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I had started to hide my toothbrush under my pillow instead of keeping it in the bathroom because I was terrified I would pass my illness to my family. I stopped holding my baby brother, or playing with my annoying little sister, because as annoying as she was I did not want her to die. It was one thing living with the possibility of being ill yourself, quite another with the possibility you might have condemned someone you love to the same fate. But it is a memoir, a memoir of her experiences and her relationships. It’s unsparing. And she really, really, really captures, for me, that kind of madness in failing relationships. While also being very very stark and honest about it. For example, she had a relationship with [the actor] Colin Farrell. And she writes a lot about New York and Los Angeles, and it really comes alive. Some likable characters I adore are Zal and Amy. They're the KEY 🔐 and Barb's life savior. Without them, Barb will still be a hermit. I love how Zal uplift Barb to not blame anything that happened to her past as it was TOTALLY not her fault at some points. And Amy was so straightforward.
Do you think that people should have more sympathy, particularly at work? That it should be taken more seriously in terms of giving people the time to recover? I think that she was glamorous, but I don’t think that The Bell Jar is glamorous. I think The Bell Jar is very bleak. Hundreds and hundreds of Telegraph readers wrote to me with their well wishes, but most importantly their stories. All of them were putting their hands up and saying “me too!” – if not OCD, then some other form of mental illness. I realised then how completely and utterly normal it was to feel weird.Do I think it was totally successful? Not really. That's not to say it's a bad novel. It just spends so much time talking about the world of social media influencers that the alopecia elements get shoved in at the end. I understand that it's meant to be part of a wider narrative about stress and mental health in young people. However, I feel like these elements could have had more time in the spotlight. This book is trying to do so much that it doesn't seem to know what it's trying to say. Let Your Hair Down isn't a book about being diagnosed with alopecia. It's a book about social media that happens to include it. Will signing up for an advanced meditation class be good for my pilot light, or might it be better, right now, to listen to a podcast about it while going for a walk? Will getting drunk help my pilot light? Will crawling into bed in the middle of the day and drawing the curtains help my pilot light? You know the type… we’ve all had one, usually in our student days, or house-share days: the kind of boiler you can’t really be bothered to call your landlord about, because it sort of still works if you fiddle around with it a bit, and the landlord will probably blame you for whatever’s wrong with it, and take away your deposit to pay for fixing it. That kind of boiler.
In this context, a collective sense of not feeling quite right is actually the most right thing during a pandemic. Of course life feels hard: you have been living in fight or flight mode for almost two years. Eventually, Bryony gathers the strength to challenge the role her aunt has forced on her and finds out some surprising news. The thing about mental illness,” says journalist Bryony Gordon, “is that it doesn’t want to be on the outside. It wants to be in your self and it wants you alone, isolated, thinking you’re a freak. That’s how it thrives. It does not want you to talk about it being there.”It’s been like this since… well, for at least a year I would suppose, not that I had any sense of time passing, of life progressing or moving forward. Some days are gloopier than others.
Gordon, Bryony (5 June 2008). "There is no shame in dropping out of university". The Daily Telegraph. London . Retrieved 11 July 2014. Sorcha is pretty obviously vicariously living through Barb. She is getting her to do things that only appeal to her and that Barb has no clue about such as getting her an appointment with a woman called Anna G who Sorcha seems to look up to. What is more, is that Sorcha also doesn't really know what she is doing and is a complete novice at everything brand-management based. This is accentuated by them going to visit a brand that Sorcha set up an appointment with, but knowing nothing about what their building looked like, or what their values were, which led to a bit of embarrassment. People are carrying on, but are they keeping calm? On the surface, perhaps, but deep down there seems to be a collective sense of inertia – inevitable, perhaps, after having to live in a defensive crouch for the best part of two years. I was 30 when I found the first bald spot on my head. I'm not saying I handled it well but I can't imagine how I'd have coped with the news as a teenage girl. Like the main character of Bryony Gordon's novel, my hair was something that people always commented on. I wasn't at Rapunzel levels but it was the thing I got the most compliments for. Cut to a few years later and it's gone along with my eyelashes and eyebrows. My 16-year-old self would never have left the house. I am totally in favour of alopecia awareness in literature. We need more stories that show it doesn't have to be the end of the world. That's what Let Your Hair Down was meant to do. But it is about heartbreak, obsession… the place that we women are ashamed to go to. When it comes to the end of relationships, it can get a bit obsessive and she is not afraid to go there and write it for what it is.
About six months ago, I collapsed in the kitchen whilst making my daughter’s breakfast. I am not a person prone to fainting fits, so it took me by surprise, not least because it was accompanied by a sudden spike in my resting heart rate, my smart watch informing me it had gone from 52 beats per minute to 170 in what felt like a split second. I came to on the floor, with a butter knife in my hand. All I remember thinking was: thank God I wasn’t carving a roast.
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