Gordon - Mad girl

Copyright 2016 Bryony Gordon

The right of Bryony Gordon to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2016

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 9781472232076

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I think I made you up inside my head

Sylvia Plath

Mad Girls Love Song

Contents

Bryony Gordon has OCD.

Its the snake in her brain that has told her ever since she was a teenager that her world is about to come crashing down: that her family might die if she doesnt repeat a phrase 5 times, or that she might have murdered someone and forgotten about it. Its caused alopecia, bulimia, and drug dependency. And Bryony is sick of it. Keeping silent about her illness has given it a cachet it simply does not deserve, so here she shares her story with trademark wit and dazzling honesty.

A hugely successful columnist for the Telegraph, a bestselling author, and a happily married mother of an adorable daughter, Bryony has managed to laugh and live well while simultaneously grappling with her illness. Now its time for her to speak out. Writing with her characteristic warmth and dark humour, Bryony explores her relationship with her OCD and depression as only she can.

Mad Girl is a shocking, funny, unpredictable, heart-wrenching, raw and jaw-droppingly truthful celebration of life with mental illness.

In the 15 years that she has worked for The Telegraph, Bryony Gordon has become one of the papers best loved writers. Her weekly column in the Sunday Telegraph has won her an army of fans who have followed her journey from single girl about town to finally! settled mum. Bryony is now 35 and lives in Nappy Valley (Clapham) with her baby daughter Edie and her husband, a financial journalist. The last sentence is one she never thought she would see written down on paper.

I need to be honest with you from the start because, as you will see, this is an honest book. A self-indulgent, self-flagellating, self-loathing book (at times, reading it back, I have wanted to shake myself), but an honest one, all the same. At times, maybe a little too honest. I have that problem sometimes. For instance, the other day, I was telling my best friend and her boyfriend all about the time my husband and I were having sex and my Fitbit started vibrating to tell me I had reached my daily exercise goal, which sent my other half into hysterics and put a halt to proceedings right then and there. My friend, she sort of smiled. Her boyfriend looked at his shoes. Me? I couldnt work out why they werent both rolling around on the floor laughing maniacally at this story that involved vibrating fitness trackers and my husband and I actually managing to have sex. I mean, what is wrong with these people?

In the spirit of honesty, I need to tell you right now that this is not a self-help book. If you are looking for that, you have really come to the wrong place. I have absolutely no qualifications to write one. In fact, I barely have any qualifications at all, bar a few GCSEs, a tiny-titted handful of A-levels and some swimming badges from childhood. It would be simply preposterous for me to pretend that this is some kind of self-help book when, as the next 300 or so pages will show you, I have spent most of my life not being able to help myself when it comes to food and drugs and booze, and have only relatively recently even thought about a solid course of therapy or a gym membership.

No miracle cure for mental illness is to be found in this book. I cannot say that reading it will change your life or transform your wellbeing or any of the other frankly wild claims made by so many of the millions of self-help books out there on the market. Please dont cry. I hope that in saying this I have not made you feel too bleak or despairing (I am guessing that, in picking up this book, these are things you might be going through or things you have in the past gone through and are keen to avoid going through again in the future). What I mean is Im not a doctor, or a qualified expert in mental illness. But I have had a lot of experience of it. Ive been dogged by it my entire adult life. I know what it feels like.

And yet, despite my tendency towards over-sharing, I have not always been honest about the stuff that has gone on in my head. Some of you reading this may have also read my first book, The Wrong Knickers, which was a somewhat candid document of my crazy twenties. In it, I wrote about the time a man tried to use Lurpak as a sexual lubricant. I wrote about hooking up with someone in a sexual health clinic. I wrote about catching nits from a barman and having an affair with a married man and flashing my boobs in a pub. But despite all of this excessive honesty, I did not write about my periods of depression, my battle with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), or my years with bulimia. I did not write about these things because even as recently as 2013, when I was writing The Wrong Knickers I couldnt. I was too ashamed, too frightened, too convinced I was a freak to admit to any of the things that had cluttered up my head for so long. I would literally rather write about a man snorting cocaine off my breasts than I would about my mental health (although it was probably clear to readers of The Wrong Knickers that I wasnt always entirely of sane mind). I made out that the first and only time I went on antidepressants was when I had a breakdown on my thirtieth birthday, because how could I admit, casually, that I had actually been on them since I was seventeen? I made out that I had lost a tooth because of excessive sugar consumption, because how could I admit that it was actually because I had an eating disorder? Nor did I admit to having been in an abusive relationship. I didnt want anyone to think that I was an emotional wreck or a drama queen. Because thats what we always call a woman who has issues, dont we? A drama queen. An attention seeker.

Then, a few months after the book came out in 2014, I experienced a serious episode of OCD. I couldnt do anything except cry and ruminate and have panic attacks. I had a breakdown, basically, my fifth in twenty years, and Id had enough Id had enough of the secrecy and the silence and all the fearful lying that I was fine, that we were all of us always fucking fine when one in four of us will at some point absolutely not be fine, one in four being the number of people who experience mental-health problems. And if thats the case, then four in four of us probably know someone who suffers. How are you? people always politely ask when bumping into someone, and Im fine is always, always the answer, even when its a barefaced lie.

So I decided I was not going to collude with this lie any more. I decided I was going to tell the truth and to hell if people thought I was weird, or a drama queen, or an attention seeker. If, as a journalist who writes personal columns and candid books,