Movement 98

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"0irl Overboard", a column in The Observer's "Life" Magazine, tells the story of what it's like to
reclaim a life alone, with wrv and sometimes painful clarity. Graeme Burk talks to writer
Kathryn Flett about confessional writing and what it takes to be honest in this dav and age.
D
D
?utal Honesty
ror the past year or so l've been
I moved to, alternately, tears and
laughter in Kathryn Flett's column
I "Giil ou"rbourd" in the magazine
section of the Observer.Her column has
a dry wit and what has been termed by
others a'brutal honesty' that has made
reading it, for me, as much a Sunday
ritual as going to Church or watching
the EastEnders omnibus.
Until February of this year, Kathryn
Flett's front-page column was "Party
Girl"- what she described as being
"Tara Palmer-Tomkinson without the
legs or the invitations"-but this
changed with a Travel article in the
Observer on the 9th February 1 997.
Her brief was to write about a romantic
weekend with her husband in Bruges.
However, in-between the commissioning
of the article and the actual trip, her
husband-she had been married 16
months-had asked for a divorce. ln an
article titled "By Waterloo Station I Sat
Down and Wept" she interspersed into
a simple travelogue the recounting of
the final dissolution of her marriage; of
being in a chocolate box of a romantic
city while a mutual life eventually dies
into a painful and awkward silence.
I have never been in a relationship
longer than three months, much less
ever been divorced, but when I read "By
Waterloo Station" I was profoundly
moved by the rawness of it. When she
wrote of the end of the weekend: "At
Waterloo, people were being met by
their'partners. As I watched mine striding
ahead to the taxi rank, I felt him let
go even more, unbouple and move on.
By the time the taxi had taken us home,
I knew nothing would stop him." I
momentarily lost the ability to breathe.
Subsequent articles in her rechristened
column "Girl Overboard", continued
with the same raw honesty about
what it's like to find oneself on one's
own. With sometimes painful clarity,
the column talks about what it's like to
go through the mundane experiences of
loss (filling time in an evening, sorting
out what to do with the rings, going to
other people's weddings) as well as
some difficult experiences (like discovering
your husband has a new girlfriend).
"Girl Overboard" isn't only about
this-it's also a very funny column featuring
Kathryn's funny and true observations
on life-but it's the "arc" of the
story of reclaiming a life alone. told
with such unreserved
honesty, that makes
the column such a
great, and sometimes
powerful, read with a
cuppa on a Sunday
afternoon. And l'm
not alone in this, as
Kathryn discovered to
her surprise when the
post came in after
the Bruges piece and
her first columns.
"Previously in
/*
one's career if you
wrote something you
only ever got negative
responses
because people will
only ever pick up a
pen and a bit of
paper and write
something if it's
going to be negative.
and this is not the
case any more," she
explains. "With this
column I have had
most incredible positive
feedback, particularly
in the early
stages of it, which
was just kind of a
shock. As a writer
you get so used to having people giving
you a hard time and it was a very odd
feeling to know that there were people
who were rooting for you in some way."
The word "honesty" is repeated
constantly in my description of Kathryn
Flett's writing. and it is probably what
my "angle" is in interviewing her. lt
strikes me that being honest isn't
something that comes easily to us.
Watch any edition of Newsnight and
you can see that not being honest
movemsnt 16
about screwing up is as natural as
breathing to a politician; if asked how
l'm doing during a difficult patch I tend
to say "fine". Which is precisely what
"Girl Overboard" doesn't do.
I ask her about whether it's this
honesty that touches a nerve for others.
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"l think so. I think people are becoming
increasingly wary of the kind of
columns which say 'Oooh when I went
to Sainsburys a very funny thing happened
to me in the frozen veg counter'.
I think-l wouldn't say I was wholly
responsible for this at all, it's been
going on forever-that when people
read something which clearly comes
from the heart they respond to it very
intuitively, almost without realising why
they're doing it. Which means that as