have a handle so you had to carry it horizontally and I carried this cake all the way down to London to present to the people at the observer to make them like me and it was the middle of summer and by the time I finally got there and opened up this suitcase the cream had just turned into just sour cheese and the room was just filled with this terrible smell and I was just like I'm so sorry that I appeared to have bought you a vomit cake but this was initially an act of love uh please like me and they did like me enough to give me a column for the rest of the summer holidays that was not part of the prize but they were like okay we're going to give you a proper chance we'll give you a job for the next six weeks.

29:39It turns out that this terrible childhood was in fact the most beautiful childhood because it's led you to the fact that you're here. Well, this is why I can never complain about it because I interview people all the time and when you talk to people about their jobs, anybody who's done something, they need a reason to have done it. It's hard to do a thing. All the people who go, oh, I've got a book in me, I think I'll write a book one day. And all writers are going, well, if you were, you already would. And it's long and horrible writing or making a film or making a TV show or doing any of these things.

30:08People think it's really easy, but it's long and it's hard, it's lonely and it makes you doubt yourself and you're full of horror and you just think everyone's going to fucking hate you. And you need a reason to make yourself that vulnerable and to isolate yourself from people for a year. So, age 13, you won this Observer Prize. You won an electric typewriter as the prize. You now write a novel. You send it off to how many publishers? Oh, I think I only get three rejection letters in the end. And then the fourth one, yeah. And who is the fourth publishing? Trans World. Trans World. Was it Patrick Jansen Smith?

30:35Oh, I do get a letter from him at one point, yes. I'm dealing with a lady called Helen who's very lovely and when I miss my last train home after a meeting I have to ring her from Euston Station and go I'm so sorry I missed my last train back to Wolverhampton and she goes don't worry my husband will come and pick you up and I have no concept of the geography of London that time he came all the way from Wimbledon to pick me up from Euston Station and you're 16? 16 and then the Uxbridge Road at that time? yes so far away and everything's so big but I'm thrilled because this is the publisher of Terry Pratchett who's one of my big heroes and I meet him at a party and he looks like a wizard because he's wearing a hat and he blurbs my book and the blurb on the front of the book when it's published says this good already and she's only 16 and I'm like I'm made now because I also have not at this point had a conversation about money and my belief is that you must get paid a million pounds for a book like it must be a million pounds right and then the check arrives and it's 1800 pounds and I'm like oh okay this is not going to save my family I need to do something else and I'm interviewed by Valerie Grove at the times when the book comes out because they're like a child has written a book and when the interview finished As soon as the interview's finished, I just push a tape recorder to one side and lean across the table and go, Valerie, woman to woman, how do you make money writing?

31:42This book thing's not working out for me. And she goes, darling, you need to be a columnist. Then you get paid every week. So I'm like, OK, I will become a columnist. This is all happening to you when you're 16 years of age. What are your parents making of this? And what are the seven younger brothers and sisters making of this? And how has it changed you as a person when you go back to Wolverhampton? My parents are, I mean, I guess that's good parenting. They're going, well, look, you're all equal to us and we love you all equally. we're just as proud of the fact that Jimmy's done his first poo on the potty as we are that you have published a book and I'm like yeah yeah I hear you yeah I hear that's good parenting but like I am the best one right I have written a book like that is that is you know quantified better than anything anybody else is doing in the family um but they they keep me on an even keel.

32:22Do people find you funny and likeable or arrogant and oh god thank god the girl's gone book's doing quite well it's quite a novelty I think a 16 year old doing a novel what was the feeling? I think I'm probably too much at all times. I'm wearing a hat at this point. And my I mean, you know, I'm a child that's gone from like not being able to talk to anybody that I'm not blood related to, to being in London and meeting people. And so I'm basing my performance on the kind of fast talking dames I've seen in 1940s movies. So I'm just being Rosalind Russell in her girl Friday, his girl Friday at all times, which I think with a broad Volvo accent and a massive hat, and the fact that I get drunk on half a pint is probably quite overwhelming to most people.

33:00Are there calm moments in your head coming back on the train to wolverhampton do you slow down and think what's happening what am i doing is this going to be all right or are you just on this roll oh the train journeys are for bitter regret and for going over every single word that i said and going i should have said something different there that joke didn't work i will perform more correctly next time i'm learning the words now and people are like you know the kind of conversations people are trying to start like one point someone says to me where do you ski and i'm just like that's not really that's not really where I'm coming from here people talk you know where did you go to school like they're presuming that like kind of I've had some kind of bohemian hippie upbringing at B-Dales or something it's like no no I'm going home to peel 10 kilos of potatoes and to see if my dog has urinated on my bed again that's that's what I'm going back to like there's no skiing chat here by now are you at 16 still sharing a bed with somebody by this point because I've started writing and also because I've started smoking I've been given the tiny box room as my own room to write and work in because all the money I'm earning is going to the family.

34:01So I'm now the breadwinner in the family. So I'm given the privilege of my own bedroom to the immense and understandable resentment of my siblings. And when did the smoking start and did drinking go with it? What did your parents think? The smoking started the first editorial meeting I went to at the magazine that I started working at. And how did you get the job? This is the metal maker, was it? Yes, I started working for the music press because you just send them some reviews. If they're good, they'll print them. and I still didn't know that much about modern music. So I reviewed two songs that I'd heard on the radio and then the soundtrack to the movie Annie.

