Emma Barnett: ‘For years I wore big floaty dresses because I was so bloated from IVF and bruised from needles’
The Radio 4 presenter speaks to Helen Brown about why going on maternity leave is like a military tour, prodding Nigel Farage, and the one question that print journalists ‘always’ ask
People make a classic mistake with a woman like me,” says Emma Barnett. “They think, you’re a career woman, so of course you didn’t like maternity leave. You didn’t want to stop work.” The former host of Woman’s Hour and current presenter of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 sighs and shakes her head. “But it’s not as clear cut as that, is it? I fought tooth and nail through many rounds of IVF to become a mother. I love my babies. I think I was very present with them during the months I spent off air with them. But also, I was surprised and bewildered not to feel fulfilled the whole time, to have whole plots of time when I didn’t know what to do and couldn’t relax the way I would if I were on my own…”
On a mission to “reflect the reality and reframe how we think about this complicated, conflicted period in women’s lives” – when they’re cut adrift from the structure and identity that comes with work – Barnett has written a book called Maternity Service. Her argument is that we should stop pretending these months of “loving service” are a holiday, and compare them to military tours of duty. “There is no actual leave. You are constantly on,” she writes, outlining the relentless slog and hypervigilance involved in the early stages of motherhood. She notes that soldiers don’t usually start such tours with battered, bleeding bodies, constantly broken sleep and brains that are going through a period of neurological reshuffling of the kind otherwise experienced only by adolescents.
Talking via video from her gleaming South London kitchen (she’s a bit of a clean freak), Barnett is frank and cheerful – dressed for spring in a silky, emerald frock. It’s her son’s seventh birthday but he’s at school – “we’ve got family coming over for a cake later” – and she’s just back from a toddler group with her two-year-old daughter. “It can still feel surreal to find myself in these large groups of women, all banging out ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’,” she laughs.
Barnett, who turned 40 last month, thinks women seem “programmed to forget” the strange experience of maternity leave. She notes that her own mother claims to have adored every moment with her when she was a baby and “never really cried”. “Our memory just skips to the highlights reel and omits the other parts,” she says. She admits that she “wiped the slate clean” in the five years between the birth of her son and daughter, so was determined to bear witness to the “tough and mind-numbing” moments in real time the second time around. In a bid to reassure other “discombobulated” new mothers, her book is intended as both reassurance that they’re not alone, and a survival guide.
“As a journalist, I’ve always been interested in how people survive the tough times, how they keep going,” she points out. She started her career at LBC before moving to The Daily Telegraph – working first on business, then tech news, then editing a new online women’s section – ultimately graduating to the BBC, where she says she “continued to blur the boundaries between news and features”. She’s never scared to ask a politician how they feel, or a regular guest about the hot topics of the day. “When I moved to Woman’s Hour I made sure we started every show with a reactive, newsy topic,” she says. “I’m always looking for fresh snow – a new take on the topical issues.”
This year, on Today, Barnett has already broadcast heartbreaking, inspiring interviews on that theme. One with Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter Caroline Darian about the impact of her father’s crimes on her family and her mother. Another with the dignified, devastated parents of Thomas Kingston, the husband to Lady Gabriella Windsor, who died by suicide after being prescribed antidepressants. In her own life, she has survived – at 23 – the shock of her father’s conviction for running a string of brothels in Manchester and decades of pain caused by endometriosis (which she unpacked in her first book, Period: It’s About Bloody Time).
She thinks that her own survival made her a “better” person. Addressing her challenges in public has given Barnett the confidence to “tread quite directly into delicate spaces” in her interviewees’ lives, “in the awareness that I’m quite often asking them about issues and emotions they may not have even discussed with those close to them”.
Although she won’t discuss her dad with me today – “print journalists always ask”, she eye-rolls – she wrote an article about the “shame, embarrassment, sadness and anger” she felt about his crime for The Daily Mail in 2016. “This wasn’t my mess,” she wrote, “and I had a choice – either let it break me into tiny ashamed pieces, or use my anger to fuel my passion for life, love and my work. By choosing the latter and not wallowing in a tempting state of self-pity, I picked up where I had left off in London – but with an extra sense of urgency.” She argued that she’d come out of the awful experience with “empathy and humility beyond my years” and a greater hunger for the stories of others.
