'Pain, surgery, rejection, criticism – no one would want to me be in a million years' … Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones. Photograph: Linda NylindWithin 24 hours of Liz Jones's latest memoir going on sale this week, the author was on a plane to Bosnia. When she gets back next week, "I'm literally thinking of going into hiding. I'm not answering my phone, I'm waking up at two, three, four in the morning, worrying." But then, she adds lightly, the dread is nothing new. "Oh no, I'm like this every week. Every time I write anything I go, oh my God, that's going to get me into trouble, I hope they don't print it, I can't turn my phone on or go out, I'll never get a bank loan, that friend won't talk to me."
Jones began publishing columns and books about her life a decade ago while editor of Marie Claire. Now 54, she has written about her anorexia and OCD, about being a virgin until 32, about stealing a boyfriend's sperm in an unsuccessful attempt to self-inseminate, and about making her now ex-husband sit in an empty bathtub in order not to make their house messy. When he cheated on her, she published emails and texts from his mistress. Her friends and family no longer speak to her because she writes about them, and she has had to move to the other end of the country after alienating her neighbours by writing unkind things. Celebrities seldom come off any better in her columns – "Bitter, nasty and unhinged," is how Philip Schofield described her after she criticised his co-presenter, while Rihanna recently tweeted that Jones was a "sad, sloppy menopausal mess". But while she's writing, it never occurs to her that she might upset anyone. "I write as if no one's going to read it. I only start worrying after I've pressed send. I've got no self-preservation."
It's certainly easy to get the impression that something is missing when you meet Jones in person. She has a wide-eyed, faintly dreamy demeanour, and there is often a delay between question and answer, as if we were talking on a satellite link – but what's actually missing is her hearing, which is now so poor that she has to lip read. She was at a grand dinner recently, seated next to a political columnist, "and he must have thought I was completely mad and stupid, because I kept giving these totally inappropriate answers".
I don't think she is mad – though there are clearly mental-health issues, of which more later – and her analysis of the beauty and fashion industry is anything but stupid. She was sacked from Marie Claire after three years for campaigning against underweight models and corruption within the beauty media, and today no one deconstructs its futile, psychologically destructive false promises more forensically than Jones – and in a mass market tabloid at that. She has spent her whole life trying to perfect her appearance yet can't bear to look in the mirror, has never allowed anyone to see her naked, and only ever has sex wearing a T-shirt.
"My husband used to say, when I'm ready to be seen it's like the eclipse of the sun, because it's only every eight years, when everything all comes together: you're just waxed but not all speckled, you've just had your hair dyed, you've had your teeth cleaned – so really you're only ready to be seen once in a blue moon. I was sort of like Derren Brown really, performing this magic act, pretending I was all this, perfect, so I never let him see the real me."
What does seem mad, however, is that none of this insight stops her craving more cosmetic procedures, designer labels and potions she knows will never work. Why the inconsistency? "It's brainwashing," she admits simply. "Like, I'm wearing J Brand jeans, I've been brainwashed into wanting them. You hear Kate Moss is wearing them, you see them in the shop, and then suddenly you've spent ￡230. But because I've been brainwashed, and I want to be Yasmin LeBon, and fail, then I can write about it. You see, if I was totally divorced from it, I couldn't write about it." But as she says, "I've seen all the tricks fashion plays" – and she was guilty of most of them herself while editing Marie Claire, "putting Renee Zellwegger's head on someone else's body, all that kind of thing". So why, when she is broke, doesn't that knowledge stop her wasting her money?
"Because they are so good at what they do, it's so seductive. Because my desire to improve myself is even stronger than that. Because I still have some hope that it might work. I saw this one dress recently. I had it on my laptop, I would look at it, I would look at it again?– I have to have it. Yes, cos I think, if I buy that dress I'll look like that girl in the picture. Of course I'm not going to look like that girl in the picture. That's the thing about fashion, you're not going to look like her – so then of course?you have to try buying something else. Even when I know I shouldn't want to have it. So my whole mantra is: it's too late for me; it's not too late for younger women."
It sounds as if it has been too late for Jones ever since she first fell in love with Vogue at 17 and longed to look like Janice Dickinson – but by then she'd already been anorexic for six years. The youngest of seven, she grew up in a lower-middle-class family in Essex, where nothing particularly terrible happened, and yet she was always miserable, repulsed by her own reflection and living off 400 calories a day. Did writing the memoir produce any clues to where the sense of shameful imperfection came from?
