Three years ago, the former fashion editor and mother of two Stacey Duguid had a fling that finally ended an unsatisfying marriage. Now, she’s written a very honest book about midlife lust and anxiety.
The lowest point in Stacey Duguid’s life came in July 2020 when she was 46. She’d been with her husband for a decade, but ever since the birth of their children, then nine and seven, she’d been increasingly unhappy. “I was feeling ignored and confused and slightly abandoned in a marriage and in motherhood.”
In an attempt to retrieve her former vivacious spirit, at the end of 2019 she had what she refuses to call an affair. “It wasn’t. It was a four-week fling, but there was that whoosh of emotions: hot-headedness, serotonin, that feeling I hadn’t had in so long.”
Her husband quickly found out and initiated divorce proceedings on grounds of adultery. Duguid decided not to try to save the marriage. “We had already been having counselling before, but this was just the icing on the cake,” she says. As the “guilty” party, she resolved to move out.
Lockdown forced the couple to continue cohabiting — surprisingly harmoniously. But as restrictions eased it was time for her to move out of the spacious family home in upmarket Queen’s Park, northwest London, and into a rented house in a nearby but far less salubrious area. She’d pored over the details of this place online for months, imagining life there as an emancipated single woman.
“It had white floorboards and white walls. In my fantastical, fairytale mind it was going to be like an art gallery,” Duguid says. “I had projected all my hopes and dreams of having this freedom there — freedom to parent the way I wanted, to have fun, to have lots of friends over.”
Eventually she collected the keys from the estate agent. “With my daughter I walked down that street I’d walked down so many times in anticipation. Only at that point did I notice the dirt on the walls of the houses. In comparison to my family home they almost seemed mascara-stained. During Covid, I’d stood at the gate of the house so many times but I’d never noticed the Victorian tiled path was broken. The front door hadn’t been painted, the windows hadn’t been washed and the hedge hadn’t been trimmed. Then I opened the door and the smell was horrendous.”
Inside, Duguid found an unuseable oven swimming in grease; a fireplace stuffed with black bin bags; broken blinds; cracked floorboards covered in mouse droppings. “It was something like Breaking Bad. There were wires dangling dangerously from the walls. I should have just handed back the keys and said, ‘This house is not fit for purpose,’ but I felt I had pushed things so far I had no choice but to carry on.”
Her daughter looked horrified. Friends rallied round to make the place habitable. Around 4pm the man she’d recently met on a dating app arrived with champagne. Duguid had hoped for an evening out to distract her from the misery but, as electricians worked in the neighbouring room, he demanded oral sex.
She refused, then capitulated. They ended up having sex on the stained seagrass carpet, then he announced he was leaving to collect his daughters. “I should’ve had a wank before I came,” he told her.
“This was it. This was the happiness I’d given up my old life to pursue. I thought I couldn’t fall lower than I did that day, when I was literally on my knees, but after that I just kept tumbling, tumbling, tumbling. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I was missing my children. There was a 50/50 custody arrangement I couldn’t remember making. I’d dismantled my kids’ lives for the sake of my own happiness. Surely it was the ultimate taboo?”
With a long but poorly paid career in fashion behind her, Duguid was at least — for the first time in her life — earning a decent salary, working for a big brand, something that had also given her the confidence to leave the marriage. But corporate life wasn’t compatible with what she later realised was a nervous breakdown.
“I wish I could go back and apologise to so many people in my office. I was a wreck. I couldn’t fulfil my role.” She’d preside over Zoom meetings, her desk arranged “like it was Anna Wintour’s”, dressed “like Krystle Carrington” in a tailored blazer, “big, chunky gold chains, fully made up, hair done, saying, ‘Yah, yah, this is what we need to do.’ What they couldn’t see was that I was drinking wine out of my tea mug. Then I’d switch the Zoom off and lie down for three hours.” Six months later she was sacked.
Yet on Instagram life still looked glorious to her thousands of followers. “It was, ‘Hey, I’m in Milan wearing this fabulous suit by Acne and carrying this bag and going to this [fashion] show, when in reality I was falling apart. But that September I decided to tell the truth or leave Instagram. I told the truth.”
“So many tears I cried until 2am…” Duguid, now 49, wrote in a post titled Divorce. “I’m not sure who I’m supposed to be any more. Uncertainty hangs in the air.” Immediately she was inundated with messages from hundreds of women, some newly divorced, some in unhappy marriages but too frightened to leave. The messages have never stopped coming. She has become, as she puts it, “an accidental divorce influencer”.
It’s for these women (as well as, let’s be honest, for the cash) that Duguid has now written her memoir, In Pursuit of Happiness (“It could have been called Cocktails, Cock and Coke: A Middle-Aged Adventure,” she jokes), which summarises why she — like many of her peers — found herself in midlife, liberated from an unhappy marriage but facing an often equally bleak single life.
