'It's such a waste of time when couples don't know how to argue properly.' Interview by Decca Aitkenhead.
I was supposed to meet Philippa Perry at her house in Islington, but by a stroke of luck I got ill, so we had to reschedule for a date when she'd be at her cottage on the South Downs. By the time I reach her door at the end of a winding country track dotted with sheep and cattle grids, nestled in rolling hills, the relocation feels so serendipitous I half wonder if my subconscious might have engineered the illness just to bring me to this idyll.
It's a ridiculous thought of course, but in the company of a celebrated psychotherapist you can't help but start thinking about how the mind works. While I'm taking off my coat Perry is already talking about countertransference. The therapist's job, she explains, is to understand a client by paying close attention to how they make her feel — so for the next three hours in her kitchen I try my best to do the same.
The author of the 2019 bestseller The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad You Did) and co-star of Grayson's Art Club, her husband's lockdown television hit, pads about fixing lunch in comfy jeans and Birkenstocks with the kind of solid, physical ease that makes me feel as if I'm dropping in on an old friend. She relaxes me by volunteering vulnerabilities; she was horrified by her posture when she watched herself on Art Club, so has taken up Pilates, and is now horrified by Channel 4's poster for the next series because she thinks it makes her look fat.
She also admits to "not doing well under lockdown, at all". Most of us have spent much of the past year under conditions we'd never dreamt of, and for those who've lost loved ones or livelihoods it has been a catastrophe. On the face of it, though, Perry's lockdown shouldn't have been so bad: she had her husband, they had a successful show, they had their health. I realise this may sound mad, I say, but can she explain why lockdown has made her — along with so many other people — so miserable?
I list the things Covid has forced us to do: surrender the illusion of control, abandon making plans and learn to live in the moment, spend more time with our families, value the simple things in life, forgo consumerist distraction. These are all the things therapists have been telling us to do for ever. In theory, then, shouldn't we be much happier?
Perry laughs. For the first three or four weeks of the initial lockdown it was a relief to clear her diary. "It had got a bit out of control, and I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing one moment to the next. I was getting quite stressed by it. Then when everything was cancelled it felt like 'get out of jail free'. And I loved it." When that novelty wore off, she and Grayson began filming Art Club, "which was great. But when we stopped and there was no wrap party, I felt, like," and she sags to evoke bleak despair, "well, what was that for, then?"
The problem with life under lockdown is that "the rituals are missing". Sunday lunch, Christmas, Eid, Diwali or Chanukkah all serve the same psychological purpose. "They happen the same way, every week or year, and so you get the feeling of time standing still. These rituals go on and on and on for ever, a bit like everlasting life. So they're sort of like an antidote to the fact that we will all die and we are finite."
She believes the real key to our psychological crisis, though, isn't so much mental as physical. "When lockdown first happened, Grayson and I responded to it very differently. I went, 'Phew!' And Grayson went, 'Well, I live in the future. My plans are what get me out of bed in the morning. Now I've got nothing.' And then he really learnt all this stuff about appreciating the everyday, living in the moment, all of that. But I — Mrs Therapist-Pants — went the other way. Because my body needs to be around other bodies. The rule I find the most difficult is the two-metre rule."
Her 28-year-old daughter, Flo, would pop round, leave grocery shopping on her doorstep and stay to chat from the pavement. But as soon as she left "I shut the door and I burst into tears. Because there's a mind-body dissonance. Your mind knows the reason why you're not hugging. But your body seems to make up its own wordless reason, which is rejection. I'm feeling as though she'd rejected me."
Perry knew perfectly well that, on the contrary, Flo kept her distance "because she loves me. Cognitively of course I know that stuff. But we have a preverbal part to our bodies that is usually completely in tune with how we're living. Usually we're hugging those we love, and we're stepping off the pavement to avoid those we don't. And now we're stepping off the pavement to avoid everybody, and everybody's stepping off the pavement to avoid us. So we're feeling like we're horrible, and that we will kill people, and we are treating other people like that as well. And I think that, over time, will affect sensitive people's mental health."
She can explain something else that's been puzzling me. Why are some people managing to be philosophical about their loss of liberty, income, even job, while others, sometimes much less materially impacted by Covid, have fallen apart?