34:32And I think they were so delighted by the fact that I was coming to work for the world's most rock and roll newspaper and was reviewing musical soundtracks. They were just like, oh, I'll give her a job. So I'm invited to an editorial meeting and I'm presuming that everyone there is going to be just like a cool rock star in leather and like it's going to be terrifying. And I don't know anything about music, so I'm going to have to be someone different when I walk in this room. And so I'm just like, well, what would say grown up more than turning up with a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey at 11 o 'clock in the morning.

34:56How did that work out? I just thump the bottle of vodka down on the table and light a cigarette. I smoked my first ever cigarette and I'm like, oh, thank God. Oh, you know what it's like when you're just dying for a cigarette and have to learn to smoke in front of everybody. And everybody's just staring at me like, what the hell have we got here? I think they were all quite terrified. So you joined the Melody Maker as a columnist? As a reviewer. A reviewer. So yes, yeah, yeah. Week in, week out, they're sending you a little check. Yes, I'm reviewing stuff and I'm working a really sweet fiddle for a while until they realise, obviously I'm claiming everything on expenses, but also you would get paid per band that you reviewed.

35:29But every gig that happens, two bands play, the main and the support. And for a very long time, I'm reviewing the support band completely separately to the main band so that I'm getting two for one on each one that I'm doing. And then one day I'm taken to one side and it's explained to me that that's not the correct thing to do. You're 16 now. Yes. So boys do come on the scene because you are a music journalist. So you've got something to offer. Well, you'd think, wouldn't you? But like, yeah, there wasn't a massive stampede. I have to say. Yeah, my schedule was fairly clear, boy-wise. They all just found me terrifying.

35:58Like, you know, a fat, gobby, working class woman who's often smoking a cigarette the wrong way around and has to have someone go, you've set fire to the filter, it goes the other way around, isn't top of everyone's list. And also, to give them their credit, even in the 1990s, I think people were, you know, everyone I'm working with is at least 10 years older than me. And I think everyone's very aware that it would be incorrect to try and sexually proposition a 16-year-old child. So what is your first romantic experience? My first romantic experience is my husband. Oh, really? Yeah, I'm 17 and I meet him and I lie about my age.

36:32Describe the moment of meeting him. We are in Hammersmith and we are both interviewing the same band. This is the Hammersmith Apollo now? I think so, yeah. I think they've been rehearsing that day and we go to a cafe around the corner and he interviews them first. And what is the band? They're a band called Levitation, a prog rock band Levitation, who I'm still a big fan of. And we both do our interviews. and then I, but the interviews have dragged on a very long time and I realised that I'm not going to make my train home because the last train would leave at 10.30 back to Wilfampton. And so I say to him, so we're on the, I'm trying to get to Euston, we're both on the tube together afterwards and I'm like, I'm really sorry, but would I be able to sleep at your house tonight?

37:06He also worked for Melody Maker so I was like, okay, this is not an unknown quantity to me. And how old was he compared to you? And he was 25. So quite a bit older, eight years older. But he's wearing a cardigan, Giles. And he's got curly hair and like kind of, and he presents us like a living cardigan. And he goes, yes, you can come back, but you need to know a secret about me. And at this point I'm going, oh God, okay, even if he says he's a murderer, I do need somewhere to sleep tonight. So I'm just going to have to hope I can fend him off. So I go, tell me your secret. And he says, I am a really big fan of the band Crowded House.

37:39And I say, I'm a really big fan of the band Crowded House too. And the reason that was a secret that we had to confess to each other is they were not seen as a cool band. As Melody Maker journalists, if we'd said that we loved the beautiful, melodic AOR rock of Credit House, we both would have got fired. So this is our secret bonding now. We're kind of like, we're united in our kind of proud shame at loving this band. So he invites me back to his house. Which was where? Oh, God, where is he? Stockwell. Was it a house or a flat? It was a flat. And he wasn't allowed to bring anybody else there, so he has to smuggle me in.

38:07And again, I'm like... You lived alone there? It was a one-bedroom flat? It was a one-bedroom flat. It was like a bedsitter. It was like a front room with a bed in it. And he... And at this point, I'm like, I fancy this man. Let's hope something happens. But have you any idea what might happen? Oh, yes. I've read Jilly Cooper. So I know everything. So what happens? So I'm doing all the eyes. I'm doing all the body language. I'm very much like, come on, this is good. And he goes from the room. And I presume that maybe he will come back naked and sort of beat his chest like Tarzan and we'll get down to it.

38:36And what he's actually done is come back into the room carrying a folded Victorian style gentleman's nightdress and a toothbrush. and the wee-wee-wee-winky style nightdress is his own choice of bedwear which he is giving to me to sleep in that night. And the toothbrush is a spare toothbrush and he gives me his bed. He sleeps on the floor and when I wake up in the morning he's gone out and come back with a croissant and a bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice neither of which I've ever seen before in my life. And I feel like a proper lady and he sets the tone for the next 33 years. It's just like a good man.

39:07He will give me his weird Victorian nightie and give me beautiful treats. And you have been together ever since. Well, we go out with each other for a couple of weeks. And then by this point, I'd been offered a TV show. I was asked to present a musical replacement for The Word during the summer on Channel 4, a kind of raucous, naughty rock and roll TV show. And my now husband sat me down and went, look, you're about to be famous and you're now going to move down to London. You need to go out and have sexual adventures and like kind of go and be, you know, go and live it up a bit. You can't settle down with me now.

39:36but just know that if at any point you want to come back to me I'll be sitting here like Gabriel Oak ready to receive you back into my arms. This man is beyond belief. I know. I don't think I could have done that, released you to the world. And did he, I mean, was he having adventures elsewhere himself? No, absolutely not, no. He simply sat there wearing a cardigan looking at my half-eating croissant for three years while I went off and had a series of absolutely appalling relationships with absolutely terrible men. Make us laugh. Tell us about the worst of them. Oh, well, one of them asked me if I'd like to have a threesome with me, him, and my 13-year-old sister when she came to stay with me.

