It was a privilege being even a ‘second- tier’ friend of Deborah’s
Rowan Pelling pays tribute to the much loved, honest, witty and direct journalist Deborah Orr, who died this week aged 57
I’m not a fan of the starling chatter of Twitter. There’s only one person I’ve ever enjoyed following and that’s the brilliant journalist and self-proclaimed “womanist” Deborah Orr, who died on Sunday morning. Deborah was as trenchant, funny, truthful and idiosyncratic in her tweets as she was in person; hence her 63,000, mostly female followers. Starting the day with a Deborah Orr tweet was like smashing the ice for a bracing fivesecond dip.
A typical example might be her riposte to the news story about Maurizio Cattelan’s stolen artwork – a gold lavatory – that was nicked from Blenheim Palace: “Imagine a world in which TWO people think a gold toilet is a thing worth having. *sighs*.” My all-time favourite was the more recent: “Morning. Orr lies in a bed on a small hospital ward, smartphone in hand. She is in perfect health. She is poised to begin the most cynical campaign of advance book publicity the world has yet known…” The joke being that Deborah, whose hotly anticipated memoir Motherwell is due out in January, had recently been diagnosed with stage four secondary breast cancer and the prognosis was dire.
Deborah met the fiendish, returned cancer (which first manifested in 2010) by looking straight down the gun barrel, and had no time for sympathetic platitudes. She relayed how “a wellwisher” had direct-messaged her one morning to say, “I’m so sad. Are you alone? Will you have a carer as the cancer progresses?” Deborah told her followers: “Think how gorgeously sad she’ll be if I’m able to confirm her sad details! Don’t be this well-wisher, kids!” Every woman I know who’s been through the hell of cancer laughed in recognition at the toot-toot of the grief tourism bandwagon.
When I realised how ill Deborah was, I panicked a little over how to respond. I was very much a second-tier friend (I can hear Deborah’s voice in my head as I tap this, saying sardonically, “Ah, my intimate friend Rowan Pelling”), but the fact we shared half a dozen great pals brought us into closer orbit in recent years and my girl-crush only grew as I realised how deeply kind she was.
Deborah, barefoot and “lost in music” on the dance floor was a mesmerising sight. I messaged her to say I wouldn’t burden her with my presence on the hospital ward unless she actively wanted more visitors (which seemed unlikely, considering the gruelling regime of treatment), but would find a suitable token of love and esteem. Then I went half crazy trying to find the perfect gift.
At this point in time Deborah had been confined on a hospital ward for weeks, missing out on the changing seasons. So I scoured country paths for the biggest, best unopened conker cases in all of Cambridgeshire and sent the five finest in an old sunglasses box – so she could prise them apart and have a slice of autumn. She subsequently posted on Twitter: “Rowan Pelling has sent me a box of outside!”
Meanwhile, the writer Nicholas Blincoe – an approved visitor – supervised a hospital fingernailpainting session where the nail technician “had a hardening machine to dry the fake nails. But the middle nail was done the old way with lacquer, so they could take a pulse reading”. The glamorous results were duly tweeted. Blincoe told me yesterday that one of his fondest memories of Deborah was escorting her to the theatre, where she insisted on drawing on her vape in the actual auditorium, “Swallowing the vapour so no one could tell.”
The truth is Deborah was one of the few people in this life I always yearned to impress. I learnt I wasn’t alone in that impulse. The many middle-aged women who were going through painful divorces found great comfort and sisterhood in Deborah’s tweets about her separation from the author Will Self, relaying their own tales.
Others warmed to her defence of our biology in a world where “feeling female” is increasingly deemed enough to make anyone a woman. In September, she tweeted, “High court judge rules, of course, that only female mammals give birth. Doh! Crazy days.”
On Mumsnet, a discussion thread started, “Just a shout-out for how great Deborah Orr has been on Twitter recently and how much I admire her. She was a couple of years above me at uni and I remember seeing her sitting on a desk in the student newspaper office, all big hair and pixie boots, and obviously a rising star then [early Eighties].”
I first met Deborah at a GQ party in 1995 and the description was still apt. She had a great mane of blonde hair, a crowd of admirers and enough charisma to dynamite everyone else off the floor. I was in awe. My status at the time was sacked PA, but Deborah had smashed through the glass ceiling in her 20s and, aged 33, had been editor of the Guardian’s Weekend magazine for a full four years. A rare achievement for any woman then, but a meteoric one for a working-class woman from Motherwell, who’d grown up in the shadow of Ravenscraig steelworks and never lost a shade of her Scottish burr.
A friend of Deborah’s recalls that when the writer started on The Guardian as a sub-editor, she entered a lift with a man who said, “You must be Deborah Orr from obits?” To which she shrugged and said, “So what?” He said, “I’m Peter.” She looked at him blankly and shrugged again. This was, of course, Peter Preston – then editor of the newspaper, who always roared with laughter at the anecdote and went on to be a huge supporter of hers.
“Not Easily Impressed” could have been Deborah’s motto. When she got engaged to Will Self, I remember thinking it made perfect sense; she was almost certainly the only woman in London not in awe of his intellect and louche charm
(he was a close friend of my exboyfriend and I was scared stiff of him back then: two women I knew had had brief flings with him and hadn’t left a dint in his armour).
A friend who was part of their south London circle told me today, “It may sound hyperbolic, but they were Arthur and Guinevere – the most glamorous pairing in our circle – and we were their court.” That’s certainly how it looked from a distance as Will’s books received wide critical acclaim and Deborah became one of the most respected newspaper columnists of her generation – staunchly defending
‘She has a mane of hair, a crowd of admirers and dynamite charisma’
the Mccanns and writing a brave and candid account of her own mental health struggles after the death of Carrie Fisher. The Orr-self marriage may have failed in the end, but it was a love match for many years and Deborah was a devoted mother to her two sons with Will and her stepchildren from his first marriage.
