Podcast
I co-host the award-winning WOMEN ARE MAD podcast, now past a million downloads, where I have sat across from high-profile leaders and thinkers and watched the same thing happen every time: the moment they drop the professional script and tell me what really happened, the conversation comes alive.
It confirms everything I believe about story – the real one always outweighs the performed one, no matter how accomplished the person telling it.
Guests have included Jameela Jamil, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Philippa Perry, Laura Smyth and Jess Phillips MP.
Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Inside story
Here are a few of the people I admire for their storytelling …
Professional photographer
Alexandra Cameron
Alexandra is my favourite professional photographer who specialises in fashion and portraiture. She is the photographer who took my photos. What struck me working with her was how little she needed me to perform. She just waited, and somehow found the version of me that wasn't posing for anyone.
Fabulousness personified
Laura Smyth
A stand up comedian and storyteller, and one of my dearest friends. Watching her turn the messiest, most chaotic parts of life into something that makes a whole room laugh has taught me more about timing and truth than any writing course ever could.
Yoga Teacher | Author
Naomi Annand
She taught me that the body tells its own story, long before the mind catches up to it, and that sometimes the truest way to understand what you're carrying is to move through it, not think your way out of it.
Poet
Hollie McNish
The acclaimed poet who wrote me my own poem. Hollie won the Ted Hughes Award for her collection Nobody Told Me, and has spent her career writing, unflinchingly, about motherhood, sex, class, and the body, the things most poetry tends to tidy up or leave out. I still don't quite know how to describe what it felt like to have someone else's words hold something so precisely true about my own life. That's the whole point of her work, really. She makes you feel witnessed.
Author | Journalist | Podcast host
Clover Stroud
Clover Stroud writes memoir the way it is supposed to be written, at full risk to herself. The Wild Other and My Wild and Sleepless Nights made her name, but it was The Red of My Blood, written after the death of her sister Nell Gifford, founder of Giffords Circus, that showed exactly how far she is willing to go into the truth of a thing rather than around it. Reading her feels like being handed permission to stop performing your own story.
Writer | Broadcaster
Julia Raeside
Julia Raeside is an acclaimed journalist and broadcaster, working for the Guardian, regularly the Observer and BBC Radio. Her debut novel, Don't Make Me Laugh, takes on power, control and the particular exhaustion of being a woman at work, and does it with real anger sitting right next to real humour. She brings the same sensibility to her bestselling Substack, Womansplaining, "flicking the crap from our windscreen, one bug at a time."
Talent PR | Artist | Writer
Jacki Jones
Tells stories for brands, and has been a friend through plenty of my own. She's a reminder that the instinct for a good story doesn't change whether you're writing a memoir or a marketing campaign, it's the same muscle, just aimed somewhere else.
Author
Hattie Williams
Author of Bitter Sweet. I would read her shopping list. Her ability to blend humour with darkness, without either one softening the other, is exactly the kind of writing I aspire to.
Journalist | Author | Speaker
Poorna Bell
Poorna Bell was a journalist and editor long before she became the writer she is now, but it was grief that changed everything she wrote. After her husband died, she wrote Chase the Rainbow, then In Search of Silence, turning loss and depression into something other people could actually use. Then came Stronger, about finding mental strength through fitness, proof that she did not just write her way through the hardest years, she lifted her way through them too. She has since moved into fiction, but the throughline never changes: she’s funny, incisive and wise.
Boost Global
Rosie Dalling
Rosie Dalling runs The Boost Global, and coaches leaders and entrepreneurs on communication, confidence and the harder art of staying kind to yourself while everything feels uncertain, the same message she brought to Lorraine Kelly's Kindness Summit. She has been an important guide and mentor to me.
Garden designer | Model
Cali Rand
Cali Rand designs bespoke gardens across London and beyond, and she brings that same eye, an instinct for how a space should feel, not just look, to her work as a model in campaigns for the likes of Toast and Sleeper. Follow her and you will start noticing the trees.
Balance Me skincare
Clare + Rebecca Hopkins
Clare and Rebecca Hopkins, two sisters, both struggling with what stress and city life were doing to their complexions, decided to fix it themselves rather than wait for someone else to. That instinct, solve your own problem properly and let other people benefit too, became a natural skincare brand made in Britain. Their story is proof that the best businesses often start as a private fix that turns out to be everyone's.
British clothing label
Clara Francis & Tania Hindmarch
Clara Francis is an actor as well as the founder of O Pioneers, a small British label built on deadstock and offcut fabric, made in small batches by female led makers in London, each piece carrying its maker's name handwritten inside. Clara also carries a loss that shapes how she moves through the world. Her daughter Maude died at two from sepsis, and in the years since, Clara has trained as a bereavement facilitator, volunteers with the Child Death Helpline at Great Ormond Street, and works with the UK Sepsis Trust to help others recognise the signs earlier than she was able to. It is not a small thing to turn grief into work that might save another family from the same loss, and I admire her enormously for it.