Abstract
What are the qualifications to be an agony aunt? I would suggest having had a wide experience of life, having reflected on and learned from one's own mistakes, and possessing a large measure of compassion and empathy for the follies, misfortunes, irrational impulses and ill-fated choices of poor, suffering humanity. As well as a fair amount of patience in perusing and answering the many letters, messages and emails received.
And in these criteria Bel Mooney, the Daily Mail's problem page adviser, qualifies more than ably. She is notably open about her own life experiences, returning to issues that have caused her some personal emotional pain, such as the birth, and death, of her still-born son; and the break-up of her first marriage, after 35 years, to Jonathan Dimbleby, which initially hurt her very much since the dissolution of the marriage was his choice – she brings the reflections of such events to her advice pages.
The first 32 pages of this book are about the background and context of the job, which came to her initially with The Times in 2005, after a long and solid career in journalism, broadcasting and authorship. This serves as both a mature philosophy of life and a glimpse into the profile of readers' concerns: marriage, relationships, family problems, bereavement, loneliness and general angst. Twas ever thus. The subsequent sequence of “Lifelines” are examples of particular problems and how Bel dealt with them.
Counsellors are supposed to be non-judgmental these days but, bracingly, Bel Mooney doesn't always follow this rather vapid path: sometimes her judgment is robust. “Let me make it clear that I do understand why you were so angry with your mother for breaking up the family,” she tells a young man who cannot forgive his mother for running off with another man. “People always underestimate the effect of a divorce on grown children, and they shouldn't.” She often advises correspondents to try to keep a marriage together where it is possible, and she expresses some admiration for a “Brief Encounter” scenario in which a married man renounced the chance of a grand passion because his wife was a good person who didn't deserve to be betrayed. But where there is an abusive relationship or an irredeemable or destructive situation, she encourages the injured party to walk away.
She is especially helpful to those bereaved by tragic deaths – the loss of an adored only child, killed by a drunken driver – or death by suicide, and she is practical in recommending rituals, which she believes we need, to cope with a grief. She advises a mother whose daughter threw herself off Beachy Head to return to the accursed spot, disperse flowers there and visualise her daughter's spirit. She is sensitive (and very open about her own experiences) in advising a reader about post-abortion guilt: this is an under-explored area of human experience because it is such a highly defended political subject. Again, Bel alludes to the way in which rituals in other cultures commit the spirit of the unborn to peace, and gently recommends such therapies – for ceremonies are therapies, indeed. (The Japanese understand this well.)
It is quite a social service, addressing the personal problems of so many afflicted souls: Mooney meets people where they are – the Daily Mail is a middle-market paper and striking the right register is essential – and yet, I like the way she can be high-minded and quotes from Darwin, Eliot (TS and George), Conrad, Kant and CS Lewis, as well as the inevitable Kahlil Gibran (corny but compulsive). I also like the way she always tries to find a positive element in every situation and seeks to draw light from dark pictures – she has rewritten Philip Larkin's most quoted poem engagingly. (“They build you up, your mum and dad / It's what they're there for, so they do / They hand on foibles that they have / But add some virtues, just for you.”) Larkin was a great poet, but a misanthropic old grump about family life, and deserves some correction on this issue.
One of her themes is change and how we must meet it as we go through life; her own story illuminates how transformative it can be. Having been made unhappy by the break-up of her marriage to Dimbleby, with time things changed. She remade her life with a second husband and came to reconcile amicably with her first – the memories (and children) they shared were thus rescued and maintained. (I so believe in change that I have had engraved on a tattoo on my arm Cardinal Newman's aphorism – “To live is to change …”).
A kind and reflective book that illuminates a significant and consistent aspect of journalism through the ages: the human angle.
