'It's not about the pain'

Living with loss in her own life, Lucy Hone is dedicated to helping others cope with grief

- ELISABETH EASTHER

Dr Lucy Hone is a leader in the field of resilience psychology who had to use her research in her own life, when her 12-year-old daughter Abi was killed in a car accident in 2014. Today, Hone is a sought-after speaker, a bestselling author, and an award-winning “pracademic”, whose TED talk, “The three secrets of resilient people”, has been viewed more than nine million times. Hone’s book Resilient Grieving looks to shift the narrative around grief, with a revised edition newly released.

In your TED talk, is that a residual English accent?

I was born and bred in London, then I went to university in Edinburgh where I did an MA in history, specialising in American secret intelligence and Russian literature.

That’s a rather quirky combination. Were you going to be a spy?

I wished, but the shoulder tap never came, and I wanted to be a writer or researcher. My first job after graduating was as editorial assistant with Checkout Magazine, an FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] title. At 23, I wrote my first piece for a non-B2B trade mag. It was for Harpers & Queen, as it was called then, about the perils of helicopter parenting, or mollycoddling your children. I laugh today that I had an opinion about parenting before I’d had children, but I realise now that even then I was fascinated by the ingredients of human potential.

A story in Harpers must have felt like the big time. What happened next?