Former Sussex Life columnist Grace Timothy tells JENNY MARK-BELL how motherhood changed her identity for ever – and why the ensuing crisis led to her first book, a wryly funny memoir
FOR beauty writer Grace Timothy, giving birth was rather like being born again. Grace was a bright young thing, “a swearer, a drinker, a very occasional smoker”, commuting from Brighton to a glamorous magazine job in London, when she found out she was pregnant at 28. Within just a few months of this unplanned bombshell her whole world had changed: she and her husband Rich moved back to her family home in Chichester while she wrestled with hyperemesis gravidarum, the extreme and potentially life-threatening sickness that has afflicted the Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancies.
Sussex Life readers first met Grace in September 2013, when she started writing a mother and baby column as her daughter approached her first birthday.
Her column was effervescent and witty: while she sometimes reflected on the crazy juxtaposition between her old world and the new, she sounded like she had parenthood absolutely down pat. What readers couldn’t know is that she was suffering a major identity crisis brought about by the question posited on the back of her new book: if becoming a mother means the person you were before has gone, who exactly is left in its place?
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