40:10So that's the kind of man that was around in London in the 90s. I had a threesome once that went rather well. Really? Yes, the other two people didn't turn up, but it was fun at the time. I've had a lot of those threesome styles. So yes, I know. So I rang him up once I'd finally broke up. And this boyfriend that I had would not leave my... By this point, I was earning money from TV. What's interesting is, had you in your head fallen in love with Pete? It was weird. Because you're 17. Last week I was thinking, unlike anyone else I've ever met, I don't think about him at all. I don't worry about him.

40:45I don't try and figure him out. He's just the omnipresent fact in my life. And I just realised, it was only last week, I just turned to him and went, the thing that made you my person in this life is, you always believed in me from day one. And he was never scared of me. like you know we're very very different he's quite a shy softly spoken man and i'm like but but from day one he was never scared of me he just completely accepted me and also that night when he told me about his flat for the first time he showed me a letter that he had written me so before he met me he'd read my writing in the observer when i when i had my column there and he'd written me a fan letter saying how much he loved me and he'd written this he'd read this fan letter out to his then girlfriend and she went you're going to leave me for catelyn moran and she was right he did it's the way it works i read a biography of a.a milne yes and when he met the girl he married it was her coming out party her 21st birthday party they met she recited to him some of his own work she'd never met him before she simply loved the way he wrote and had learned pieces by heart it's the way to do it isn't it see this is the dream i think this is one of the reasons why we write and I can remember the piece that he had seen that he wrote to me about was just me going uptown saying the kind of looking at boys that I fancied and describing which ones I fancied and at the time I remember thinking this is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the sea I hope the boy some boy that does fancy me reads this I'm putting everything I'm selling myself so hard in this piece if you read this piece you'll know who I am and if you're for me you will respond and it worked you have been together for 33 years yes and today happens to my 53rd wedding anniversary.

42:26Congratulations. So I can tell you that there are ups and downs, certainly in my marriage. What is the greatest down that you've told us about the highs, which sound beautiful. Have there been any downs and what caused them? I mean, when we had our first child, that was very, very difficult because it was a very difficult birth and we were very young parents. I was 24. Did you actually get married? Married? Yes. Yeah, we were married by that point. We'd already lost one baby. Actually, that was the worst. that was the we were we were supposed to get married on boxing day and I was pregnant and I'd got this whole thing planned that I was going to stand up and give my speech and I was going to say thank you all the guests for coming here but there's one guest who wasn't on the guest list who's managed to sneak in we are going to have a baby and this is the the final guest on the guest list and it would be amazing and everybody was so happy but on Christmas Eve we went for our 12-week scan and they couldn't find a heartbeat and at that age you don't you know now you know how many first pregnancies end in miscarriage and so you know but I had no idea and they I'd had my beautiful my first and only ever manicure to get ready for the wedding and they had to remove the nail varnish in order to put the thermometer on my finger and we were just so distraught like all we all the doctors and nurses were crying because we were just this lovely young couple who were like getting married in two days and our baby had just died and we came back from the hospital and we'd been planning to spend that Christmas with our parents before we went to the wedding so we'd got nothing in so on Christmas day he had to like drive around and find a garage where we could find some like mince pies and some like sliced ham and we had our Christmas together just the pair of us and it was the most pure crying I've ever done in my life but that night we'd got our wedding rings ready to wear for the wedding and we just lay in bed and our hands were wet with crying and we just put our rings on each other and like that was when we got married that night like the wedding the next you know two days later didn't count it was that night we put our wedding rings on each other and that was when we got married is that the lowest point of your life losing your baby uh no no no no my daughter being ill was the the low point yeah you have two girls i have two girls and the youngest one is very creative very like me very creative very adhd with that's how i got diagnosed with adhd which is the modern way because my daughter got diagnosed with it and i was like oh this makes sense adhd stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder so you just your brain is just constantly racing basically you have a you don't have enough serotonin in your body so you become kind of painfully bored very quickly so you're constantly doing things to give yourself a little serotonin bump so you know you're talking quickly so that you will get some stimulus back and you're just constantly doing things to try and raise your serotonin it makes you quite reckless and uh she was but she was undiagnosed with that and she was and is it an inherited characteristic yes so i think my dad clearly had it as well this is you've got it yes you have alas given it to your daughter yes who is how old now uh she's 22 now and is she through all that now she is but she but i think the she was undiagnosed with adhd and undiagnosed polycystic ovaries which made her periods very uh emotionally intense and despairing and so she developed an eating disorder at the age of 11 to be able to cope with that so the three years that she had an eating disorder with that that was the low point definitely and how did you deal with that are you in retrospect quite pleased with the way you dealt with that at first appalling lovingly because even then I mean this was what seven years ago eight years ago now even then there wasn't as much information as there is now about it so as a parent it was I mean I'm a researcher I'm a journalist as soon as she was diagnosed with this I was like I will learn everything I will go out there and find every book I will talk to every expert I will find out and I will ask them the question how do I make my daughter better and no one could answer that question they were like it's part of the journey she will have therapy like kind of like these the average length of an eating disorder is five to seven years.

