Lucinda Holdforth

But I'd also say, Sarah, in my case, and I think for others as well, about a year after mum died for me, I woke up one morning and

realising that at 59 I was an orphan.

I was somehow, in the manner of all those good 19th century novels, free to reinvent myself.

I felt creative liberty.

I felt personhood.

Now, for my mother, her parents were... Her mother died when she was 45.

So this prolonged period of being a daughter, just the fact of being a daughter, and every daughter with a strong mother knows that feeling, it has a mental effect on you which can serve as a barrier to you being your true self.

Absolutely, and I didn't know how much that would... I had no idea that I would feel like that after Mum died.

I thought, you know, I've been myself for years, I've written books, I've done things, and then after that year, after that period passed and I woke up with that strange feeling of liberty, it's just, oh...

There's no one to judge now.

She did.

Virginia Woolf wrote in her, you know, she wrote these great long famous diaries.

I should say Virginia Woolf, the great writer, the sort of core of Bloomsbury in many ways, a group of young people who overturned the world.

And she wrote in her diary, it's the 24th of May, father would have been 96 if he'd lived.

but luckily he didn't live.

If he had, there would have been no books, no writing, no nothing.

I read that line.

I thought, I know what she means.

I know what she means.

It's not, he was a very sane, erudite man, but the burden of approval seeking and one's own needs for one's parents gets in the way.