SUPERWOMAN - Shirley Conran
Years ago, during my Penguin publishing days, I commisionmed Auckland writer/journalist Sue Miles to adapt Conran's Superwoman (huge publishing success in the UK) for New Zealand conditions and subsequently we brought Conran to NZ to promote the title. The tour and the book were great successes and over the years since I have caught up with Conran on a couple of occasions, usually during author tours, and indeed in one of her subsequent novels, Savages, she thanked me for help I had given her in researching the book.
So it was with much interest that I read the following story in The Telegraph this week.
Merry Christmas Shirley!
'I was 40, but felt 70'
Shirley Conran wrote Superwoman despite having ME. She tells Elizabeth Grice how the illness - which she kept secret for 30 years - focused her mind
Shirley Conran lists her pleasures as though these are all that remain of her celebrity days as author of Superwoman and a clutch of bestselling novels. Now she is no longer writing books, she feels she has nothing to lose by confessing that for more than 30 years, she has been hiding the fact that she suffers from ME. And ME has dramatically simplified the pleasures of life.
Shirley Conran wrote Superwoman despite having ME. She tells Elizabeth Grice how the illness - which she kept secret for 30 years - focused her mind
Shirley Conran lists her pleasures as though these are all that remain of her celebrity days as author of Superwoman and a clutch of bestselling novels. Now she is no longer writing books, she feels she has nothing to lose by confessing that for more than 30 years, she has been hiding the fact that she suffers from ME. And ME has dramatically simplified the pleasures of life.
It doesn't do to admit to an energy-sapping illness if you have books to promote so, over the years, she has used many forms of subterfuge to disguise what was going on, even from her publishers. It's a relief to be able to come clean, she says, and to get the message across that it is possible to manage the illness and still be successful.
"I thank God that I don't have a husband," she says. (There have been three, the first being Sir Terence Conran, founder of Habitat.) "At least I don't have to be a burden to anyone."
As she sees it, ME has actually been a spur, despite many bedridden days, sleepless nights and times of suicidal despair.
"I would never have become an international author if I hadn't had ME. I wouldn't have been round the world five times in total luxury at my publisher's expense. I'm lucky. I can now afford to lie in a darkened room all day if I need to."
Conran, now 70, is a robust advertisement for the power of positive thinking. Her written target on the day I met her was to make three phone calls, attend a meeting with the Department of Trade and Industry for the Work-Life Balance Trust, of which she is founder-president, and do the interview.
Quite enough for a healthy person, let alone one who has 12 of the 15 classic symptoms of myalgic encephalomyelitis. When I arrived at 4pm, she had about two hours to go before bedtime. "I am ruthless about it. You have to know when to stop."
She has just returned from a "holiday" at her 16th-century farmhouse near Bordeaux, but for seven of the eight weeks she was bedbound with ME. She's cross that she has spent two-and-a-half hours writing a report that should have taken 20 minutes, though most people with her condition would probably not have even tried.
"I thank God that I don't have a husband," she says. (There have been three, the first being Sir Terence Conran, founder of Habitat.) "At least I don't have to be a burden to anyone."
As she sees it, ME has actually been a spur, despite many bedridden days, sleepless nights and times of suicidal despair.
"I would never have become an international author if I hadn't had ME. I wouldn't have been round the world five times in total luxury at my publisher's expense. I'm lucky. I can now afford to lie in a darkened room all day if I need to."
Conran, now 70, is a robust advertisement for the power of positive thinking. Her written target on the day I met her was to make three phone calls, attend a meeting with the Department of Trade and Industry for the Work-Life Balance Trust, of which she is founder-president, and do the interview.
Quite enough for a healthy person, let alone one who has 12 of the 15 classic symptoms of myalgic encephalomyelitis. When I arrived at 4pm, she had about two hours to go before bedtime. "I am ruthless about it. You have to know when to stop."
She has just returned from a "holiday" at her 16th-century farmhouse near Bordeaux, but for seven of the eight weeks she was bedbound with ME. She's cross that she has spent two-and-a-half hours writing a report that should have taken 20 minutes, though most people with her condition would probably not have even tried.
"It's like working with flu," she says. "For about four hours, four times a year, I feel normal."
Conran's ME started in 1970 when she was women's editor of the Daily Mail, bringing up two young sons alone. "I was unconscious in hospital with viral pneumonia for five days and, when I came out, I had ME. I was 40, but it was like being 70."
Doctors told her there was nothing wrong. Psychiatrists assumed she was either attention-seeking or work-shy.
"They were terribly patronising and unhelpful. I was accused of being a malingerer, but anyone who knows me knows I love work."
Exhausted, confused and permanently anxious, she resigned from her job because "I realised I had become completely unreliable". Sebastian and Jasper, her two sons by Conran, were 14 and 10 at the time.
"It was extremely hard for them to see me as I was. I had never saved, so we got poorer and poorer. We had to move out of our house and let it out. I reached a suicidal point. I couldn't cope. Terence and Caroline [his second wife] kindly offered to have the boys, but it was my lowest time."
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