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Woman's Hour

Tell-all celebrity memoirs, child poverty, and 'de-banking'

Woman's Hour

BBC

Society & Culture

4.13K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Britney Spears has been in the news again after spilling personal stories in a memoir. Are women being pressured to overshare in order to sell books? And are men also expected to publicise their personal lives? Nina Stibbe, whose newest memoir is Went to London, Took the Dog, and Caroline Sanderson, Associate Editor of The Bookseller, joined Emma Barnett to discuss.

Mary Turner Thomson found writing a memoir cathartic after discovering that her husband, William Allen Jordan, was not a spy as she had been told. He was actually a bigamist and a conman. Her story is now a documentary series, The Other Mrs Jordan: Catching the Ultimate Conman, which is available on ITVX. She and her daughter Eilidh told Emma about the day they discovered William's real identity.

A report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Heriot Watt university says the number of children in the UK living in destitution has nearly trebled since 2017. Why are families struggling, and what could be done to help? Abby Jitendra, Principal Policy Adviser at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and Sophia Worringer, Deputy Policy Director at the Centre for Social Justice, joined Emma. We also heard from Kimberley in Fife who contributed to the report.

Dame Alison Rose, the former chief executive of NatWest, has been found to have breached data protection laws after she publicly discussed the closure of Nigel Farage’s account with NatWest subsidiary bank Coutts. In the UK, banks closed more than 343,000 accounts in the last financial year. Gina Miller, the woman who spearheaded the anti-Brexit campaign before the 2016 referendum, was 'de-banked' and has called for an investigation into the practice.

Presenter: Emma Barnett Producer: Hannah Sander

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Newscast is the unscripted chat behind the headlines.

0:05.6

It's informed that in Formal we pick the day's top stories and we find experts who can

0:11.2

really dig into them.

0:12.4

We use our colleagues in the newsroom and our contacts.

0:15.2

Some people pick up the phone rather faster than others.

0:18.6

We sometimes literally run around the BBC building to grab the very best guests.

0:23.4

Join us for daily news chats.

0:25.6

To get you ready for today's conversations, newscast,

0:29.3

listen on BBC Sounds.

0:37.6

Hello, I'm Emma Barnett and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4.

0:42.4

Good morning and welcome to the programme.

0:45.1

Shortly, we're going to be talking about, well, talking.

0:48.4

Specifically, sharing what we do and don't share of our lives publicly and whether

0:52.8

women sharing so much in memoirs is liberating or something they may come to regret and feel

0:58.7

further abused by.

1:00.2

This is in light of Britney Spears shocking memoir being the latest in a long line of celebrity

1:04.8

memoir where women in particular aren't just sharing.

1:07.6

They're really sharing and a lot of it could be cathartic, of course.

1:11.8

Perhaps you can relate, maybe you've written or said or spoken or shared something on social media

1:16.3

and you feel a lot better or maybe you've shared too much and you've come to look at it

1:20.5

in a different way in years to come.

1:22.6

Perhaps this is something that we're in now and we'll look at differently in, I don't know,

...

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