It is 10.30 on a Wednesday morning. Libby Purves has finished interviewing Sir David Attenborough on Radio 4’s Midweek and she is high with delight. Now, in a hotel close to the studio, it is her turn to be interviewed and – worse! – photographed. She tolerates the camera clicks amiably but supplies a self-effacing commentary, managing her self-consciousness with some brio. Exposure is the penalty to be paid for turning her hand from broadcasting and journalism to pesky fiction.
‘An author gives away far more in even a light novel than you would in 15 years of me-and-my-life columns,’ she says. In her latest book, Shadow Child, the central character is a bereaved mother whose son has died in his 20s.
Libby knows she took ‘the huge risk’ that readers would presume she is the template. Her 23-year-old son Nicholas, by her marriage to fellow journalist Paul Heiney, committed suicide in June 2006 at their Suffolk home. She admits, ‘A lot of what the character goes through I know about. I know about the emptiness, I know about the missing.’
Other comparisons are more oblique. The fictional mother delves into her son’s private life, making a shocking discovery. The real mother had her son’s inner life charted for her. Nicholas left behind diaries, essays and fierce, lucent poetry, which Libby read at dawn during the insomnia that followed his death.
Contrary to her middlebrow and slightly cosy image, Libby has a discriminating mind (she got a first from Oxford) and can be confrontational. She is also seen as an exemplar of stolid, middle-class jollity, whereas she is prone to depression and mysticism. As a diplomat’s daughter, she spent her childhood abroad or boarding in convents (her mother was of Irish Catholic extraction) and has often felt a misfit in England.
Nicholas as a young adult
You can trace the commendable manners of the embassy child in the way she exerted herself after Nicholas’s death. ‘About a month afterwards, it was the traditional Barrel Fair in our village, Westleton, and I went down, said hello to all the people I knew and half-knew and always made sure to drop in something about Nicholas – ‘Nicholas loved the hoopla’ – so people realised it was safe. I didn’t want to talk about him constantly.
'I talked to my friends – God, you wouldn’t believe the friends I’ve unloaded on! – but you do want people to know…to know he hasn’t changed because he died. You want to create a feeling of casualness so that you don’t become the poor old creature nobody speaks to because you’ve been through a tragic tragic-ness.
'You have to make it all right for others. You do put effort into that.’
She sees it as a human duty to be resilient. The first female presenter on the Today programme in 1976, she never shared Sue MacGregor’s perceptions of BBC chauvinism.
‘She rang me up and asked whether I was bullied. No! I don’t stand for any of that s***. I think it’s partly deep insensitivity and the fact I grew up with three brothers, but it’s never occurred to me that having testicles gave you extra pull. I have an awful lot of men friends.’
But she was incarcerated in convents for years. ‘The nice thing about girls’ boarding schools is that some girls simply take on male behaviours to alleviate the boredom of girliness. There’s nothing sexual in this, it’s just that some of you decide to be one of the lads, make the black jokes men make. With coeducation, girls find it harder to be tomboys. I had to internalise my brothers.’
Her wit and toughness acquire a heroic dimension when you realise that she has battled with depression, on and off. As a young adult at university, she also survived ‘a very oddball mystical phase. I think it’s far more common than people admit.’
In some ways, her experience of the all-female St Anne’s College was routine, evading curfews to party at the men’s colleges. ‘I could climb in and out of all of them. I know the Magdalen drainpipes, the Merton wall.’
It was all very innocent: she jokes that convent sex education – ‘the Catholic wife will go up to the bedroom first…taking up cocoa’ – left her learning about sex from Harold Robbins novels. ‘For years I thought you couldn’t have sex until you’d made a million dollars.’
........
.....She tackles next year’s 60th birthday with bracing sanity. ‘I don’t like this business of women not being allowed to grow older. Helen Mirren’s got to sashay round in a bikini at 62, saying she fancies Russell Brand. Whereas most of us go through an acceptance of a younger generation. My younger friends – and I’m happy to say I have many – ask me what I am doing for the big 6-0. I tell them, “Absolutely sod all.”’
.....Click to read on
Shadow Child
By Libby Purves
£17.99
Hodder & Stoughton
To be published on April 30.
you-bookshop.co.uk
© 2009 Associated Newspapers Ltd
Click for Related report "Shadow Child by Libby Purves"
April 18, 2009
UK: 'There is no solution to grief,’ reveals Libby Purves
.
