“I’m nearly 24,” writes poor Judy Bishop, columnist heroine of the debut novel by former columnist Rose Heiney, who is nearly 24. “Any minute now my mid-twenties will fade into my late twenties, which will bloat gently along into my thirties, and before I know what’s happened I’ll have crawled my way into my forties, fifties, sixties and seventies, with nothing left but two years of eating mashed carrots in a home as a fitting preliminary to my sparsely attended DSS funeral. The clock is ticking.”
More a time bomb really, the kind that not only threatens to go off, but also keeps going off, with dreadful consequences for everyone close. Judy is a hot spot of self-hatred, disgusted by her body, her face, her aspirations, her lack of lovers, and planning with ever greater desperation how to dump her virginity in the Ipswich area. The bleak projection quoted above is Judy Bishop talking in her authentic voice, and using her private journal as confidante. It is not Judy B the columnist, who writes a weekly magazine piece about her brilliant metropolitan life with an almost criminal facility.
Judy B’s reports for public consumption are sparkling little frauds, with the tiresome signature of one convinced that readers share her obsession with her specialist subject – herself. This, for instance: “Oh, Dear Lord, it’s all Getting Complicated. Last week we established that my love-life has been growing somewhat hot in the Bedroom Department. You may, in fact, have assumed that there would be no column at all this week, as I would be firmly ensconced in the Chamber of Shag…” You can’t want more, please. It’s all lies.
This clever, dark brawl of a book can be read as a dialogue between the surface and the interior – that which is given out and that which is experienced, suffered. The two personae dance around each other as if they have a mutual need, and though they might appear to be tearing Judy apart, they might just be keeping her together as well. The most reassuring sign of her psychological balance is that she is more disgusted by her duplicity than she is proud of managing to carry it off.
The Days of Judy B can also be taken as the testimony of someone who might have fallen to pieces if she had not written it. The clues are everywhere. There is the author’s name. Her father is broadcaster Paul Heiney, which makes her mother BBC presenter and Times columnist Libby Purves. It also makes Rose the sister of Nick Heiney, who nearly two years ago, when he was about the age Rose is now, committed suicide at the family’s farm in Suffolk. The tragedy happened a matter of weeks after she started her novel. We are only up to page 43 when the private rather than the public Judy is herself musing about suicide. “To be honest, I don’t think it’s really for me. Suicide is for the disordered, the complex, the mercurial. It requires courage – grotesquely misapplied courage, but courage nonetheless… I don’t want to die, or actively to make the transition into death. I just want to slip away, which I suppose is what, in effect, I’ve already done, at the grand old age of 23.” There is an attempted suicide in the book, but handled with enough farce to suggest the author might be laughing the subject out of court.
The similarities between Judy and Rose keep coming – it’s the inconvenient truth at the shoulder of most first-time novelists who have followed the impulse to write about what they know. Both are passionate about musical theatre, above all Gypsy, above all with Ethel Merman. “I got absolutely obsessed by it [musical theatre],” says Rose. “It coincided with the one period of very real depression that I had. There is something about the raw energy of it just bounding out. I do think it is transcendent.”
Rose, too, has had, as they say, issues about the way she looks. She is tall, pretty and generously proportioned, which is not to say fat, as she has herself said in the past. It matters because she is also embarking on a parallel career as an actor, something she got into when she was studying at Oxford. She has a part in a forthcoming Miss Marple TV film and, when pressed, concedes that she would be “perfectly qualified” to play Judy B herself in the adaptation she is working on. “I used to be physically much bigger than I am now. Even after you have lost weight, you still feel some sense of otherness. I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin. I had to sit myself down and give myself a talking-to. Also, my new tactic is to become Offensively Naked Woman in the gym, walking about, not using the cubicles, realising that you look fine.”
As with her mother, it’s surprising when depression enters the picture. Contrary to some images of the condition, they both do so much – in Purves’s case, the tireless broadcasting, the journalism, the sailing, the books, the fiction. But then, particularly if you have read Purves on the subject of depression, you realise you are looking at the great antidote – work – rather than at the affliction.
Rose’s brother was beyond such remedy. “I remember the months just before his death as being so strange,” she says. “It was the summer of 2006, and it was very hot. I knew there was something terribly wrong. It was like being among animals before a thunderstorm. Suicide is something that you can’t consciously let yourself fear, because if you are worried about it, that means that you can try to prevent it, and that would have led to all sorts of guilt. But there was that sense of something really amiss, of the world not being the place it should be, a sort of… I sometimes try to remember things in colours; I think of then as a pitch-black, hot, burning time. The week after he died, I remember sunlight and breezes. I had been picking up on his suffering.”
She pays great tribute to her parents for the way they handled it all. “My mother sort of took me by the shoulders and said, ‘Now, you must not let this blight your life,’ and I thought, goodness, for her to have the generosity to say this at such a time…” They must have been shattered. “Yes, they were. But they are so brave, so professional. They just keep on working, which is something I’ve learnt to do. They did it so well. Soon after, I was in London and I thought, Nick has done this with such good grace, and left behind such a beautiful body of work.”