“My husband says I’m always, inescapably myself,” she says today. “So I’m the same on air. It’s important, as a broadcaster, to have a strong sense of who you are.” She puts some of her success as a political interviewer down to the fact that she never worked in Westminster and “talks to politicians the same way I’d talk to anybody else”. Last month she cornered Reform UK leader Nigel Farage live on air, pointing out: “You keep saying what we shouldn’t do, but what is your vision Nigel Farage, specifically? We’re not mates in a pub – can you commit to something?”
Today she says it’s only recently that she’s realised that her tendency to find the point where the personal meets the political dates back to her time at Nottingham University. There, she wrote her dissertation on the personal relationship between British prime minister Harold Macmillan and American president John F Kennedy. “The files had just been declassified so you could go and read them and I really geeked out,” she grins. “That personal connection was key to the ‘special relationship’ [between the US and UK] being cemented in the way it was in the 1960s, in the way we secured nuclear deterrents. It’s not as simple as: ‘those two guys got on so this happened’. But there were several quite key examples of how important that human connection was, away from the cameras.”
When my son gets in the car after school I do ask him for three ‘headlines’ from his day
Indeed, the two men swapped remarkably candid correspondence. JFK once began a letter to Macmillan with the lines: “I wonder how it is with you, Harold. If I don’t have a woman for three days, I get a terrible headache.” Barnett doesn’t comment on the precarious state of the “special relationship”, and how it might hinge on the relationship between Donald Trump and Sir Keir Starmer.
She admits she still finds the transition between her role on Today and her role as a mother to be a “jagged experience”. “Slowing down or speeding up can be hard,” she says, cracking up when I admit that my own children (now 13 and 15) occasionally accuse me of interviewing them. “When my son gets in the car after school I do ask him for three ‘headlines’ from his day,” she says. On her first “maternity service” with him, she admits she pushed him around the park listening to podcasts about world affairs and occasionally shared her views with him. “A man walked past me once, overheard what I was saying and joked: ‘Wow – that’s high fibre!’ He said he missed hearing me on Five Live and I said, ‘I think you can tell I’m missing it too at times. But I’ve got a regular live show here in the park!’”
It was during these days that Barnett developed her survival guide. She always aimed to be out of the house by 9am; she found a practical uniform to keep her comfortable and she forged powerful bonds with the women she met at antenatal and toddler classes. “I talk about sisters in arms, walking in lockstep,” she says. “I bonded with the women I met then in a way I’ll probably never bond with people again. I still refer to the woman I befriended during my first pregnancy as my ‘Mat Leave Wifey’. I found a video the other day of us both pushing prams together and laughing so hard… I couldn’t have done it without her. I’d have gone mad.”
Barnett points out that she has to remind her husband, Jeremy Weil, with whom she now runs a colouring book business called Colour Your Streets, to try to hook up with friends while he’s out with their children, because companionship makes things so much easier and men can be less likely to seek that out. In her book, Barnett is honest about the release she found in finding a local wine tasting group. Although some women disapprove of the “Mummy Needs Gin” memes so often shared online, Barnett says she has “always worked hard and played hard”.
“I love food,” she says. “I love having a drink. Socialising. A great boozy Soho lunch is regularly in the diary. We put so many drugs in our bodies. Nine million people in the UK are on antidepressants. I don’t actually drink a lot but when I do get to have a couple of drinks it’s great. I have no shame about that.”
She notes that her adjustment to all the nights of broken sleep with her daughter made it easier to take the Today programme job, for which she has to rise at 3am. “An actor friend pointed out my sleep was screwed anyway, I might as well lean into it!” She also points out that she’s been “gaming around chronic pain, IVF, a body full of hormones” for a decade.
But Barnett is also happy to be shedding her old fertility uniform at last. “For years I wore big floaty dresses because I was so bloated from the IVF and bruised from the needles,” she says, pointing out the fact those dresses “allow you to be pregnant. Or to lose a baby. Or to breastfeed”. But eight months ago she bought herself a pair of jeans for the first time in years and is thrilled to feel her edges more clearly defined. She’s a woman who believes her comrades in motherhood should go into their own maternity leaves with their “eyes and hearts open” aware that things will get wild and they “may never be the same again”.
‘Maternity Service: A Love Letter to Mothers from the Front Line of Maternity Leave’ is published via Penguin UK on 13 March
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