Kate Figes
Author whose books explored relationships, happiness, motherhood and the trials of growing up
KATE FIGES, the writer and journalist, who has died of cancer aged 62, was an acute anatomiser of human relationships and the author of books on everything from the joys and pitfalls of marriage to dealing with terrible toddlers and terrible teens, and from the anxieties of adolescence to the psychology of motherhood.
Anna Murphy, who interviewed her for The Sunday Telegraph in 2010, noted that Kate Figes had, “in the nicest possible way, made a career out of being a nosy parker”, and her books combined trawls through the latest academic research with interviews and personal reminiscences.
For Couples: The Truth (2010), a fascinating portrait of 21st-century relationships, she spent three years asking 120 people questions about love, sex, who does the washing-up and who pays the mortgage, about children, infidelity, and about happiness – concluding, encouragingly, that the state of modern matrimony is healthier than many people think.
As well as being a surprisingly heartening read, Couples was also at times very funny, as when one wife notes of her husband’s midlife indiscretion: “I should have seen all the signs. He was reading Proust.”
Kate Figes herself was happily married for 30 years to Christoph, with whom she had two daughters, but her interest in relationships and how they can go wrong arose out of an upbringing dislocated by the breakdown of her parents’ marriage – and her determination not to enact on her own children what her parents had enacted on her.
Catherine-jane Figes was born on November 6 1957, the daughter of John, a personnel consultant, and Eva (née Unger), author of the feminist tract Patriarchal Attitudes. Her mother’s family, who were Jewish, had fled Nazi Germany in 1939. Kate’s younger and only sibling is the historian Orlando Figes.
She was five years old when her father walked out on his family, the prelude to an acrimonious divorce, the emotional impact of which took its toll on the eldest child.
“My parents,” Kate Figes recalled, “made all the mistakes that couples made at that time, when divorce was rare.” She spent the early years of her own marriage saying to her husband: “You won’t leave me, will you?’’
Bullied at school as a young child, she felt isolated and lonely, and in a 2004 article in The Daily Telegraph described how as a teenager she “smoked far too much dope” and, from the age of 15, had casual sex “in order to feel real”.
Although she did not do particularly well at Camden School for Girls, she won a place to study Arabic and Russian at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster).
She left home at 17 after a row with her mother and subsequently moved into a squat with Paddy Melly, George Melly’s stepson, with whom she had fallen in love. When she was 20, however, she discovered that he had become a regular heroin user and, unable to cope, she left him. He died of a heroin overdose a year later.
She met her husband-to-be, Christoph Wyld, a BBC foreign news editor, on a language placement in Russia and later explained that she consciously chose him “because he was completely unlike the people I’d had relationships with before”. She only agreed to marriage, however, at his insistence, and was 31 when they married in 1988.
After graduating, she worked for the feminist publisher Pandora as a sales rep, then a publicist and editor, and only began writing full-time in her late thirties. Her first book, Because of Her Sex (1994), explored the ways in which sexism persists in British society.
A part-time job as fiction editor for Cosmopolitan led to commissions to write for newspapers, including the
Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, and to an appointment in 1996 as books editor for the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine.
Her struggles with undiagnosed postnatal depression prompted her to write her second book,
Life After Birth (1998), in which she explored the alienation many women feel when required to redefine themselves as mothers.
A book about teenagers,
The Terrible Teens, published in 2002 as her own daughters were hitting adolescence, was followed by two novels, What About Me?, subtitled The diaries and emails of a menopausal mother and her teenage daughter, and What About Me Too?, continuing her exploration of the motherdaughter relationship.
In The Big Fat Bitch Book for Girls (2009) part self-help book for teenagers and part an entertaining history of bitching, she recorded that Alice Longworth, the daughter of President Roosevelt, embroidered a cushion with the words: “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anyone, come and sit next to me.”
After Couples she moved on to infidelity with Our Cheating Hearts – Love and Loyalty, Lust and Lies (2013) which left reviewers divided, some objecting to her argument that couples should get over infidelity, and that it can revive a failing marriage.
In a 2013 article in The Daily Telegraph, Kate Figes wrote: “I can honestly say that I have never felt more content than since I turned 50. This is my time – but perhaps the greatest wisdom that comes with being older is that it is limited time.”
Just how limited was revealed in On Smaller Dogs and Larger Life Questions (2018), in which she told how, as she was coming up to her 60th birthday, she had been diagnosed with incurable breast and bone cancer, a disease which forced her, for the first time, to put her own needs first and feel less guilt and responsibility for others.
Though lacking religious faith, she found comfort in small pleasures, not least the company of a miniature dachshund.
During her illness she and her brother decided to accept naturalisation papers from the German government to reconcile themselves with the country their grandparents had left as refugees.
Kate Figes is survived by her husband and daughters.