It’s clear from Deborah’s forthcoming memoir that her complex character traits were deeply rooted in her childhood and entwined relationship with her loving but controlling mother.
What resonates is the triumph with which she seemed to escape her roots and, underlying it all, the deep and lasting hold they ever had on her. No one was more aware of these countertensions than Deborah.
She writes: “The more humble my beginnings, the more I appeared to have achieved. I emphasised my lowly parents to feel prouder of myself.” That profound honesty, wit and directness of expression was the reason so many adored her.
The first tier, the second tier and the Twitter-tier have all had their hearts broken by her death.
DEBORAH ORR, who has died of cancer aged 57, was an award-winning radical journalist who inspired, and was greatly admired by, her friends and colleagues in the press.
As a columnist, mainly for The Guardian and The Independent, she was a fierce campaigner for social justice, protesting in a typically forthright article in 2017 at the way in which, “mesmerised” by the continuing Brexit saga, Britain had become oblivious to problems on its own doorstep and the Government had become gripped by a “terrible paralysis”.
“Homeless people are stuck in the streets once again,” she wrote. “The services of food banks have never been more in demand. People with mental and physical illnesses or disabilities are dying for want of care, or even heat. The National Health Service has been plunged into a financial and staffing crisis … ”
She often drew on her own experience. In 2001 she recounted (in an Independent article also published in The Daily Telegraph) a violent tussle with a hooded female intruder and its aftermath: “I feel sad for her, but I’m glad we caught her … I want to meet her, try to get her to understand how it feels to have such a violation visited on one’s home and one’s children …
“Almost certainly, she needs to do herself two favours. She must get off drugs and she must brush up her English. How good it would be to believe that in our penal system these things are easily arranged. But they’re not.”
Deborah Orr had not had the easiest of lives. In a memoir, Motherwell; a Girlhood, to be published next year, she described her struggles to escape the confines of her working-class upbringing. More recently, she laid bare the details of her private battles with metastatic breast cancer, and with her estranged husband, the novelist Will Self, in a series of sad but funny tweets that won her a loyal following on Twitter. When writing about herself, however, her ruthless honesty was always alleviated by self-deprecating humour.
Deborah Jane Orr was born at Motherwell, North Lanarkshire, on September 23 1962, to a Scottish father and English mother, parents who, as she put it, made “so many self-centred demands … during their lives that I have literally written a book about it. (Motherwell, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, all good bookshops, March 2020.)”
During the 1950s her father, John, had moved to England, where he worked as a postman and met and married “a bright and beautiful girl from rural Essex”, Win, née Avis. But he could not adapt to southern ways and by the time that Deborah, the elder of their two children, was born, they had returned to Motherwell, where John found a job with Anderson Boyes, manufacturers of machinery for the coal industry.
Deborah did not hate their home, a tenement flat, but hated “the glassstrewn play area, where you had to check the slide in case other kids had smeared the innards of blown-up frogs – or worse – on it” and “the constant threat of intimidation from older, tougher kids”: “If there was one building, during my childhood, that I truly adored, it was Motherwell Library,” she recalled. “For me, its very walls were suffused with all the grandest ideals that civilisation cherished.”
When Deborah was 11 the tenement block was demolished and the family moved into a new high-rise “scheme”. Deborah was sent to be educated at Garrion Academy, Wishaw, where she was berated for the “unbearable pretension” of her English accent.
Though she did well at school, her mother continually undermined her attempts to assert her own identity. Deborah’s solution was to keep secret those aspects of her life which she knew would not gain approval, but her defiance came at great emotional cost in feelings of guilt and in the yawning gap between her and her parents that could never be bridged.
Her mother was furious when she won a place to read English at St Andrews. Deborah, too, had misgivings when she discovered that the university was largely populated by “England’s hunting, shooting and fishing crowd” who could not understand her Motherwell accent. “Even now, my strong, working-class, regional accent will be referred to pointedly … and I’ll feel obliged to respond with a rousing round of ‘Muuuurrrduuur’, in the manner of Detective Taggart,” she wrote in 2018. “It’s either that or a Glasgow kiss.”
She began her career writing for the New Statesman and for City Limits magazine, a London listings title set up as a workers’ cooperative in 1981 in opposition to Time Out, and where she became deputy editor. But she found it seethed with “victimhood, resentment, factionalism, incompetence and silliness” and resigned in 1990 to join the Guardian.
In 1993 she became the first female editor of its Weekend magazine and later its literary editor. In 1999 she moved to The Independent as a columnist, but returned to The Guardian in 2009, writing a column for the paper for nearly a decade. In 2018 she joined the i newspaper.
She also co-created the play Enquirer, which was shortlisted in 2012 for New Play of the Year in the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland.
Deborah Orr could be somewhat forbidding, but one of her editors has recalled that while she was “slightly terrifying to commission”, it was worth it for the “joy of getting her scintillating copy back”.
In 1997 she married Will Self, with whom she lived in a 19th-century terrace house in Stockwell, South London. The marriage broke down in 2015 and in 2018 Deborah Orr began tweeting about the progress, or lack of it, of their divorce. Thousands of people joined in on Twitter with messages of support.
In 2010 she discovered she had breast cancer and had aggressive treatment, but in August this year she was told that the cancer had returned.
She is survived by two sons from her marriage and two stepchildren.