FIONA O’LOUGHLIN
on the joys of sobriety and being a grandmother
Tenderly cradling her first grandchild, comedian Fiona O’Loughlin can only marvel that she survived to meet the beautiful baby who is “like this magical happy ending” to her large and loving family’s troubled times. “I’m in such a good place now that this second chance has been given to me,” smiles the funny, frank, mother-of-five, “thankful every day” to be in recovery from the alcoholism that came desperately close to killing her. “I find I have more gratitude, I listen more. I laugh like I did before I ever had a drink. And the joy of waking up and not having to ask what happened last night, wondering if you have to apologise for anything …
“It’s a freedom,” reflects Fiona, proudly introducing the O’Loughlin clan’s newest member, tiny Úna Mary Dunne, born on September 7, while her grandmother reluctantly headed to a gig. “When you’re an active alcoholic you are imprisoned. You don’t realise it, but you are in chains. At last I have escaped and have a passport to travel!”
Sober, clear-eyed and crusading to help others, the stand-up and reality television favourite (she won I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! last year) is in her element with Úna gurgling in her arms.
“I didn’t do a great job as a mother – I kind of dropped the ball – but I can do it now,” says Fiona, 55, cheerfully admitting that her former family home in Alice Springs was dubbed “the land of do as you please” by one of her sisters. Today, that manic anarchy has been replaced by sun-lit serenity at the cosy inner-Melbourne townhouse she shares with tiny Úna’s parents – Fiona’s publicist daughter Tess and son-in-law Ciarán.
“Come and see the nursery,” beckons Fiona, a diminutive pixie leading the way upstairs in sky-high heels. “We never had one, but it’s almost the nursery I dreamed of for my kids. I’m slowly getting used to having all sorts of things I never had before, like a nice leather handbag. Not a designer label, I’m not into that, just really nice leather.”
After years of torment, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival sensation has an overflowing portmanteau of hopes and plans: a “crack” at making it in America, keynote speeches to spread alcoholism awareness, a comedy-drama she is co-writing with a friend.
“I’m going to try to get into the housing market, which is something I never thought would happen. And I just got back from a trip to Paris! I took my parents for their 59th anniversary – anything over 50 years is worth celebrating – and it was heaven on a stick to be able to thank them because they never let me go, they never gave up on me. So there are these little luxuries now that it’s taking a long time to enjoy. I’m not scared every time I look in my bank account, the way I used to be, seeing what I’d spent while I was drunk.”
That was a recurring nightmare throughout Fiona’s long, intimate and anguished relationship with alcohol. Grog gave her confidence, made her hilarious, fuelled the international comedy career that took off (much to her own surprise) when she was in her mid-30s. There was, however, a dark underbelly to her boozing and a stark price to be paid, via an ever-escalating cycle of blackouts, anxiety, agoraphobia, depression, fear and self-loathing. Not to mention the blinding hangovers. For years, Fiona concealed the problem from her family, opting not to drink at home between tours, but “deep, deep, deep down” lurked the unwelcome awareness that she was an alcoholic.
Finally there was no hiding place when Fiona fell down drunk on stage in front of 300 people at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in 2009, days before she was due to compete on Dancing with the Stars. It seemed she had hit rock bottom and in that, perhaps, lay salvation. Embarrassed and ashamed, the Northern Territory Australian of the Year nominee owned up to her addiction and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
“As soon as I went public and told everyone I was an alcoholic, I thought that would solve everything,” she recalls, laughing uproariously at the sheer folly of the idea. “How could I drink after that?” She could and she did, but every relapse intensified her despair and self-hatred. “I just kept poking the tiger until it reared up and ate me back. I was always on and off the wagon, whiteknuckling it. Every few months I would go, not just falling off the wagon, but getting caught in the spokes and dragged across three streets.”
Drinking was ultimately responsible for her separation from dental technician Chris O’Loughlin in 2012, after 27 years together. “I let it go so far and so long that it ended my marriage, ultimately,” she says, stressing that the couple have never divorced and remain friends. “I almost died of shame. I woke up in bed with a stranger and I’m literally incapable of that behaviour sober.”
The following year, Fiona booked into a motel under an assumed name with the intention of killing herself – one of three suicide attempts – but was saved after youngest daughter Mary-Agnes tracked her down.
Death came knocking again, more insistently, in 2015 when alcohol, a dental injection and a faulty heater leaking carbon monoxide poisonously combined to put her in a coma for four weeks. Doctors gave Fiona a 14 per cent chance of life, with the odds on waking unscathed and “normal” halving to a slender 7 per cent.
“Normal? They’ll never know, will they?” she quips, that familiar, skewering wit belying the pain in her bright blue eyes. “For some of the kids, and I
totally get it, there was so little chance I was going to survive ... a couple of them had the feeling that, although it was heartbreaking, if I died I would be released from it [alcoholism]. And then, for some reason, I did recover.”