This is a reference to a collection of his writings that the family subsequently published as The Silence at the Song’s End. In among the juvenilia were some promising poems of great intensity and self-mistrust, including an apparently paranoid take on one of his sailing voyages. “As days wore on the crew began to feel resentment towards me/ For they did think that I, alone unhurt/ Was the sole cause of all the torment which they had to face.”

It’s impossible to know for sure why Nick took his life. Rose and her parents suggest that his state of mind, which had gone beyond acute, was made worse by a bad bout of labyrinthitis which he had suffered six years previously, and which may have left him with post-viral depression. What both Rose and her mother say – and very moving it is – is that Nick stayed for as long as he could.
Having read the travails of Judy B, I can’t help but see a parallel between what Rose is up to in the book and Nick’s own, very real diary entry declaring that he could “tear my character in two, Nick and Alastor, one mild-mannered, the other a demon”. In Roman mythology, Alastor was a figure who incited murder; for the Greeks, he was associated with the passing of sins down through the generations. Shelley’s 1815 poem of that name is about the losing of sanity. Nick was evidently engaged by this difficult presence; alastor1815 were the first characters of his e-mail address, and his password was Shelley.
Rose’s novel may be a comedy, but the heroine’s fear of succumbing to her own shadows is grim and graphic. For reasons beyond both of them, it was Nick’s lot to inhabit, and then not, the landscape of black pitch, and Rose’s to find a route, airy and Suffolk-like, towards broad skies and windy heaths. To this extent her project was a therapy. This is not my interpretation but hers, and she is adamant that it was a case of either writing it or living it.
There is another significant resemblance between Rose and her brother. From the writings he left, it’s impossible not to be struck by the maturity of his thought and clarity of his perception. He had harboured ambitions to teach at university, but was overwhelmed by what he saw as the pointlessness of postgraduate life. “Too much bad writing about good writing,” he wrote. “It is ruining English as a subject, reducing it to a weird network of theory.”
Rose, too, seems to have got people’s numbers at a dauntingly early age; even though I am of her parents’ generation, I had a queasy sense that I would be meeting someone with a blithe ability to take the lid off my trade.
She herself had followed her mother precociously into print, writing columns for this very paper as a teenager. Then, like Nick, she became disaffected. “Handing in those articles and then seeing them in print was like a ball of lead in my stomach,” she says.
“I thought, that’s not me, that’s not my writing, I did it entirely for money, I didn’t believe what I was writing. Maybe I was just a bit bumptious, and young and naive and red-faced and jokey in the columns. It was probably nauseating, and it did depress me a bit.”
Here again, whether by luck, temperament or will, she pulled herself clear of trouble. After Nick’s death she also had, as she puts it, the energy of grief, and this was such a force that she thinks of it as another blessed legacy from his brief life. “You think, ‘Why am I not feeling more destroyed?’ Well, it’s not disrespectful, because we have to respect his decision, and part of that respect is not being destroyed. Going through something so extreme makes you realise you are worth something, that you have some knowledge, something to say, and will have more as time goes on. So, if you have the mental facility to be happy, then do your best.
“Grief can be very divisive. One reads terrible stories of families with suicides – people separating, going nuts, losing everything. I went online to find out about suicide survivors, and what it boils down to is basically you’re f***ed. Then you look at what is going on, at what you actually have. I think humans are embarrassingly resilient. As a family, we are good. It’s different, but we are good. There is a sense of detached acceptance and tolerance. Every time I think about it, I’m surprised – damn, we’re doing well.”
There’s still an elephant in the room and, as Judy B might say, we’ve already established that it is not her. No, it’s the question of what her parents think of the book. Some people will surely take it as a rowdy party in the parental home. Back they come and the place has been wrecked – sick on the sofas, knickers on the banisters. After all, Libby Purves is no Judy B, but a seasoned commentator on human affairs. Part of the function of such people is to diagnose and prescribe. Judy B’s own parents are kept at a judicious distance from the action, but certain circumstances are recognisable: blameless, breezy Suffolk, with guilty, grubby Ipswich stuck there like an Alastor, darkening the county. And just when you think it’s getting safe, passages like this crop up: “Which one of them do I fancy most? Him – denim jacket, nice T-shirt, jeans, tight little arse and a bit of a strut. Or her – shift dress, jacket, breasts nicely rising out of a slim, concave torso. If I were allowed just one shag, only one more for the rest of my life, would it be him, or her?”
So, what do your parents think? “My father hasn’t read it yet.” Oh? “No. He’s been waiting for a bound copy. It’s a massive pain reading manuscripts.” And your mother? “She responded very positively. I think they’re both just happy that I’ve written a novel and am earning some money. I suppose I was worried about their reaction to reading about explicit sex, because that’s a very basic human thing. The second thing was the suicide attempt, because I really didn’t want them to think, ‘Oh crap, not another one.’”
There seems no reason for that. Far from it.
April 26, 2008,  copyright Times Magazine
To order The Days of Judy B by Rose Heiney, published by Short Books  for £11.69, free p&p (RRP £12.99), call BooksFirst on 0870 1608080
Picture copyright Rose Heiney