46:10I'd really hope that by the time she saw a therapist she'd be better by Christmas and eating sausages on New Year's Day. And it's also the mental illness with the highest mortality rate. So when you're told this by a doctor, you're like, oh God, this is really serious and the stakes are incredibly high. So I researched it as much as I could, but no one could tell me how to make her better. And so when she did finally recover, everything that I'd learned about that did help her to get better, that was what I put in my next book because it was like i need to share this information what was the essence of me apart from time clearly which is obviously part of it when a child stops eating they are communicating with you it's a physical communication and they are having to physically manifest how they feel because you for whatever reason are not listening to what they're saying and because my family was a family where if you were sad no one cared you just had to cheer up and make a joke and crack on with it as soon as she started getting ill I would just be like yeah but you know you know an eating disorder doesn't start with an eating disorder it starts with someone being anxious and depressed and when she started to be anxious and depressed I was just like well buck up come on life is difficult but we crack on and we make a joke and I said that for so long that she then had to start physically showing me how she felt until I paid attention and that's the big thing you have to learn when you have a child with an eating disorder they are trying to tell you something and they won't start eating again until you start listening to them.

47:30Did your parents ever pay attention to you? Did they listen in the end? Nah. Nah. So what's the end of that story, you and your parents? I haven't talked to them for seven or eight years now. Yeah. It's just, again, this is a sort of growing thing. This is, again, I can remember watching Oprah Winfrey when they'd have families on talking about how difficult what their relationships were and however awful the stories were that the children were telling about their parents oprah would go yeah but it's your mom you gotta love your mom and i think that's very much changed as societal information there there are so many groups called no contact groups or no familial contact groups where the children have just eventually gone it isn't going to work and it's painful for all of us to try and make this work and it's just actually the more humane thing is just to step back and and not be in contact rather than need to be litigating the same arguments over and over again have your daughters ever asked after them and said what about yeah but they know they know the stories like kind of like they know the stories from you yes haven't formed their own judgment of them no but they've i mean they spent time around them when they were younger and they they they saw what they were like and they're kind of yeah they that's i mean they i mean that's one of the reasons why i'm not in contact with them because i didn't want my children to be around is it exhausting for pete being married to you I think it's delightful for Pete to be married to me.

48:55Because you've not got parents. Yes. You have got daughters. Yes. Which you take seriously. But Pete has got to take all this on board. And the expectations from Pete are so great. He's, I mean, he seems to be a very happy man. Like he also has a complex family background. And I think that's one of the reasons that we bonded so instantly, even though it took years for us to realise the parallels. And we are very, very happy. Like we are the happiest family I know. when people come and we have people who come and like come for a party at our house and then tend to live with us for like six months or a year it's kind of a house where people come and don't leave again we've tried really really hard to really look at everything that made us both unhappy in our childhoods and go we're going to start getting from scratch here i think there's an intergenerational thing where at some point there's intergeneration trauma that gets passed down and you have to be the generation that goes okay it stops here i'm going to make sure it stops here and when i finally confronted all the stuff that was happening around with my daughter's eating disorder it was both of us realizing okay there's a whole lot of stuff that we were given as children as everyone is and we're going to stop it here and we're going to learn everything we can in order to have a really healthy happy house that doesn't make our daughters feel like we both did when we were kids which is i can't wait to get out of here but the thing that you really lack from your parents seems to me to be attention.

50:19Yes. Well, I mean, there's a reason why, you know, you know, there's a reason why it's often the common story for communicators and people who are vaguely in the public eye that they're constantly coming into a room going, ta-da, let me delight you. Let me tell you a funny story. Let me tell you my wisdoms, like kind of, you know, sort of like, you know, at the base of all it, it's just like, daddy, look, I did a thing. And are you doing that now to the world? Is that what you've done to the world? Because that's what art is, I think. I think art, that's what art is and all community, you know, sort of, you know communication is someone my husband years ago said it was interesting when social media started and you see people posting stuff and they would seem to be communicating with millions of people but it was very obvious that the messages they were sending were usually aimed at one person and sometimes that person wouldn't even be alive anymore but they just wanted a response from one person and I think that's so often what we're doing that's that's what drives people my wife says to me every day Giles they've been dead for a long time now you don't need to be doing this to please them anymore you don't need to go on trials you really don't you can stop now so who are you communicating to my parents yes this is my wife's view yeah i'm not saying i go along with it yeah yeah but she thinks that i'm still trying to please them get their approval get their admiration get their applause and clearly your parents never gave you any of that do you think she's right with you oh yes and no actually i mean i i think it's an easy thing to say yeah um with you the the difficulty the challenge with your daughters is you so don't want to do that but you mustn't overdo that i'm here i'm listening this is a happy place where there is love and you can do it your way oh huge i mean that's i mean god that's that that's the difficult part of being a parent isn't it and just realizing often that your gift to them is just stepping back like kind of i've got a lot of friends who are in the same kind of job and we all just had conversations really early on when we had kids which is just step back and let them have their own light.

52:08What's the worst thing of you as a mother? What do you think they can do badly? I mean, I drop them quite a lot. There was quite a lot of carrying them up to bed when I'd had a couple of drinks and sort of dropping them a little bit. You're physically dropping them? Yes. Oh God. Well, you know, onto the bed, you know, it wasn't the best landing. But did you go through a period of drinking far too much? I was a classic British binge drinker so we don't drink with meals, we don't drink sort of, you know, me and my husband never sit around and drink together but we'd have a party every six weeks and kind of that would be mum's night big night out or big night in um so that was I mean I can't do that now because I've passed a certain age you just don't have the enzymes to digest white wine so I just can't do that anymore um but yeah definitely I mean I was a young mother and it was like quite stressful so yeah I was sort of once every six weeks I would really really let go I think the worst part about me being a mother um I I know everything like kind of I've had to really learn when they because when they're younger and they have a problem it's your job to solve it they have no information so when they say something, you're kind of like, well, this is what's happening to you.