"Well, funnily enough it did, actually. You see, you can't totally blame Vogue – it just reinforced what I already felt about myself. It's amazing how much your parents mould you, and because my brothers and sisters were all so naughty – they grew up in the 60s, they took drugs, they had sex – that upset my mum and dad so much. They were very upright wartime people with these very hippy children – so I knew I had to be good. I wouldn't deviate or have an argument or go out with boys or get drunk. I wanted not to be any trouble. So I never had an adolescence; I never really grew up. But then in a weird way I was trouble because I was so anorexic. So I sort of went too far, really, in trying to be good."
I doubt that the people she's rude about in print will see it this way, but it seems that her work lands her in hot water because she's still trying too hard to be good. "I mean, I wish I could write a column saying, isn't London lovely during the Olympics, cos it's easy. I would love to write that, because who would be phoning you up afterwards? No one." So why not, then? "Because I just think it would?be too boring. I always try my best, cos that's what's you're supposed to do." When the Daily Mail wanted to write something about her memoir, Jones "had a great idea": why didn't they contact all the people she'd fallen out with to ask why they no longer speak to her? I can't believe she would suggest such a thing, but she just looks puzzled and crestfallen that "not one of them would say why".
She has been wildly vilified for complaining about colleagues taking maternity leave, but says that was just because she was always so terrified of being sacked that she overcompensated by working 24/7 and then resented the women she worked with for having a life. "I think my whole anti-mums thing?is slightly jealousy, cos I wish I'd had that. I've got nothing. I just work." And she had to leave Somerset because all her neighbours hated her, when she'd?thought she was just being entertaining by writing about the locals having no teeth.
"It doesn't happen overnight," she offers. "You just become braver and braver, and go further and further. I write about things now that I would never have written about before."
I wonder if, like anorexia and OCD or cosmetic surgery, the public self-sabotage has an addictive quality, compelling her to chase ever more dangerous highs of notoriety. "But I don't get a thrill from it," she disagrees at once. She says she gets no kick from the morbid fear that envelops her every time she presses send – "God no, not at all" – and I do believe her. I have seldom ever met a more fearful person. But she also says, "I'm incapable of happiness, absolutely. I suppose I think I don't deserve happiness" – and you do not need to be a shrink to see that the unconscious consequence of her work has been to create a life that confirms all her darkest fears, leaving her as isolated and unloved as she's always felt.
"I have never done anything right in my life; nothing. Every decision has been a disaster. No one would want to be me, trust me. I work 85 hours a week, I have just two friends, I haven't had a holiday for three years – it's incredibly stressful. Pain, surgery, rejection, criticism – no one would want to be me in a million years." She writes like a dream, and receives between 6,000 and 10,000 letters a week from her three million readers, "but I wouldn't say I was successful, no". So who does count as successful? "Someone who is happy, who can sleep at night; someone who's got peace, and?people close to them. I would say that's success."
I tell her she sounds profoundly depressed. "I think I should probably be on antidepressants, yeah," she agrees vaguely. She has tried therapy, but nothing much seemed to work, and has never taken medication, "because I kind of think I'm not worth it. That's my default setting."
Like everything else, she offers this in an airy tone, and I suspect the incongruity between content and delivery is why she attracts so little sympathy, because critics infer from her matter-of-fact style that she must either be making her misery up or else fishing for pity. The problem seems to be her sense of humour, which is so dry as to be imperceptible to some. "Humour is how I survive and get through my life, but people don't think women should be funny. If Giles Coren makes a joke, no one gets upset. Why are women not allowed to make a joke?" She says men never get her jokes; at a lunch recently with her agent and an editor, "my agent said, 'The thing people don't know about Liz Jones is she's really funny.' I was like, excuse me? How could you not know I'm funny? That's meant to be?my USP, and you're meant to be on my side!"
Unfortunately, her boyfriend doesn't get her jokes either. For three years she has been dating an unnamed rock star, whose identity – incredibly, given the frenzied online speculation – remains a secret. "Basically because we never see each other. It's like having a pen pal" – although she adds tantalisingly, "there have been photographs of us together". He didn't mind her writing about him at first – "They always like it in the beginning" – but something she wrote recently enraged him. "And he said, the next thing you'll be writing a column about my penis! I said that wouldn't be a column, it would be a novel. Which I thought was quite a funny joke. He was absolutely furious." Why was he upset? Jones starts to giggle.
"Well, he thought it might identify him. You see, you can't often tell what will make people furious."
‧ Girl Least Likely To: 30 Years of Fashion, Fasting and Fleet Street by Liz Jones is published by Simon & Schuster for ￡14.99. To order a copy for ￡10.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
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