Just to warn listeners, this episode contains some explicit language and occasional references to drug use.

You're listening to Love Stories, with me, Dolly Alderton, a series in which I talked to guests about their most defining relationships.

The passion, heartbreak, longing, familiarity and fondness that has formed who they are.

My guest this week is the journalist and author, Briannie Gordon.

Briannie first gained both notoriety and a loyal readership a decade ago.

When, as a 27-year-old single woman living in Camden, she was given a girl about town column in the telegraph.

Her honesty, warmth and self-deprecating humour soon established her as one of the paper's star writers.

She has since been lauded for writing and campaigning about mental health, detailing her own struggles in the best-selling book, Mad Girl.

Her third book, Eat Drink Run, is about a personal journey that led her to running the London Marathon and is out in May.

But before that, there was the wrong knickers. Her first memoir about her 20s that she describes as a decade of chaos.

2018!

Well, it came out in 2014.

Fuck! Can I swear on this?

Of course she can.

So I wrote it after I had my daughter. I wrote it on maternity leave.

You know, I'd heard that. There's this rumour that goes around journalists where I'm from saying,

when am I going to write my book? How do I write my book? And everyone says, did you hear Briannie Gordon wrote it?

When she was on maternity leave.

Now the rumour I heard is that you wrote it. You started writing it when you were pregnant.

No. No.

I think I signed, I think I signed a deal like two weeks after I gave birth.

Fucking hell.

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