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‘The point was to get to 7pm so I could drink’
Gavanndra Hodge interviews Bryony Gordon
‘GETTING SOBER WAS THE REALISATION THAT I HAD TO STOP THE SELF-LOATHING’
Anyone familiar with Bryony Gordon’s blisteringly honest Telegraph columns, TV interviews or podcasts might think the writer and mentalhealth campaigner had laid bare the toughest times of her life. But now she’s about to reveal the shocking details of her battle with alcoholism… Gavanndra Hodge meets her. Photography by Anna Huix
‘The point of my day was to get to 7pm so I could drink’
In the summer of 2017, Bryony Gordon woke up in the grounds of a country estate to find a man performing a sex act on her. The man was not her husband, who was asleep with their daughter in the grand house less than a mile away; a house hired for the 40th birthday of a friend. Gordon had not consented to this act, it was an assault, but she did not ask the man to stop. The man had been providing her with cocaine during the party and this seemed like a sort of payback. ‘So I lay there, and watched as what remained of my soul seeped out into the soil and the trees around me,’ she writes in her new book Glorious Rock Bottom.
Bryony Gordon is well known to readers of the Telegraph. She has been a columnist and writer at this paper since her early 20s – she is now 39. She is an award-winning mental-health advocate, working closely with Heads Together, the charity founded by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke of Sussex, and presents the popular podcast Mad World; on which her first guest was Prince Harry, who revealed his personal struggles with grief and mental health.
As a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, to make feel people less alone in their isolation, she has recently rebooted the podcast, launching it with nurses Katy Lowe and Natalie Mounter, who worked in Sierra Leone during the Ebola pandemic in 2014, followed by baking superstar Nadiya Hussain and the co-creator of the TV show This Country, Daisy May Cooper.
‘We can go to really dark places, but in a way they can be the making of us. Everything is the making of us, even right now in this horrible, weird, strange time that we are living in, there will be positives to come out of it,’ Gordon says, sitting at her bedroom dressing table in the south London house that she shares with her husband Harry Wilson, a financial journalist, and their daughter Edie, aged seven.
It is late March, full lockdown, and we are talking via Facetime, Gordon wearing her gym kit, make-up free, sitting in her white-walled bedroom, with a view of her bed in the corner of the screen. ‘I remember lying there, having come back from my last night of drinking. I remember thinking, “I cannot imagine ever having peace of mind. I can’t imagine ever not being in some sort of turmoil.”’
She has written four other books, two of which are memoirs, The Wrong Knickers,
detailing her wild 20s, and Mad Girl,
about her obsessive-compulsive disorder. Although, considered with hindsight, these earlier books are as much about alcoholism as anything else. Both were written while Gordon was in its grip ‘and in total denial’. Whereas Glorious Rock Bottom is about a series of devastating experiences that cumulatively nudged her from denial to realisation, and ultimately sobriety. ‘I spent so long trying to prove that I wasn’t an alcoholic. I couldn’t believe I was an alcoholic, I had achieved all these things.’
Gordon was born and raised in Chiswick, west London, with her younger siblings, Naomi, 37, a journalist, and Rufus, 28, a radio producer. Her mother, Jane Gordon, is also a successful journalist, and a columnist over the years for The Sunday Mirror, Mail on Sunday, The Times and Sunday Telegraph newspapers; her father, Jack, is in public affairs (her parents separated when she was 20).
It was a comfortable childhood, but once she reached her early teens Gordon experienced periods of severe mental dislocation and depression. She started drinking aged 14 – cider and vodka on a park bench with a school friend. The friend stopped because she didn’t feel well, but Gordon kept drinking until she vomited. It felt, she explains to me today, ‘like being anaesthetised. It was oblivion and confidence. It was a way of escaping the way I felt.’ And the next weekend she did the same again. ‘I wanted to get back to that state where I didn’t have to feel so anxious all the time.’
This was the beginning of a relationship with alcohol that would define much of her 20s and 30s. ‘I knew from the get-go that my drinking was problematic, but at the same time I just thought it was what everyone did because I was surrounding myself with people who drank. It became the joke. I was the fun party girl.’