53:07And here is the solution. But there's a day and you're never told when it is, when it flips. And the thing they need to do is for you to go, I don't know, what do you think, babe? Like, what's your solution? Like, kind of, and just let them talk. And the other thing I've really learned, because I'm a fixer and a solver. So as soon as they would have a problem, if they're crying and upset about something, I'd instantly be like, stop crying. It's all going to be great. Here's three jokes. And here's a solution. And I've got my credit card out and we'll get in the car and And this is sorted and we're going to make this amazing.

53:33And I've learned that you have to sit and listen to someone until all their emotions are out, before you even start going near and talking about a solution. There is no point in trying to fix someone's problems until they've said everything they need to say, because they will not listen. So I've really had to learn to not be clever and not be funny, not make a joke, just sit there and listen. Let them vent. And the venting never stops. Right. I've got the solution almost the moment they've begun. Right. oh no I fixed it 30 seconds in but like I've really learned that now I can't remember the last time I gave my children advice like oh actually no actually this morning I told my daughter not to wear heels to a wedding because she'd regret it but um but other than that I just let them talk of your career things which is the book that is the one that oh you I'm wanting that definitely to go into the I think just the impact that how to be a woman had that came out when I was 32 that was the first book I wrote as an adult and just there's still the impact now i meet children who have been named after me because their mothers love that book so much i've had i've had so many i mean this this is an insane thing so i've had so many people going that book changed my life like that book saved my life you know that the advice in there about self-harm and eating disorders and you know your sexuality and bad relationships abortion miscarriage motherhood and when i wrote it at the time i remember where did you get all i mean i can see where some of those things come from yeah some of these things are out of your experience oh every single you've not had an abortion yeah no I've had an abortion yeah and wrote about that and at the time when did you have an abortion this is before no no no after I'd had two children I got pregnant again and you thought enough's enough yeah I was just like we were just we wouldn't you know if we'd had a third child we just would not have been able to cope and so so I had an abortion and that chapter me my agent and my publishers talked about that for so long so I was like a big columnist at the times at the time and no one was really talking about abortion that the conversation around abortion was very much like you do it and only if it saves your life and you must regret it and it will screw you up for the rest of your life like so you're allowed to have an abortion ladies but on the understanding that you are so sad and screwed up about this the rest of your life and I did not find that to be the case when I had my abortion I'd had an abortion at 12 weeks and I mean I you know I jokingly say in the book that it genuinely took me longer to decide what worktops to have in my kitchen than it did to have an abortion because I knew I couldn't be a mother again I know what a serious thing is I know what commitment that is that is the rest of your life and when you know what it will take and you can't do it that's a really quick decision to make you're just like and I can't do this properly I revere this role and I can't do it properly again so every part every experience within that list that you gave me you have had yes so the the format of the book was each chapter was it starts chronologically from my 13th birthday where I just realized I'm being chased by boys and I'm just wearing a crocheted poncho and they're just calling me a fat lesbian and I just sort of go home and I go I don't know how to be a woman and so every chapter is then something that happens in my life first boyfriend first love sex masturbation abortion miscarriage marriage bad relationships that happened to me in my life and it starts with a vignette and then it goes okay let's pick apart here what's happening here why are these the big things that happen in women's lives what are the what is the information that we have at the moment is that correct should we be thinking about these things differently let's reclaim this word feminism which was in abeyance in 2010 and just see how useful it is to us because this is an invention that is supposed to make women equal to men but there are still all these experiences that only women have and men don't have and the way that we talk about them as a society most of them it's secret and shameful and the big thing about my life is whenever there's something that is secret or shameful that is what i want to talk the two things that you picked up and i suppose this is why i'm picking up on them would be the abortion thing which you've explained yes that is secret and shameful yes and masturbation which i didn't think was secret and shameful but maybe it is oh it was that when i wrote about that i was summoned onto news night by jeremy paxman indeed who sat there like a kind of peevish furious horse going why have you written about masturbation like why is this necessary like why would you need to talk about this and you may have noticed in the last 10 years female masturbation is a very popular subject like it's happening in fleabag like it happens in movies people are talking about it at that point no one was you were not supposed to talk about it you know we'd had like port noise complaints like kind of male masturbation was the thing that was talked about all the time and indeed wash with it literally yeah but when i wrote it as a there's an you know it's amazing to realize how quickly things change when i wrote about female masturbation in that book and all the girls were going yay martin amiss wrote a really peevish piece going i can't understand why cattlin moran is writing about masturbation is she trying to be a man like only men can write about and that's my i love martin amiss but even he had inculcated into him that that was a thing that men did and that it's not something for women to talk about and if they do they're trying to be men and that was the kind of thing that i you know it takes you back to queen victoria not knowing what lesbians are yeah yes because it was inconceivable i've never heard of it yes so that was so that's my great joy i think because there was no you know because of my childhood and not having any advice or information and growing up in a time when it was still very shameful and secretive most aspects of being a woman is like yeah okay now i'm a grown-up i get to write about these things and they get sent out there to girls who read them and they grow up not having the same secrecy and shame that I had and that's the great joy of my life.