At that point, surely Fiona saw the light, sought help and stopped drinking? Not a bit of it. Hopeless, she lived rough for months in her native South Australia, relying on the kindness of fans and strangers to give her a bed, or even a blanket on the floor.
“I could not bear to have my children, my brothers and my sisters or my parents see me like that,” she says, lighting a cigarette as she confronts those searing memories. “I was guilty and ashamed and sad. I had made such a mess, I didn’t know how to clean it up. I was the walking dead and without getting sober, there were only three possible endings: death, jail or an institution.”
For children Henry, now 32, Biddy, 30, Tess, 29, Albert, 23 and Mary-Agnes, 21, their mother’s plight was devastating. “She was still so sick after the coma,” says Tess, who called the ambulance after discovering her mother near death with multiple organ failure. “For a while she was suffering so badly I felt quite guilty I had saved her life.”
Fiona could sink no lower. Begging to be admitted to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, she was told she wasn’t sick enough. And then she tried again, eating “humble pie” to call her sister Cate for help. “She dropped everything and came to get me, but she is so stylish and the comparison
... You know, homeless people wear crazy things and my outfit just made no sense. It was a summer dress with a brown and green woollen waistcoat and I said, ‘Cate, look at me!’ And she said, ‘Trust me, it’s perfect,’ because we were trying to get into a psychiatric ward!”
The turning point proved to be five months’ intensive residential rehabilitation at Karralika
Therapeutic Community in Canberra, an experience “too precious” for even madcap, mocking Fiona to turn into a joke. Well, almost.
“It was very humbling,” she says, with just a hint of a twinkle. “I shared a room with two other alcoholic women and we cleaned and cooked and gardened, which absolutely horrified me. I had never gardened in my life.”
Yet digging deep at Karralika gave Fiona new insight and new tools to fight the addiction that had “f***ed up” a decade of her life. Two days after being discharged she was back on stage, and then I’m A Celebrity came calling.
“Hell, I had nothing to lose,” she whoops. “At the very worst I might make a fool of myself but I would earn a nice pay packet. In the jungle we had no phones and nothing to eat, only 600 calories a day, but I had done all that before for free, when I was homeless!”
She pauses to snuggle Úna in her pram. “You know, I think the reason I won that show is because I am in such a happy place now, this second chance has been given to me.”
In the South African wilderness, there was time to examine past mistakes and decide how best to avoid them. Trying to work out why she became a self-professed “garden variety alcoholic” was simply a waste of time.
“I was born on the bright side of the road and pretty much always lived there,” muses Fiona, who grew up with six close siblings in tiny Warooka on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula. Boarding school from the age of 15 was followed in short order by nursing, marriage and motherhood, fostering 30 children on top of caring for her own brood.
“I never lost a child, never lost a sibling,” she says. “My life pain simply didn’t equate with drinking myself to death. I think we waste far too much time trying to find reasons.”
Alcoholism, she concluded, is not about individual weakness. It is a deadly addiction, an obsession of the mind, an allergy. “It’s mental, physical and spiritual. It attacks on all three fronts and there’s this shame around it, but there shouldn’t be. I don’t understand why kids aren’t taught in school that we will all try booze, but for some it will be sheer poison. We should understand across the board that, as long as there’s alcohol, there are going to be alcoholics, so stop with the hushed tones.”
With nothing to hide any more, she has found new strength in sharing her story. “I absolutely hope to get other people to look at themselves. Oh God, if I can get sober, anyone can.” Life is good, and all the better for Úna’s placid presence. Recently, like any good Irish-Australian family, the far-flung O’Loughlins got together to wet the new arrival’s head, while Fiona sipped soft drinks.“It was a joy to see all the children with Úna, just watching,” she says dreamily. “They are all obsessed with the baby and it’s so precious. Bert wrote a beautiful song dedicated to her and I swear there was not a dry eye ...
“It feels like everyone has stopped shallow breathing. There’s this huge relief. You know, it was very hard for the kids all those years, wondering whether I would ever get sober.” In recovery, happy and at peace, it must be a perfect time for Fiona to become the zaniest, most scatter-brained of grandmothers. “Obviously, because I am well,” she agrees, stroking Úna’s peach-fuzz hair. “That’s a decade that is done and dusted ... a decade of me not understanding my own disease and not taking the time to get it treated. I look back and go, ‘What a complete waste of time!’ But I’m just in too happy a place to get pissed off about it. The other day Mary-Agnes said to me, out of the blue, ‘You know, Mum, when you were dying, it just didn’t make any sense to me because I always knew this was going to have a happy ending.’ And it’s so sweet that she believed it, even when I didn’t.”
Fiona is touring her new show Fiona O’Loughlin Addresses the Nation. Details and tickets at fionao.com.au
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, call 13 11 14 or visit lifeline.org.au