Bryony Gordon: my journey from denial to sobriety
In 2017, Bryony Gordon woke up after a friend’s 40th birthday party with a man who was not her husband. Hers may be the most searing account of alcoholism you’ll read.
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 – he was asleep with their daughter in the grand 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. Gordon is well known to readers of the British newspaper The Telegraph. She has been a columnist and writer 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 podcast Mad World, on which her first guest was Prince Harry, who revealed his personal struggles with grief and mental health.
It is late March, full lockdown, and Gordon is in the south London house she shares with her husband Harry Wilson, a financial journalist, and their daughter Edie, aged seven. We are talking via FaceTime and Gordon is wearing her gym kit, make-up free, sitting at her dressing table in her white-walled bedroom. “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. 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”. 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.” She says she is probably more scared about this book coming out than the others. “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 had a comfortable childhood (her mother is journalist Jane Gordon), but once she reached her early teens she 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 says, “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 she regretted, followed by more drinking to numb the shame she felt. “I would drink to black out.” There was a brief hiatus when her daughter was very small but Gordon resumed drinking, motherhood colliding with alcoholism. She writes about how she was 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 bottom of the garden, often alone, or she would arrange to go out, leave her house, her husband, her child. Often she would go to a pub to meet people she didn’t particularly know or like. 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.”
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 nonjudgmental,” 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’s OK. I think most of the humiliation is on me.”
Gordon’s relationship with her mother has had its ups and downs but they are now very close and Gordon says her mother is thrilled she is sober. However, Jane 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 shit 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 locked in the same cycle of dependency realise they are not terrible human beings, and 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.” Gordon attended a non-residential rehab centre for three months. No one’s journey to sobriety is painless, and she describes her own, with all its terror and fury, with an easy 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 programs 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. “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. 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 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 self-loathing 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 mental health campaigner she had spoken to enough people who had told her that exercise was crucial to mental wellbeing 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.”
Covid-19 is challenging for everyone, not least those with mental health issues, but Gordon is dealing with enforced quarantine by going for frequent runs and tuning into online support meetings. 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 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 (Hachette) is out on August 6.
If you or someone you know may be at risk of suicide, call Lifeline (131114), Kids Helpline (1800 551 800), Beyond Blue (1300 224 636)