"How we react to this sort of thing will depend on our sensitivity." She cites the book The Orchid and the Dandelion by W Thomas Boyce, a doctor who concluded from 30 years of medical research that "all mammals are on a scale of orchid-ness, or dandelion-ness". A dandelion can be crushed by a steamroller — "nobody's infallible" — but given half a chance will bloom almost anywhere. An orchid, on the other hand, is more fragile and reactive to its surroundings.
"If a [human] orchid gets the right conditions, it will grow up to be an amazing genius, more beautiful than a dandelion. However, if they don't get the right conditions they'll be the most depressed, the most ill, have the most eczema, the most asthma — and suffer the most mental health difficulties. And this is a little theory that can explain why people are experiencing lockdown so very differently. Some people think, 'Well, it's a nice change!' Whereas other people are going, 'If I don't get a hug soon I'm going to kill myself.' "
I'm becoming worried, I tell her, about all the couples I know who would rather kill each other. Divorce lawyers are certainly going to make a killing out of Covid. When I interviewed Perry's husband last summer, he told me they never row. After all this time in lockdown, can that still really be true? "We do have our differences!" she laughs. "Quite a lot. But then we work out how much I can stand, how much he can stand, who can stand it the most, who can stand it the least. And from that, if we're both kind of fair-minded, we can find a compromise."
The problem for a lot of couples, according to Perry, is that they nitpick over facts instead of talking about their emotions. "It's such a waste of love when people don't know how to argue properly. Don't talk about facts, talk about feelings," she explains. It's probably a good job I'm single, I say, because I approach an argument in the manner of a barrister. She shakes her head. "You've got to look at the feelings beneath the reasons. Because I cannot argue with how you're feeling." If she wants to watch Schitt's Creek and Grayson wants to watch The Crown, they don't debate the competing merits of each programme. "Because that would be trying to use reason. We'd say, how much do you want to watch that? How much do you want me to be in the room when you watch it? And if it's a lot, then I'll make a sacrifice. If it's not a lot, I can be out of the room while he watches it."
This might work for telly, but what if we raise the stakes? Couples are often forced to make difficult choices at Christmas, and this year particularly so: most who were able to meet up with family had to choose which side to see. "Ooh yes, that's quite a good one, isn't it?" she says. "But suppose I get my way and he's so miserable he's no fun to have around. That wouldn't really work for me, would it? I don't think winning is that great, because if you win an argument like that, you do so at someone else's expense. And why would you want someone you love to suffer like that?"
That could depend on how much she hated her in-laws. She shakes her head again. "We've got a culture of being right and being wrong; we're brought up to think winning is everything. But I think harmony is everything. And that sometimes means not winning."
Perry's greater sympathy seems to lie with teenagers, whom she thinks the pandemic has hit hardest. "This is truly awful for them. Your job as a teenager is to reject your tribe, your family, and to find a new tribe. And if you think about it in evolutionary terms, your parents aren't going to live for ever, so you need to find another tribe to attach to that's got more longevity. Plus they want to snog people!"
What does she think the long-term impact on teens will be of spending a year stuck at home with their parents, unable to be out with their friends? Will it matter in the end? "I don't know," she admits. "We'll find out, won't we?" She thinks the legacy of Covid is clearer for younger children. "At a very formative time, if the signal they've been getting is that other people are dangerous, that is quite a message. It's going to take, like, six or ten years to undo that."
And what about the horrors of trying to work from home with small children? Her parenting book has a lot to say about giving young kids enough attention, and warns against endlessly fobbing them off in order to catch up with emails. When I reread the book before meeting her, my heart sank, because that's basically what I've been doing to my children for nearly a year.
"Mmm," she nods. "This is tricky, isn't it? We've got the mind-body dissonance thing happening all over again. Just like me not understanding on a bodily level why my daughter wouldn't come in, your kids won't get it on some level why you won't play Super Mario with them when you're trying to meet a deadline."
Is there a solution? "When you say to a three-year-old girl, 'I've just got to finish this email and then I can play with you,' you get, 'Are you finished yet, Mummy?' " Perry repeats it over and over, her voice growing shriller and more demanding. "And you see the urgency in her little face. Because what this 'Mummy! Mummy!' is about is 'I need reassurance, I need reassurance'. So what you do is, you don't do the email. There's no point. She's going to interrupt you every five minutes. What you do instead is you aim for what I call 'autopilot'.