58:39Are you in a happy place now? Oh I am happy as a clam Giles yes. And this new podcast of yours what's that going to be about? Well this is so this has been so a couple of years ago I had what the young people call a mental breakdown a kind of proper midlife crisis that happened around the the menopause because the news is so dreadful and everybody feels so dolorous about the future and you know civilization is going to crumble. So I decided I had to go and live on the side of a mountain and be completely self-sufficient. I'll stop you there because you're presenting in such a complicated way to take on board because you present with so much energy and verve and the jokes and etc and you are clearly a huge success and yet you keep actually mentioning things that have been traumatizing, traumatic and dark.

59:23You're throwing in here that a couple of years ago you had what amounts to a breakdown. Yes. Just unpick that for a second. What happened in your head? What happened to you? Well, I didn't realise that I was mad. I'd never really realised I was anxious. I just thought that how I felt was normal, which is that I broke every day down into 20-minute segments and something had to be achieved within that 20 minutes. So if we went for, and the weekend was the same as the week. So on the weekend, I would take the dog for a walk and I needed to have hit 10 ,000 steps within 40 minutes in order to be able to move on to my next unit of time in order to use that productively.

59:57And all of this felt completely normal to me. 10 hours a step in 40 minutes. I'm a very rapid walker. You must be. I know. So, yeah, so I thought all that was normal. And then, so then the menopause started happening and this kind of ferocious anxiety then started to collide with terrible depression. Just touch on that. I should know more about this because I am an official for the ITV program this morning. I'm a menopause ambassador. Really? Well, I felt you can't really say no. It would be childish. Yes. But the truth is, I'm sympathetic. Yes. But as my wife says, what do you know about anything?

1:00:29She would not answer this question, but you can. What are you feeling? How is this menopause affecting? Because what is happening? Why does it affect your head? Well, so what I realised, so when you read what's happening, because obviously these things happen really slowly, it's like the pan in the bucket of water. But essentially what's happening when you start menopause is you start becoming depleted in oestrogen. Like kind of you've been full buoyed up with oestrogen, the loving drug that makes mothers lovely you're full of estrogen and in nature we need estrogen when we are fertile because when you've got a small baby that just bites your nipple really hard were you not awash with estrogen you would simply scream what are you doing you terrible bastard throw it out the window but when you're awash with estrogen you look down at your lovely little bitey child and go it's so adorable and so estrogen is basically makes you drunk it makes you high it's like being on e like estrogen keeps women loving and and caring about their houses and their children once you start the menopause it starts draining out of you and so you just gradually start going hang on i've been taken for a mug here why am i ironing a tea towel why am i the only person who knows where the bin bags are like why am i listening to these people wanging on forever and ever what about me and this is in your head you're thinking actually thinking these things your emotions are you just have less and less tolerance you're not drunk on estrogen anymore you start to sober up basically that's and if you you know i think if you think around the middle-aged women that you know in your life around the time of the menopause they will suddenly become a lot brisker, a lot angrier, a lot more.

1:01:50I'm going out to do what I want now. The worm has turned, like kind of like I'm off. And that's what's happening. We are just sobering up from being drunk on estrogen. So what happened to you two years ago? So as you lose estrogen, it has knock-on effects on your brain chemistry. And so it tends to deplete you of serotonin and having ADHD, I'm already quite depleted in that. So I started to become very depressed. And without the kind of bouncy buoyancy. Spending more time lying in bed? no no no I'm always a very active person I just became more and more frantic I was just like I've got to work my way out of this like I've got to optimise even more got to optimise we'll start our lives somewhere completely afresh I need to be completely in control in every aspect of our lives which is why we're going to live on a self-sufficient farm we'll have our own water source I will have my own forge in order to make my own iron tools because if civilisation crumbles I'm not going to be the fool that perishes I know he was so lovely he was like is there going to be room for my record collection I was like we won't have room for the record collection?

1:02:44No, but it's all on Spotify. And he went, there's no Wi-Fi signal here. We were in the middle of nowhere. He was so lovely about the whole thing. So how did you work your way through this? Well, in the end, we just couldn't afford it. It's like, because the thing is that the whole thing about a midlife crisis is if you read all the books and watch the movies, that's where you go and walk the salt path or adopt a hare or a hawk and you have this kind of massive quest and it changes your life. But in normal life, no one can do that. You can't go and adopt a hawk in Crouch End. You can't go on a 600 mile walk.

