I Quit Sugar’s Sarah Wilson: ‘I was king of the kids’
THE BEST-SELLING FOUNDER OF THE I QUIT SUGAR BRAND TELLS CATHERINE MCCORMACK ABOUT GROWING UP THE ELDEST OF SIX ON A BUSH BLOCK IN SOUTHERN NSW. EARLY IN HER NEW book about living with anxiety, New York Times bestselling author and founder of the I Quit Sugar brand Sarah Wilson shares a funny childhood anecdote about her mother buying cheap, day-old bread. “The bread was reserved for pig farmers,” Sarah writes in First, We Make the Beast Beautiful (Pan Macmillan, $34.99). “We didn’t have pigs, but Mum felt justifified in the deceit. ‘I’m not lying. You lot are pigs!’ she would say.” It was the early 1980s and Sarah, the eldest of six siblings to parents Michael and Clare, was living on the family’s eight-hectare bush block in Wamboin, NSW, about 30 kilometres north-east of Canberra. It was a semi-self-sufficient property, with goats, ducks, a vegetable garden and orchard for food, and solar panels and a pot belly stove for heat. There was no rubbish collection and drought was a constant threat. “People have said to me, ‘Oh, you grew up on a farm’, but I literally grew up in the bush,” Sarah says today, on the line from her office in inner-city Sydney. “There’s no point romanticising it, that’s for sure.” Now 44, Sarah has built a stellar career from this unflinching approach to her own life and topics that often challenge the accepted norm. Trained as a newspaper journalist, she had her own weekly column with the Herald Sun aged 25 before taking up the position as editor of Cosmopolitan from 2005–2008. Alongside other television shows, she hosted the fifirst-ever season of Masterchef Australia and turned a popular blog post on giving up refined sugar into the bestselling I Quit Sugar book in 2011. Since then, Sarah has built the brand into a thriving business, with more than 20 staff. In June this year, she went to Europe to launch I Quit Sugar’s supermarket products into Sainsbury’s in the UK. The entire time, she has struggled with anxiety, a condition Sarah traces back to early memories in Wamboin and, later, as a teenager, living in a share house in Canberra. Her book — for which she consulted all four of Australia’s major mental health associations — weaves the accepted science around anxiety together with her own experience of diagnosis, medication, healthy living, the highs and lows, including the two occasions she’s contemplated suicide. Sarah says the book was something she felt like she really needed to do. “I had an aching need to be less lonely. I wanted to have real conversations with people about what I felt really mattered. The last thing I wanted was my life story out there, but I had a story to tell and my publisher was willing to take a risk on a book most publishers wouldn’t normally go for. So there was also a sense of responsibility,” she says. Indeed, anxiety, Sarah argues, can be a motivator; a driving force that can help sufferers strive and achieve, and live a rich life. “My father has always said to me — before I even knew the meaning of the word — that I was very tenacious,” she says. “I suppose he would also say it’s been my my Achilles heel. I can’t say any of it has been easy. It has been enriching and rewarding, and life-enhancing, yes, and so my message is that you can be anxious and have a chattery, loud mind and also have an incredible life.” For more information, visit sarahwilson.com or iquitsugar.com
would scrub all our feet and our knees and clip our toenails. It was always a very depressing time of the week. Both my parents grew up in Canberra and all my grandparents lived in town. Dad was a public servant — and had been one since he was 17 — and Mum was at home. We moved to Wamboin when I was seven years old and everything out there was recycled and reused. There was no rubbish collection so everything was kept and used again. I think the words we use now are ‘self-subsistent living’, so we had animals for meat and eggs, a vegie patch and orchard, and solar panels and a pot belly stove for heating our water. Our house was a kit home that Dad had literally got offff the back of a truck. It had been developed by some person in the wake of Cyclone Tracy and it was never fifinished. We had concrete flflooring, we never had curtains, it was never painted — it was literally the bare bones of a house. We all shared rooms with difffferent siblings at difffferent stages, but by the time I was 12 I got my own room. My youngest brother was born when I was 17, after I’d moved out of home. There was only one car and Mum would do one trip into town each week to do the shopping and see the grandparents and do other bits and pieces. Everything was done on that one day. Then we’d all drive into town for church on Sundays. We went to a small country primary school and then I used to commute to high school in Canberra. There were a few other kids around in the area, but they had difffferent lifestyles to us. They were in pony clubs and we just weren’t in that crew. If I wasn’t with my siblings I was sewing and doing craft. I had my fifirst business aged 12. I used to make library bags and sell them in toy shops and a gallery in Canberra. Later on I worked for Lincraft and Home Yardage — I used to sew everything and my clothes were all handmade. I’d love to say I still do it, but it isn’t the most effifficient way to get clothing onto your back I assure you. I moved out of home to a share house in Canberra at 16. Mum and Dad moved into town soon after that — there was a drought and they just could no longer afford to live in the bush. The ultimate irony was that we were living
“My brother Ben and I would take offff and build cubby houses and BMX tracks.”
this self-subsistent life, yet they had to buy water and just couldn’t afford it. That’s what drove them to sell. I didn’t love where we lived when I was growing up at all — at all. But it’s obviously in me because I’m constantly needing to ‘go bush’. I get out for a hike at least once a fortnight and that’s something I just have to do. Sydney is my base now although I travel quite regularly. My lifestyle is very nomadic; I’ve lived temporarily in Airbnbs for years. I prefer not to talk about my family in the context of my new book and that anxious journey. I’m very respectful of them, they’re very private and don’t follow me on social media, which isn’t a bad thing. My parents have read the book but I don’t think any of my siblings have and that’s absolutely fine by me. We’re all still very close; we do things together and go on holidays together. Recently I went to Western Australia and did the Cape to Cape walk with one of my brothers and my sister. None of us can find anyone else to come! Do we talk about the ‘old days’? Constantly, it’s tedious. It’s all we talk about! Bodily functions and ‘remember the time when...’