There were hangovers and humiliations, drugs and sexual encounters that she regretted, followed by more drinking to numb the shame she felt at the things she had done. ‘I would drink to blackout.’ There was a brief hiatus when her daughter was very small, but then Gordon resumed drinking, motherhood colliding with alcoholism.
‘I am probably more scared of this one coming out than I was with the other [books],’ she says. ‘Because I know how women are judged, how mothers are judged. We still find it really hard to see alcoholism as an illness. But the fact that people are still being judged for this kind of behaviour is exactly why we need books like this.’
Gordon writes about how she was always impatient and short-fused with her daughter, how she did not give her the attention she deserved. ‘The point of the day was not to have a nice time or achieve fun things. The whole point of each day was to get myself to 7pm so I could drink,’ she says.
She would either drink at home, sitting at the end of the garden, often alone, or she would arrange to go out, leave her house,
‘I surrounded myself with people who drank. It became the joke. I was the party girl’
her husband, her child, giddy with expectation. Often she would go to a pub to meet people she didn’t particularly know or like, their purpose mostly to facilitate drinking. She would order pints of ale so that she could drink for longer – wine or spirits would get her drunk too fast.
Cocaine also increased her stamina. Often she would stay out all night, going AWOL, her husband not knowing where she was. In the book she describes taking cocaine on her wedding night, in the hotel room loo, watching porn on her mobile phone and smoking out of the window while her husband slept in the room next door. ‘That summed up for me the seedy, sad, tragic place that I had got to. All that mattered to me was getting out of it, getting high.’
If these episodes are tough to read as an outsider, mustn’t they have been even tougher for Harry? Not at all, says Gordon. ‘Harry knows all of it. We have spoken about it a lot and worked through it. I have always been very honest in my alcoholism, so when things would happen I would tell him, almost like, “I am telling you now so if you want to leave me, go.”’
But he didn’t leave. ‘When I would tell him about this stuff I would say, “Oh my God, I am such a bad person.” And he would say, “You are not a bad person, you are a person who is ill who sometimes does bad things.” He knew this before I knew this… And it is part of the reason that I was attracted to him, because he is very kind and empathetic.’
He was attracted to her because of her emotional honesty and her loving ebullience. ‘It was not like he got together with me and thought I was this shy, retiring person. And I would bump-up the dazzling charisma, to make up for whatever I had done.’ She describes getting through this period as a ‘battle’ and Harry as her ‘carer’.
‘What an amazing man for holding up the fort and being so understanding and non-judgmental,’ she says. They went to marriage counselling just the once. ‘He is not really into all of that, and that’s fine. I can’t expect everyone else to be vomiting out their emotions.’ Sometimes he would even ask her not to be so honest, not to tell him everything.
And yet he is, according to Gordon, not unhappy that these stories about his marriage are entering the public domain. ‘He is like, “If it helps other people, go for it.” Obviously the last thing I want to do is humiliate my husband; I always say that as long as the person I am most horrible about is myself [then it is OK]. I think most of the humiliation is on me.’
Gordon’s relationship with her mother has had its inevitable ups and downs, but they are now very close and Gordon says that her mother is thrilled that she is sober. However, Jane Gordon had a more ambivalent response to the book than Harry. ‘She was worried about me, she didn’t want me to be criticised. And I said, “That feeling that you instinctively have is why I need to do this, why I need to put this stuff out there.” I am not ashamed of it any more. I am proud of myself. I don’t do that sh—t any more, so if someone wants to judge me for it, that is their problem.’
For Gordon, the anecdotes in the book are not gratuitous, they serve a purpose. ‘I find that if I say it first, no one else can say it. If I claim it, if I admit it, put my hands up, I’ve owned it.’
Admittance was also exorcism. ‘The saying that I heard in treatment [for alcoholism] was that shame dies when you expose it to the light. Shame kept me very very sick for far longer than it should have done. The more we talk about these stories, the more we are able to move on from our shame, be constructive, get on with our lives and be good parents, good friends, good wives, husbands and all the rest of it.’
Most of all, Gordon wants to help others by sharing her stories, so that people who are locked in the same cycle of dependency realise that they are not terrible human beings, and that they are not alone.