1:03:10You have to find a domestic quest. and my big domestic quest was I was so sad about nature and the end of the environment that I was like how can I make birds be in my garden and I was literally googling can you buy sparrows I want a dawn chorus again and then I went to a rewilding project at the neper state and they were just like if you want nature you have to build a nature place and it was such a simple mind-blowing thing and I was like yeah I've got a really neat garden but nothing can live in here so I just rewilded my garden and suddenly the sort of the peregrine falcons started coming in and the red starts and the gold crests and I've got newts and I've got frogs and every day if you are depressed and anxious if you come downstairs and the garden has come up with a surprise overnight the garden wants to make you happy the world wants to make you happy all these little you know a bird is just like a is a burst of serotonin it just flies across the window and makes you happy again and I just became so passionate about gardening it just completely rewired me so this is what outsiding so this is the new podcast so for the last 30 years I've been asked to do tv shows and podcasts and stuff and because I had a terrible experience when I was 18 presenting a TV show I was like I will never do anything like that again but with this I was like I can talk about gardening forever let me tell you about why the oak tree is the symbol of Great Britain not only was it the size of our oaks that allowed us to build the biggest ships in the world that allowed us to have an empire but the the oak gall wasps galls that they have on the tree are what the ink that Shakespeare used to write his sonnets and plays from so like within the oak tree is all of our cultural software and of all our military hard power in one single tree and that defines our country so as a massive nature nerd when i was asked to do this gardening podcast my co-presenter is adam frost from gardens world who is my all-time gardening hero and so every week people come to my garden which is all rewilded and we sit there with a cup of tea and some cake and we all just nerd out about what we love about being outside not just gardening going for walks rambling cold swimming anything that is that moment where you step out of the front or back door and take that deep breath and you're away from your screens and you go this is good news because it means you have a passion because i've been sitting here worried about what happens to you when pete goes yeah oh god i don't i worry about this all the time um because pete is both in reality this wonderful thing for you but also he has become in your mind's eye this wonderful thing for you yes so pete is there what happens when he goes i mean i have looked into having him stuffed there's a taxidermy shop on Essex Road and I could just have him like stuffed in there forever I honestly don't know I'm really this is why this is why I'm a bad wife to him I'm constantly lagging about yourself have you ever looked at another man who ever had a a fling I don't have time Giles I'm optimizing my walk to get 10 ,000 steps in 40 minutes how am I going to fit in a man on the side well you are kind of high energy there are many men who'd be very grateful for your attention the admin though I just it's just the scheduling I just and as far as we know he is kept on the straight and narrow oh he's so scared of anyone looking at him he's he's a very shy man like he's horrified by the idea that anybody might might might give him the eye he's too good to be true he's the best he is my oak tree he is what i built my ship from and what powers the pen and my ink coming to the end now so some big questions well actually some quite straightforward questions i'm going to say to you a moment of joy and all i've got to come is really what comes into your mind a moment of joy oh it's always being at the glastonbury festival yeah i've been there every year for 33 years and it is i think it has a reputation of being this kind of like lawless kind of rock and roll thing or now some kind of corporate behemoth that kind of like give me your best glastonbury moment then watching the dawn come up with all my friends uh we stayed up to watch the sun come up and we were just like and by this point we were very middle-aged just we're going to see the sun come up we've never seen the sun come up we're going to watch the sun come up and when it finally came up, the second it came up over the horizon, a massive cloud came over it and we couldn't see it at all and we were so hysterical with laughter at that point.

1:06:59We'd stayed up so long and we couldn't see it. But it's the happiest place on earth. And a moment of sadness. We've touched, obviously, on you losing your first child just before the wedding. But what comes into your head?

1:07:16Yeah, when my daughter is ill and the other thing that happens if you have an ill child and people with families who've had to deal with any kind of illness in the family know that if you've got one very desperately ill child that is taking up all your time and bandwidth any other children you don't have time for them so it's a double it's it's a double tragedy because you're you've completely abandoned one child while you're trying to save the life of the other one and that was I mean thankfully now both my daughters are incredible and our relationship is amazing and we've been able to talk really truthfully about it all the time and make jokes about it but um but that's you know those are the things where if you could go back that's you know if I had to time machine the one thing i'd do is go back and i don't know what i'd do but i'd try and make it better when did you last cry um on friday we'd finished recording the first episode of the podcast which was amazing we'd had bob mortimer over and he stayed for three hours and he's just the ideal guest and i love him so much i've interviewed him so many times and he's just i adore him but it had been a very intense and full-on day and then my husband came back and went i found your dad's album and that was and he was like he tracked it down that day and he was playing me my dad at 18 singing his songs and there was a photograph attached to it as well it was my dad at 18 in this band and I just sobbed because I was like for all the complexity of the relationship I've had with my father that's it was over at that point he'd already got dropped by his label at 18 and I could just see it was like that's the start of my life there in that moment you're 18 and it's already over for you and we just lived in that sadness forever and I just sobbed and sobbed and it made me think this is the only way that I can get back in my contact with my dad again because I want to get that album and go and give it him I want that's the only conversation we'd be able to have I could give that to him and go I think you should have this like this is yours and you should have it back be wonderful yeah and you will cry well I'm starting to cry now thinking about it it's gonna be really weird but like I do want to give it to him and is he still with your mum no no no no where's your mum do we know she's yes uh Oh, it's a long and complicated story.

1:09:17But yes, they're both still alive, but not together. So you're going to find your dad first. At least you know where he is. Do you send a Christmas card to him? Do I? No, not anymore. So you're going to see him this year? I think so. In a good way, because you've got something lovely. Yeah, we've got something to talk about that isn't about anything else. It isn't about that. It's about, and how many are your girls now? 25 and 22. So it's him at 18. It's him in his good days. He'll love to hear it. Well, this is what I kept thinking. he was a teenager and it was all over and like the mum in me now as a mother I can see him at 18 with all these dreams that just got smashed and I'm like I want to I want to like go back and parent you but he had it the point is at 18 he had it he had that moment and his life may have ended up disappointingly but he had glory I think I think him being able to put that record back on and listen to himself it does feel like it would be the closing of a very long circle lovely okay What have you learned?

1:10:10This extraordinary life. You're 51 now, aren't you? Yeah, I know. This child prodigy. It all happened to you. I mean, your glory moments, age 13, 16. I know. And then meeting the man of your dreams, dressed in his wee willy winky, your first night with him. You're dressed as wee willy winky, and he's actually sleeping on the floor. I know. And he sets you free and says, be a wild animal for a while. Sow your wild oats. Have ridiculous sex with ridiculous men. And then come back to me. I'm the harbour. I know. And he's still the harbour. He played a long game there. He's a wise man, Pete. He's a quiet man, but he's a really wise man.

