Your Voice in My Head

"I read this when I was in my late twenties. I’ve always really admired Emma Forrest as a writer and as a young journalist. She was one of those super-talented young girls who started writing for newspapers when she was about seventeen. It is a kind of eulogy to her dead psychiatrist. He died when he was 53 [of lung cancer, without having told Forrest of his illness]. So, his voice is in her head. It describes the beauty of therapy and the importance of it. She tried to commit suicide and he kind of brought her back from that. I always say that finding a good therapist is like finding a good boyfriend or girlfriend. It’s such an important relationship. And to think of having that suddenly taken away from you… But, also, it wasn’t her relationship to mourn in a way. It was his family who needed to mourn. Yes! They know everything about you, and then you find that you know very little about them. 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. 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. I think it is. For me as a writer there’s no point of me writing books if I wasn’t brutally honest about it. But you can be brutally honest about it in a lighthearted way, that isn’t too hard to read. One in four of us will experience mental illness this year, so as I said, it is very normal to feel weird or to have experiences that feel completely awful. We all have them. It is a relief getting that out onto the page, and it can be a relief too for the reader."