“There are so many of us about the age of 45 who have a sexual awakening and are like, ‘I’ve done that — tick. Am I happy? No. Am I fulfilled? Not really. Do I know who I am? Not sure. OK, and now I’ve got this whole next chapter to live.’ You go, ‘Do I bail or do I stay?’ If you bail you find yourself free-falling. My friends said, ‘Hunker down.’ I was like, ‘F*** you. I just want to go out and go mad.’ "
Duguid tells me she has “shocking tinnitus from raving too much. My daughter said, ‘Would you rather have perfect hearing or a fun life? I choose a fun life.’ " It’s a perfect introduction for her book, which is gripping — sometimes sad, often very funny and always jaw-droppingly honest.
Reading it as a married middle-aged mother, parts of the book — a drug-fuelled sexual encounter involving a woman dressed in a black corset in the loos of A-lister hangout Chiltern Firehouse, for instance — sound way more exciting than the highlight of my day: beating the Ocado deadline. Yet other bits (take the man she met online who tried to choke her outside the five-star hotel after their first date) remind me of the line from When Harry Met Sally, “Tell me I’ll never have to be out there again.”
The cover, which the ineffably stylish Duguid also designed, is in itself an objet d’art, showing her from behind wearing Manolo Blahnik heels, spotted Falke tights and a teal velvet Paul Smith blazer, her flaming red head diving into matching teal velvet curtains (“I found the material in John Lewis in Brent Cross”). “A friend said it’s a book you could snort coke off,” she recalls fondly.
I would have been too scared to write it, fearful of judgment from my parents, friends and — most importantly — my children. How does Duguid think they’ll react? She fixes me with her enormous, startling blue eyes. “I’ve had to think very, very hard about this. Is there anything in the book that I wouldn’t tell my children when they were adults? This brutally? Honestly, no. There are boundaries and red lines. But also, in many ways, I want them to know about life. I wish I’d been warned about dickheads on apps and how you’ll feel after having a baby and that you will lose your tiny mind after divorce and it’s OK. I don’t want them to feel that there is some kind of happy ending and you need to follow that trajectory.”
We’re sitting at Duguid’s kitchen table. She’s just back from a weekend trip to Ibiza for an all-night rave session with her best friend from her Edinburgh schooldays, Sara MacDonald (Noel Gallagher’s ex-wife). “I can’t stop sweating. I left my HRT in Spain,” she exclaims. Voluble, smart and likeable, she’s in an old Celine shirt and Adidas tracksuit bottoms, but rushes upstairs to change into denim shorts before turning on her “menopause fan”, which bathes us in cool air. She keeps apologising for its noise (I can barely hear it), but she’s ultra-sensitive to it, a symptom of her attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which she recently had diagnosed and which goes some way to explaining the impulsivity that allowed her to “wreak this much carnage and chaos in my life”.
Two moves on from the “crack house”, she now lives in a nondescript Fifties semi in an uncool (but rapidly gentrifying) corner of north London, which, as befits someone who’s worked for Elle and Net-A-Porter, she has transformed into a bastion of great taste. The living room is painted dark green, the hall is glossy red.
“I was trying to rebel. My family home was all biscuit and beige and poured concrete floors, which, looking back, represents a quieter version of myself: more likeable, easier, gentler, kinder, softer, smaller. You go into people’s houses and they all have the same Pinterest board — I’m not criticising them for that, but I thought, ‘I have to put a stamp on this place that isn’t going to cost me the earth.’ I can’t afford the Crittall glass extension even if I wanted it, so I thought, ‘I’ll use the power of colour,’ and I love it. Not bad for someone from Ashton,” she adds, a reference to her working-class roots, which make her a rare thing in fashion and contribute to many of her insecurities.
Duguid was born in Ashton-under-Lyne, outside Manchester. Her draughtsman father walked out when she was three, leaving her mother to make ends meet by working three jobs including nights on a supermarket checkout. When Duguid was six, her mother moved to Edinburgh — hence her alluring soft Scottish burr — and remarried. She called her stepfather “Dad” but her mother left him when Duguid was 23. She vowed to have a family and never break it up. “I always thought I wanted to conform, to have a family. I never realised I was such a nonconformist.”
After dropping out of a couple of art schools, at 19 she moved to London with a boyfriend and worked on the shop floor at Harvey Nichols before progressing to the press office at Paul Smith. Then she became a fashion editor at Elle. “I used to wander in like a dishevelled Courtney Love.” That, plus her witty writing, scored her an anonymous column, Mademoiselle: Confessions of an Elle Girl, which ran for six years and in which — à la Sex and the City — she chronicled her party lifestyle and unsuitable boyfriends. It was glamorous but it was also precarious: there was an abortion and there were debts of £35,000 ($75,000) as she took out endless credit cards to buy the outfits she felt her job demanded.