1:10:46Well, we look forward to having him here next week. Tell me, Kathleen, what have you learned? Today or in my life? Well, today and then in your life. I've learned that I love you and I want to talk to you more about your life. I feel really bad that I've hogged all the time. Can we do a second day where I interview you? Yeah, well, that day will come. Yes. I mean, I've learned lots from you. I'm so sorry that you didn't write a book called How to Be a Man. you can work on that one yeah I gave it a go I wrote a book called What About Men where I really tried to understand the problem with modern masculinity and just had loads of men shouting at me so yeah I don't think my problem is modern masculinity I think mine is late 19th century I was going to say yes anyway but that's nice and I love you too what has life taught you darling life has taught me I mean I mean just if you are the if you are the unstoppable force like kind of you will at some point bore your way through the immovable objects like kind of like you you do really have to keep going but I think the main thing is just respect for teenage girls like I look back at myself now like kind of I think as a society we really underestimate teenage girls like I look back at that teenage girl now and she's the mother of me like she you know she she did everything I'm living off everything my teenage self did now she was so amazing at the time just people thought she was just this weird bobbly fat yammy girl just kind of like just like being a mess but she was really wise and she was not going to stop and so I you know I accord my daughters the same respect now like there's a lot of wisdom in young girls like they've got some amazing ideas so yeah just just how amazing young girls are really and that the future is all for I really hope the future is guided by young women I think it's with old men have had their time and I would really like to see young girls rule the world in whatever messy crazy way they do but it can't be any messier and crazier than we got now right you are an unstoppable force but I'm very glad you stopped by here.

1:12:35Thank you, Kat, for being part of Rosebud. Thank you. I've loved this. I've loved you. We'll get up and hug now, off camera. Yes. We can both burst into tears. Well, also as well, I just need to thank you for this podcast, because as I say, it's fuelled my column so many times, and the fact that you killed the man, the emu man, that was a saying in my social group for about six weeks afterwards. That's an amazing story. That's probably what he'll say in my obituary. The jumper man who killed Rod Hart. Yes. That's what it comes to. We must bear that in mind. Lovely.

1:13:11I loved that. I love Catelyn Moran. I've always loved her writing and now I'm loving her podcast, Outsiding. It's the podcast she does with Adam Frost and I'm rather flattered. They've asked me to be a guest in the next series. So I'll be popping up on Outsiding. I'm really thrilled, though, that Catelyn popped up on Rosebud. that for me felt like rather a special episode. We come to you, these episodes come to you from Grosvenor House, which is on Park Lane in Mayfair. And we love them. We love the room they've made available to us for our studio. So thanks to Grosvenor House. Thanks to Catelyn.

1:13:51And thanks to the people who write to us. I think Catelyn was very funny, very touching, and spoke to us from the heart. And here's an email, I think, that does speak from the heart. It's from Becky Toomey. and she writes, Dear Giles, My mother died on the 22nd of May following the passing of my father just eight months ago on the 7th of September. Rosebud has been a huge comfort during this time of deep sadness. I've listened to very few podcasts preferring to read or watch but my Instagram account showed you talking to Monty Don whom I enjoy watching on Gardener's World so I was keen to listen.

1:14:32I was hooked immediately, and have pretty much listened to an episode most days since, delving back into the intriguing library of rosebud episodes. Listening to other people's experiences of their parents and childhoods has led me to look more deeply at my own, and it really has been a kind of therapy which has brought me understanding and reassurance. When you ask a moment of sadness, so many guests refer to the death of their parents, and it has helped me realise I am not alone in my devastation, and I will learn to cope with it and feel happy again. You, Giles, are such a compassionate person and brilliant interviewer.

1:15:16The way you guide the conversation, ask questions, and feel sadness and joy along with your guests with such genuine interest has surged my belief in humanity. Oh, bless. Your voice is also very soothing. Ha ha. Ha ha. That's always saying ha ha. She's written ha ha in the letter. Anyway, I didn't want to overthink this email. I've literally never sent anything into a show before, but I felt compelled to tell you how much your podcast has helped me. Just wonderful. Thank you. With the very best wishes, Becky. well that is a lovely generous email and thank you I love the way you didn't want to overthink it I'm often being told by Harriet Jane our producer that I overthink things and you just you got down there and you wrote it and you sent it off I'm so glad you did it's very nice for Harriet and me to receive it and obviously we send you heartfelt condolences about the loss of your parents I don't know if I've said this before but I probably have when each of my parents died not only was there the sadness and the pain of it, but there was also great discombobulation.

1:16:25I remember, and I'm sure I have mentioned this, when my father died, Kenneth Williams, who was born 100 years ago, the entertainer, the actor, the carry-on, Kenneth Williams, sent me a letter simply saying, to endure is all. But it's difficult sometimes simply to endure, and you can go a bit off the rails, which I did. So if you do, don't worry, you get back on the rails eventually. And thank you for liking my voice. I like the sound of you, Becky. So that's been another very special episode of Rosebud. Aren't we lucky, the people we know, to have spent an hour with the extraordinary Catelyn Moran to think about her life, her childhood, and now to think about Becky and her parents and her sharing what she shared.

1:17:10It's lovely being part of the Rosebud family. So from us at Grosvenor House on Park Lane, from me, my producer, Harriet Jane, from Alec Cadell, who gets us up onto YouTube and edits the episodes for us often, and from the rest of the team, Marie, Sinead, Lisa, Becky, of course, my Becky. We're all part of the Rosebud family, but most of all, to you. Thank you very much for listening. Until next time, bye-bye. Cue the music.

1:17:45Thank you.

1:18:24Rosebud is a Plain Jane production produced by Harriet Jane, hosted by me, Giles Brandreth, with music by Phil Leppard, and recorded this week at the J.W. Marriott Grosvenor House in London's Park Lane. Room service.