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At least 10 minutes have zipped by before I realise that I have been merrily babbling away about my own life – sitting in a striking pink Chelsea flat, hands clasped greedily around an exceedingly well made cup of tea – and not yet asked Lesley Garner anything about hers. Once a skilled interviewer, always a skilled interviewer. (Her, clearly, not me.)
Dear Lesley…
I’m curious to find out more about one of Britain’s best known agony aunts, and indeed a leading journalist whose career has spanned the length and breadth of British newsprint: from being a wayward features editor on a teenage magazine called Rave, to larking about with Jilly Cooper on the old Look pages of The Sunday Times, to serious writing for The Sun (when it was a Labour party broadsheet, before it folded and was bought by Rupert Murdoch), to the high flying role of Women’s Editor at The Daily Mail and her current position as weekly ‘advice columnist’ for The Daily Telegraph, via The Observer, Daily Mirror and Evening Standard. How fun to turn the tables.
But first, I could really use some grown up, life-lived-well words of wisdom on a variety of ill conceived, unresolved and borderline humiliating personal issues. We’re in her home, so she can’t escape, and the prospect of a pop psychology session is mouthwatering. In umbrella headings, mine are the same questions underlying all the letters (and, these days, emails) that are sent to Garner for advice: Who am I? What should I be doing? Who should I be doing it with? Where did I go wrong? What should I do now?
The biggest topic of all, of course, is love – actually it’s the lack of it. Fortunately (for Garner), we don’t need to broach my woes of the heart because in her second book, Everything I’ve Ever Learned About Love, she has already provided a lyrical collection of poignant insights that I and every other lovesick puppy should read without delay. The concerns she addresses are written in her words, but they might be mine, or somebody else’s: If I can’t be choosy, what’s the point? (Don’t get less choosy, just choose better things.) What gave that first kiss such power? (It was the first overt piece of risk taking, the first little piece of commitment. It was the first chance of rejection.) How do I know when it’s over? (It’s over when one of you says it is. It’s as cruel and as clear as that.)
Garner would tell me not to fixate on and obsess about finding my one true love, the romantic love that hogs all the headlines. She must be tired of it, spending so much time bringing ardent lovers back down to earth – “yes, this man you have found on the internet dating site may turn out to be the man of your dreams, but you haven’t even met him in the flesh yet so it’s a bit early to be thinking about whether you should wear cream or ivory on your wedding day”. Instead, she encourages us to consider love in its infinite expressions, relating to family, children, parents, friends, work, nature, art and landscape.
Everything she’s ever learned
I suppose I should pause to consider why I’d want advice from Garner. After all, she’s not a psychologist, nor a counsellor, healer, guru or any other kind of ‘professional’ advisor. By her own admission she is a journalist who fairly absent mindedly volunteered to write an advice column and then, on finding that an almost overwhelming number of people actually did write to her for advice, decided that she’d better step up to the plate.
One qualification that Garner does have is what might euphemistically be called life experience; a lot of it, good and bad. So when she writes for example about love and sacrifice, about how love begins by giving and ends by asking, the price asked for the gift often overlooked in the excitement of giving, she can truthfully say: “I have paid the price of looking like a fool in pursuit of love. I have paid the price of abstinence and fidelity for the commitment of love. I have paid the price of leaving friends and family to follow love.” Then she can conclude that: “for each and every sacrifice I have felt it was worth it.” Her honesty is affecting, and inspiring.
Yet what really marks Garner out as worth listening to is the antennae that twitch ceaselessly, picking up signals wherever she goes, presenting her with fresh questions and stimulating new insights. She’s open and evidently adventurous, even in mid life. She’s had the good sense and courage to push her own boundaries as well as having been forced to find strength in times of personal crisis. As a young mother at home with two children under three and a patchy freelance journalist career she somehow felt she had lost the plot: “I had no clue what to do about lost plots, but deep down I thought there must be some way of getting perspective on my life or understanding what I was feeling”. She soon found herself on an eight-week intensive course in assertiveness training, which she believes helped her to land her next job, on the news desk at The Sunday Times – and, critically, it was on her own terms. Thinking – daring to think – “I need help” and searching for a way to find it has been a feature of her life ever since.
Everyone needs a self-help tool kit
The reflections, observations, tips and techniques that Garner has gleaned over the course of about 20 years of self-development work ultimately were distilled into her first book, Everything I’ve Ever Done That Worked. She explains: “Some people have first aid boxes. Some people keep recipe books. Some people have tool kits. I keep a resource book – everything I’ve ever done that worked”. She thought that a lot of what was contained in her resource book could help other people too.
Now, I can safely say that there are no self-help books on my bookshelf. I do not make this statement because, as Garner writes in her new book, Life Lessons (Things I Wish I’d Learned Earlier), “saying that you have a collection of self-help books is like admitting to alcoholism or a serious chocolate habit: just not done in company”. It’s just that I’ve always thought of them – as I believe many other people do – as (a) patronising, (b) cynically written or (c) glib nonsense. My approach to self-help is blunt and simple, three words: get a grip. Stop moaning and do something about it. Don’t engage the brain, just put on a pair of walking boots, get outside for an hour and life will seem much better when you return home. You may think that doling out advice on this basis would not make me a best selling author or get me a gig as an agony aunt – not least because it would leave me 997 words still to write for the typical advice column – and it’s certainly not Garner’s style. She says that she admires terrifically the roll-up-your-sleeves, this-is-what-you-must-do-and-promise-me-you’ll-do-it-right-now style of agony aunt who deals in certainties and solutions (thanks Lesley….), but adds that she’s not like that in person and not like that in the way she writes. Her approach is to treat a letter or email as though she were reading tea leaves. There is the story somebody is telling her and the story they are not telling her, and she has grown skilled at reading between the words on the page. Thus she believes that, first, we all know more than we think we do and, a second and related belief, we need quiet, withdrawal and sometimes guidance to learn exactly what it is that we know.
The never ending flow of problems
It must be fun being an agony aunt, I say, echoing many others before me. “Often it’s not”, Garner replies, “I’m dealing with real people and haunting problems”. She has a professional supervisor to help her work through the strong feelings provoked by the problems about which she is constantly reading: “It can be disturbing and depressing hearing bad stuff all the time.” It’s not easy to absorb the flood of emotion provoked by the soldier who has returned home from Iraq to find that he left his personality behind, or the man who was taken into care as a child and still manifestly has mental health problems. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been punched; I think ‘Oh God’…” The stories invade her life, take up a lot of thought. And we humans are selfish, we take but we don’t often give back. Garner confesses that she very rarely hears from the recipient of advice in her Lifeclass column: “But I think about them a lot, I wonder what has happened…”
The ones that always work
It’s fortunate, therefore, that Garner has so many self-help techniques up her sleeve. I ask her to spill the beans on a few of the better ones, the real ‘circuit breakers’. She favours Writing a Letter to God (or someone else) and then immediately writing her own answer – “writing can be incredibly cathartic, and clarifying”. Or there’s The Magic of 20 Minutes – “never underestimate the power of inertia; it’s only 20 minutes; anyone can sit and concentrate for that long”. My favourite is The Broken Record. I sense I might be good at that one.