Gradually Duguid began feeling terrorised by endless headlines warning of women’s fertility “falling off a cliff” at 35. At 33 she joined several dating sites, meeting a series of “ridiculous ratbags” and getting pregnant by one she barely knew but then having a miscarriage.
Eventually her prince appeared to come along. Duguid is wisely “too scared” of his reaction to reveal many details about the father of her two children, only saying he was “well mannered, well educated, polite, and we had this lovely, lovely romance. I was in love.” Eight months into their relationship they started trying to conceive, assuming it would take years and require IVF. Aged 36, she became pregnant immediately.
Yet early motherhood was no pastel-tinted, bunting-clad idyll. Duguid had postnatal depression but was too frightened to tell a doctor. When her son was about three months old, she picked up her screaming baby and carried him into the kitchen. “I remember looking at the cutlery drawer and how orderly it was compared with what was going on in my head.” She took out a knife and then walked out onto the balcony, where she debated whether to throw the baby over before jumping after him, or to kill him and then herself with the knife. “The thought of him dead and me alive was enough for me to pull back.” Her eyes fill with tears. “I was recording the audiobook and in this bit I just howled against the wall.”
She was prescribed antidepressants and life improved, but a year later she became pregnant again. She hated the sandpit-supervising drudgery of early motherhood and trying to fit in at coffee mornings. She returned to work four days a week but felt judged by other mothers for employing a nanny and utterly frazzled by the inevitable multitasking.
“I’d have these rare glimpses of who I used to be, then I realised I’d lost her and couldn’t get her back.” She and her partner had few friends in common, almost never went out together or had sex, and he was often away for long periods. Duguid felt desperately isolated, even more so after they unromantically agreed to marry for passport reasons (he was a US citizen), with her boyfriend telling her he was buying an engagement ring from “surplus stock”.
At 46 she had just started hormone replacement therapy and felt “an enormous boost to my libido, like nothing before”. At that point she bumped into a married man who’d been in the year above her at school and felt an almost forgotten sexual attraction. “In marriage and motherhood you’re unseen in everything. That triggered being seen.”
The fling solved nothing, culminating in a night in a Soho hotel where he was impotent from taking too many drugs and suggested calling a sex worker before leaving at 5.30am to let in his cleaner. Duguid was “a middle-aged woman, abandoned in a hotel room, amid a seedy scene of empty vodka bottles and cocaine debris”. Two weeks later her husband told her he’d read their emails and began divorce proceedings.
Writing about all this (it’s the first time she’s revealed the infidelity) was not in any way cathartic. “No. It was deeply painful.” Yet — aided by five years’ therapy — it helped Duguid come to terms with her guilt that she should have tried harder to save the marriage. “It helped dispute my narrative that I should have stayed, that I was such a bad person, and to explain to the children why I left.”
We agree there are no easy answers for our Gen X crowd, whose formative years were in the ladette era when we were told to live exactly as we pleased, only to find ourselves caught out by an urge to procreate that’s both biological and social. Duguid bewails a moment when — single and childless — she dodged a summons to meet Anna Wintour, the editor of US Vogue, “because I was thinking, ‘How would I bring up children in New York?’ But at the same time I would have been absolutely miserable if I hadn’t had kids.”
Now, on the eve of 50, things are hugely looking up, thanks largely to the discovery two years ago of toyboywarehouse.com, which provided Duguid with a 36-year-old French “lover. I won’t call him my boyfriend — I hate the confines of these words. This narrative that makes you feel like you’re in a prison. I care for him. I wouldn’t shag anyone else but I don’t want to be anyone’s wife or girlfriend ever again.”
Have they ever been to Sainsbury’s together? “No.” Ikea? “No. We have nice lunches together and drink beer in the afternoon like naughty schoolkids. He unlocked me sexually — I hadn’t been unlocked before. I’d just been lying there, pretending to enjoy it, sometimes wishing it was over, doing things because I thought I ought to experience them. But now a combination of a younger lover and therapy has made me far more sexually confident. I think that’s common in women my age. We’re no longer fertile but we’re still f***able and we’re having sex for ourselves. Before it was so performative.”
Next month Duguid starts a master’s degree in fine art at Central St Martins. She’s learnt to no longer chase dopamine hits of validation, be it from men, drugs or shopping. “Happiness was always going to be ephemeral. Now it’s about contentment.” But she’s too honest to claim a happy ending — yet.
“Knowing what I know now, would I have left the safe harbour? I’m not sure,” she says. “Am I a romantic fool for wanting to be loved, to be f***ed, to be enjoyed? Probably. But still.”
In Pursuit of Happiness: Mating, Marriage, Motherhood, Money, Mayhem by Stacey Duguid (Piatkus) is published on September 14.
Written by: Julia Llewellyn Smith
© The Times of London
