Conversations with women (over 40): Lindsay Nicholson, 69
"My magazine editor persona was armour from the turmoil and the grief inside of me."
It’s not even the end of January and 2025 has already been A LOT. It got me thinking about living with the unimaginable – on a personal and a global level. Which reminded me of a conversation I had last summer with a woman I have known for a very long time. (I’ve known her longer than she’s known me, if that makes sense, as she was a close friend of my first magazine boss.)
During the times I sat on the sidelines of
's life, the unimaginable happened to her, over and over again. Her husband and then daughter both died of a rare form of leukaemia. Then she picked up both herself and her younger daughter, Hope, and they rebuilt their lives. Already a successful magazine editor, she became Editor-in-Chief of the British edition of Good Housekeeping, where she stayed for 18 years, winning countless awards. (It was at this time that we worked alongside each other, while I was Editor-in-Chief of British Cosmo and then, later, Red.)As if she hadn't had more than her fair share of shit already, Lindsay was then diagnosed with breast cancer, and she's been in remission for more than 17 years.
Then I left magazines and our ways kind of parted, as they do. But a couple of years later, I began to hear rumours; that her second marriage to a man who, from the outside, looked like some kind of knight in shining Armani had fallen apart. Magazines were in trouble, and the company we had both worked for had dispensed with their experience, talented (for which read expensive) editors, including her, perhaps their most senior and decorated.
"I had no identity. I didn't know that there was a me who wasn't an editor, a mother and a wife. I didn't know that beyond all those labels, there was someone else."
You might think that would be more than enough, but, as Lindsay has written in her heart rending memoir, Perfect Bound, that wasn’t even the half of it.
This conversation runs the gamut of emotions – we discuss the glory days of editing magazines in the 90s, sacrificing yourself to (or hiding yourself in) your career, her obsessive pursuit of perfection, the damaging pressure to be a coper, being accused of domestic violence and spending the night in a prison cell and finding it in herself, somehow, to recover again.
(CW: this conversation is a lot. A lot of everything. Such a lot of joy, but also a lot of pain, including bereavement and suicidal ideation. You might want to bring tissues.)
Sam: It must have been incredibly hard writing this book. I mean, even knowing you for a long time, and thinking I knew a lot of your story, it was mind blowing.
Lindsay: I sort of had to write it. I didn't have a choice. I wanted to do other things. What I wanted to do was write a novel. Wrote a novel. It was terrible!
I know that feeling!
And I just had to write this. I didn't want to write it. I didn't want to have to tell people about what had happened, but I couldn't stop.
As a way of processing it?
Absolutely. I mean, I had lots of therapy as well, but I needed to process it. As we know, writing is a great way of processing stuff, but it's hard. I mean, you don't want to do it. I'd rather process it by having massages!
I think people and by people, I include publishers, have no idea how hard writing memoir is even without the immense amount of trauma you had. It’s strange isn’t it, because right now you and I are sitting in this very swanky meeting room in your publishers. And you and I have sat in swanky meeting rooms a lot in our careers, although not for a long time. Do you miss it?
There were a lot of things in my life that I wasn't doing because I had this fabulous job which occupied every waking minute, and there were other things in my life that I needed to do.
There were many things you said throughout about how much you gave to the job, the constant working and feeling grateful to be there, and putting the job before everything else. And I was kind of just nodding along, because I absolutely did.
I don't think younger women feel the same way.
They won’t put up with that shit!
Well, that they’re so grateful to be there, you know? I mean, obviously, lots of people have lovely jobs that they enjoy very much, and they think, ‘Well, this is what I'm worth. I deserve it. I'm doing good job. Thank you.’ But I'm a bit older than you, particularly for my generation, it was, 'oh, my god. I can't believe someone's letting me do this. I better not make a fuss. I better not have a picture of my children on my desk.
Before we get into it, if you can bear to, I wanted to talk a bit about perfection, because really, that's what the book is about, isn't it? It's about all the, frankly, unreasonable quantity of shit that has been thrown at you throughout your life. But it's also about seeking perfection, trying to make everything look perfect.
It’s not just making it look perfect for other people. I think it's very much this good girl thing, if you're perfect, more bad stuff won't happen. And if bad stuff happened, it's because you weren't perfect enough. That's a hard, hard, hard way to live. The awful thing about it is that, if you live that way, then you get very rewarded in the world of work. So no one's saying to you, don't be perfect. They're saying to you, fantastic. Here's an award, here's a pay rise. Be more perfect. We love you being perfect. And then, of course, they discover – not just work, but the people in your life – that they can push your button and make you try to be more perfect. By hinting that you're not perfect, they can send you running towards perfection.