"If, for example, you're working at home with a child demanding 'Talk dollies', I suggest you talk dollies — but not very well. Don't be too entertaining. And then she'll show you how. And then you watch her as she talks dollies." Stealthily Perry starts to shift her chair backwards, inch by inch, miming the withdrawal. "And then you might get a good half hour in at your laptop. This is when a child feels so secure in your company, they don't pester you for more. I know we're sort of brought up in our Protestant work ethic to think work first, play later. But no, play first. Play first with the kiddywinky. And when they're on autopilot you can write your emails."
I'm not sure that can work for a whole working day. "No," she concedes, laughing. It'll take you longer to do your eight hours. I cannot make this a miracle."
Perry's own parents didn't much go in for talking dollies. She was born in 1957 to a wealthy, rather severe, "practically Edwardian" couple; her father owned an engineering company, her mother's family owned a cotton mill, and they educated her privately before sending her off to finishing school in Switzerland. She drifted from secretarial school to a job as a litigation clerk, and married an Oxford graduate.
It's very hard to reconcile the rather lost, mousey, younger Perry she describes with the woman sitting opposite me. If she hadn't found her way to therapy, and had stayed with the Oxford graduate, I wonder what she'd be like now. She looks aghast. "I don't think I could have stayed married to him." Did they argue with facts? "Yes. Mostly his facts, telling me why I was wrong. And I was crushed. I thought, I'm nothing without him."
The marriage ended when her husband went away for the day and Perry invited some of her colleagues to lunch. While preparing the meal she caught her wrist in a collapsible dining table and cut it badly, so had to call them en route to hospital to cancel. To her astonishment they wanted to know which hospital, showed up in the waiting room and spent the whole day with her. "They were really nice. We had a lovely time. And I can remember I had to pick up my husband from King's Cross. I had a bandage on my hand and he went" — her tone sharpens into sneering impatience — " 'Oh God, you're always doing something to yourself. What have you done now?' And I thought" — her tone switches to epiphanic innocence — "Well, this is very different from my friends. They were really nice about the fact I'd had an accident. Ooh. And suddenly from that I had a bird's eye view of the situation. I thought, that girl needs to stop listening to this. It's not doing her any good."
Divorce was "a complete and utter relief". She studied fine art and signed up to volunteer for the Samaritans, which led her to therapy. In 1987 she met Grayson on a creative writing course. She looks nothing like her transvestite husband when he is dressed as a woman — but the longer I'm with her, the more I notice how much she reminds me of the non-drag version of the artist. She and Grayson share the same facial expressions, the same comic timing; even her speech patterns are uncannily like his.
Both credit psychotherapy with transforming their lives, and seem uncommonly comfortable in their own skin. In fact I'd say Philippa Perry is one of the wisest, most sane and secure people I've ever met. The only time she gets ever so slightly defensive is when I try to explore the curious coincidence of her whole family finding fame. Her daughter was interviewed in this magazine about her 2019 book, How to Have Feminist Sex, and even her cat, Kevin, is a celebrity. When he went missing in 2017, his picture was published on the front page of the Evening Standard, and Kevin now has his own Instagram account with more than 7,000 followers. The pursuit of fame is typically, I suggest, a signifier of someone compensating for an inner void that they try to fill with external attention.
"It's a theory," she agrees. "But sometimes when you're famous you're famous because you do something very well. Like I don't think Grayson ever set out to be famous. He just happens to do something very well — art. And Flo's not famous for going on X Factor. She's written a book and she's illustrated other books. So she really does not seek fame."
What about her? "I'm not famous!" Don't be daft, I say, wondering why she would protest. "I may or may not be famous, I don't know. Because it makes no difference to me when I'm sitting on my sofa at night." But if we were in an Islington restaurant, her signature badger hair and coloured glasses would undoubtedly attract stares. "But I'm not aware of it." I say I think she's being disingenuous. "I'm not, I really don't …" she begins, but breaks off into a smile.
"I once was having this argument with my friend Helen in a restaurant. And I said, 'No, I'm not famous, nobody ever recognises me.' At which point I got up and this man said, 'Oh, I do admire your work.' And I thought, 'Oh, you f***er. F*** off!' "
She drops me back at the station, and before my train comes we end up grocery shopping together, as if we've known each other for ever. After we part in the car park she calls over her shoulder triumphantly: "See how I was just mobbed in the Co-op? Not!"
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London