‘I remember, about two years before I got sober, going to a Cocaine Anonymous meeting in my lunch break and hearing this man talk about how he put drugs before the welfare of his children. I remember sobbing, but also just feeling this relief, because I thought I was the only person in the world doing this. And then, the first person I met in treatment was Holly [who would go on to become one of her closest friends], who was doing almost exactly the same thing as me a mile down
the road. It is everywhere, all walks of life.’
Gordon attended a non-residential rehab centre in west London for three months. No one’s journey to sobriety is painless, and Gordon describes her own, with all its terror and fury, with an easeful candour that will give anyone in a similar position hope. ‘The fact that I have not had a drink now for three years is a testament to the amazing systems that exist to help people get through the programmes and treatments.’
Her life today is very different to when she was drinking – she’s focused on work and family. She has been with Harry for 10 years now, having met when they were both working at the Telegraph. ‘I call him Harry “hospital corners” Wilson – he has an Army dad. We could not be more different. But we are very happy. He is not like a cuckold in the background. He is not shy and retiring, he is just more contained than I am, which isn’t hard – Dame Edna Everage is more contained than me. We have fun and we are very comfortable around each other. We are even more comfortable now that I don’t drink.’
Sobriety has also changed her relationship with Edie. ‘I’ve always loved her, it is not like I love her way more now. I just listen a lot more. I am more attuned to her. She is very emotionally articulate. She knows I am allergic to alcohol, she thinks I have never had alcohol. I am proud of the fact that I am sober and I am pretty sure that by the time she reads this book she will be proud of me.’
The most fraught relationship in the book is the one that Gordon has with herself. There is a great deal of self-blame and much less self-love, which seems sad when she is clearly such a kind, clever and exuberant woman, who writes with honesty and humanity and often humour, leavening even the bleakest of times. But alcoholism is an illness that corrodes self-esteem, and part of the work of sobriety is rebuilding a positive sense of self.
‘My self-esteem was tiny,’ she says. ‘It was based on stuff that is so wafer-thin that it could have gone at any moment – alcohol or losing weight, stuff that is transient and doesn’t actually matter. It wasn’t based on any appreciation for myself. Getting sober was the realisation that I had to stop the selfloathing because if I didn’t I was either going to die by drinking myself to death or by suicide or by falling off a balcony.’
A key part of Gordon’s recovery was her discovery of running in 2016. As a mentalhealth campaigner she had spoken to enough people who had told her that exercise was crucial to mental well-being that she decided to give it a go, although at first she was only able to run for about 15 minutes. ‘It was such a revelation to me, and continues to be, that it is something I can do. Every time I go for a run it reminds me that I can do the thing that I thought I couldn’t.’
And an important moment for the newly sober Gordon was her decision to run the London Marathon for Heads Together in 2018 – wearing only her sports bra and pants.
‘That naked running was me learning to respect my body. My body kept me alive through blackouts, through the mixing of alcohol and cocaine, which create a toxic substance. I should be dead. And I am not, so I don’t give a sh—t if someone thinks I am fat. I am done with the physical loathing. I don’t care if anyone thinks I am attractive, that isn’t my purpose.’
She appeared on Lorraine and Good Morning Britain in her underwear to spread her message about body acceptance, and last May nearly 1,000 women ran the Vitality London 10k in their bra and pants. ‘It was wonderful, and so was the response from the public, shouting out, “You are amazing,” to the runners. It is about celebrating women’s strength.’
Covid-19 is deeply challenging for everyone, not least those with mental-health issues, but Gordon is dealing with enforced quarantine by making sure to go for frequent runs and tuning into online support meetings. ‘I am so glad that I am sober and in recovery. I am actually getting to more meetings now than I was before, like three a day. I can just prop up the phone, turn on the bath, mute myself and listen to a meeting.’
But she will not be using this time to write another memoir. ‘I don’t feel I’ve got any more memoir in me. I’ve stopped drinking, so I don’t do anything interesting. I feel like I have done that. But I also feel really proud, I don’t feel ashamed any more.’
Glorious Rock Bottom by Bryony Gordon is published by Headline on 6 August