LONDON, England / The Daily Mail / YOU Mag / April 18, 2009
Contrary to her stoical image, broadcaster and journalist
Libby Purves, 59, has battled with depression all her life.
Now, three years after the suicide of her son Nicholas,
she tells Louette Harding why writing a novel about
bereavement was inevitable
By Louette Harding
It is 10.30 on a Wednesday morning. Libby Purves has finished interviewing Sir David Attenborough on Radio 4’s Midweek and she is high with delight. Now, in a hotel close to the studio, it is her turn to be interviewed and – worse! – photographed. She tolerates the camera clicks amiably but supplies a self-effacing commentary, managing her self-consciousness with some brio. Exposure is the penalty to be paid for turning her hand from broadcasting and journalism to pesky fiction.
‘An author gives away far more in even a light novel than you would in 15 years of me-and-my-life columns,’ she says. In her latest book, Shadow Child, the central character is a bereaved mother whose son has died in his 20s.
Libby knows she took ‘the huge risk’ that readers would presume she is the template. Her 23-year-old son Nicholas, by her marriage to fellow journalist Paul Heiney, committed suicide in June 2006 at their Suffolk home. She admits, ‘A lot of what the character goes through I know about. I know about the emptiness, I know about the missing.’
Other comparisons are more oblique. The fictional mother delves into her son’s private life, making a shocking discovery. The real mother had her son’s inner life charted for her. Nicholas left behind diaries, essays and fierce, lucent poetry, which Libby read at dawn during the insomnia that followed his death.
Contrary to her middlebrow and slightly cosy image, Libby has a discriminating mind (she got a first from Oxford) and can be confrontational. She is also seen as an exemplar of stolid, middle-class jollity, whereas she is prone to depression and mysticism. As a diplomat’s daughter, she spent her childhood abroad or boarding in convents (her mother was of Irish Catholic extraction) and has often felt a misfit in England.
Nicholas as a young adult
You can trace the commendable manners of the embassy child in the way she exerted herself after Nicholas’s death. ‘About a month afterwards, it was the traditional Barrel Fair in our village, Westleton, and I went down, said hello to all the people I knew and half-knew and always made sure to drop in something about Nicholas – ‘Nicholas loved the hoopla’ – so people realised it was safe. I didn’t want to talk about him constantly.
'I talked to my friends – God, you wouldn’t believe the friends I’ve unloaded on! – but you do want people to know…to know he hasn’t changed because he died. You want to create a feeling of casualness so that you don’t become the poor old creature nobody speaks to because you’ve been through a tragic tragic-ness.
'You have to make it all right for others. You do put effort into that.’
She sees it as a human duty to be resilient. The first female presenter on the Today programme in 1976, she never shared Sue MacGregor’s perceptions of BBC chauvinism.
‘She rang me up and asked whether I was bullied. No! I don’t stand for any of that s***. I think it’s partly deep insensitivity and the fact I grew up with three brothers, but it’s never occurred to me that having testicles gave you extra pull. I have an awful lot of men friends.’
But she was incarcerated in convents for years. ‘The nice thing about girls’ boarding schools is that some girls simply take on male behaviours to alleviate the boredom of girliness. There’s nothing sexual in this, it’s just that some of you decide to be one of the lads, make the black jokes men make. With coeducation, girls find it harder to be tomboys. I had to internalise my brothers.’
Her wit and toughness acquire a heroic dimension when you realise that she has battled with depression, on and off. As a young adult at university, she also survived ‘a very oddball mystical phase. I think it’s far more common than people admit.’
In some ways, her experience of the all-female St Anne’s College was routine, evading curfews to party at the men’s colleges. ‘I could climb in and out of all of them. I know the Magdalen drainpipes, the Merton wall.’
It was all very innocent: she jokes that convent sex education – ‘the Catholic wife will go up to the bedroom first…taking up cocoa’ – left her learning about sex from Harold Robbins novels. ‘For years I thought you couldn’t have sex until you’d made a million dollars.’
........
.....She tackles next year’s 60th birthday with bracing sanity. ‘I don’t like this business of women not being allowed to grow older. Helen Mirren’s got to sashay round in a bikini at 62, saying she fancies Russell Brand. Whereas most of us go through an acceptance of a younger generation. My younger friends – and I’m happy to say I have many – ask me what I am doing for the big 6-0. I tell them, “Absolutely sod all.”’
.....Click to read on
Shadow Child
By Libby Purves
£17.99
Hodder & Stoughton
To be published on April 30.
you-bookshop.co.uk
© 2009 Associated Newspapers Ltd
Click for Related report "Shadow Child by Libby Purves"
It is 10.30 on a Wednesday morning. Libby Purves has finished interviewing Sir David Attenborough on Radio 4’s Midweek and she is high with delight. Now, in a hotel close to the studio, it is her turn to be interviewed and – worse! – photographed. She tolerates the camera clicks amiably but supplies a self-effacing commentary, managing her self-consciousness with some brio. Exposure is the penalty to be paid for turning her hand from broadcasting and journalism to pesky fiction.
‘An author gives away far more in even a light novel than you would in 15 years of me-and-my-life columns,’ she says. In her latest book, Shadow Child, the central character is a bereaved mother whose son has died in his 20s.
Libby knows she took ‘the huge risk’ that readers would presume she is the template. Her 23-year-old son Nicholas, by her marriage to fellow journalist Paul Heiney, committed suicide in June 2006 at their Suffolk home. She admits, ‘A lot of what the character goes through I know about. I know about the emptiness, I know about the missing.’
Other comparisons are more oblique. The fictional mother delves into her son’s private life, making a shocking discovery. The real mother had her son’s inner life charted for her. Nicholas left behind diaries, essays and fierce, lucent poetry, which Libby read at dawn during the insomnia that followed his death.
Contrary to her middlebrow and slightly cosy image, Libby has a discriminating mind (she got a first from Oxford) and can be confrontational. She is also seen as an exemplar of stolid, middle-class jollity, whereas she is prone to depression and mysticism. As a diplomat’s daughter, she spent her childhood abroad or boarding in convents (her mother was of Irish Catholic extraction) and has often felt a misfit in England.
Nicholas as a young adult
You can trace the commendable manners of the embassy child in the way she exerted herself after Nicholas’s death. ‘About a month afterwards, it was the traditional Barrel Fair in our village, Westleton, and I went down, said hello to all the people I knew and half-knew and always made sure to drop in something about Nicholas – ‘Nicholas loved the hoopla’ – so people realised it was safe. I didn’t want to talk about him constantly.
'I talked to my friends – God, you wouldn’t believe the friends I’ve unloaded on! – but you do want people to know…to know he hasn’t changed because he died. You want to create a feeling of casualness so that you don’t become the poor old creature nobody speaks to because you’ve been through a tragic tragic-ness.
'You have to make it all right for others. You do put effort into that.’
She sees it as a human duty to be resilient. The first female presenter on the Today programme in 1976, she never shared Sue MacGregor’s perceptions of BBC chauvinism.
‘She rang me up and asked whether I was bullied. No! I don’t stand for any of that s***. I think it’s partly deep insensitivity and the fact I grew up with three brothers, but it’s never occurred to me that having testicles gave you extra pull. I have an awful lot of men friends.’
But she was incarcerated in convents for years. ‘The nice thing about girls’ boarding schools is that some girls simply take on male behaviours to alleviate the boredom of girliness. There’s nothing sexual in this, it’s just that some of you decide to be one of the lads, make the black jokes men make. With coeducation, girls find it harder to be tomboys. I had to internalise my brothers.’
Her wit and toughness acquire a heroic dimension when you realise that she has battled with depression, on and off. As a young adult at university, she also survived ‘a very oddball mystical phase. I think it’s far more common than people admit.’
In some ways, her experience of the all-female St Anne’s College was routine, evading curfews to party at the men’s colleges. ‘I could climb in and out of all of them. I know the Magdalen drainpipes, the Merton wall.’
It was all very innocent: she jokes that convent sex education – ‘the Catholic wife will go up to the bedroom first…taking up cocoa’ – left her learning about sex from Harold Robbins novels. ‘For years I thought you couldn’t have sex until you’d made a million dollars.’
........
.....She tackles next year’s 60th birthday with bracing sanity. ‘I don’t like this business of women not being allowed to grow older. Helen Mirren’s got to sashay round in a bikini at 62, saying she fancies Russell Brand. Whereas most of us go through an acceptance of a younger generation. My younger friends – and I’m happy to say I have many – ask me what I am doing for the big 6-0. I tell them, “Absolutely sod all.”’
.....Click to read on
Shadow Child
By Libby Purves
£17.99
Hodder & Stoughton
To be published on April 30.
you-bookshop.co.uk
© 2009 Associated Newspapers Ltd
Click for Related report "Shadow Child by Libby Purves"
