Vogue Williams is experiencing a common feeling that overcomes people who have written a memoir and are now having to do interviews to convince others that the book is worth reading. She found the editing process particularly gruelling. After months of going through every line, in a book that’s all about her, she told a friend recently, “I hate it … I hate myself too, I cannot read about myself any more.” She’s joking, sort of. “Then I had to read it out loud for the audio book, I had to read it four times. I was like ‘here she goes again’.”
Her entertaining book, which is definitely worth reading, is called Big Mouth, both because of the prominence of that feature on her face and because she has always talked a lot. The proof is in her school reports and in her podcasts, of which she has three – the most popular is My Therapist Ghosted Me, with her close friend, comedian Joanne McNally, which launched during the pandemic and grew so big it spawned a live tour.
“It’s been kind of magic, great for both of us,” she says. Then there’s Never Live It Down, in which she gets celebrities and comedians to recount their most embarrassing moments. The latest is Vogue & Amber (Amber is her older sister), which last year replaced Spencer & Vogue, the podcast she made with her husband until “I could tell he was getting bored”.
She has been married to Spencer Matthews, former star of reality show Made In Chelsea, for the past eight years. His family own Eden Rock hotel on the Caribbean island of St Barths and Glen Affric, a 10,000 acre estate in Scotland. Matthew’s brother is James, who is married to Pippa Middleton, Kate Middleton‘s sister. When I ask Williams what it’s like to be so royal adjacent, she says “I never actually speak about any of that because they’re very private. And I’m not as private as everyone, but I think when somebody wants to be private, I respect that.”
Privacy is not something Williams craves, clearly – she shares a good deal of her life with more than a million social media followers – and a memoir seems an obvious choice for someone who is a bona-fide brand, the very model of a modern multi-hyphenated woman. In addition to the podcasts, she has her own gender-neutral children’s clothing line Gen, a long-standing advertising contract with Fairy – she’s the perfectly groomed woman in those ubiquitous “click clack” ads – and has her own booming fake tan brand, Bare.
As expected, the former model looks stylish and camera ready on the video call from her home in London. Several rings flash from her fingers and she wears necklaces with G, T and O charms, around her neck. The letters stand for Theodore (6) Gigi (4) and Otto (2), her three children with Matthews.
She wrote the book herself and enjoyed the process, but name-checks writer and theatre maker Una McKevitt as a valued collaborator. “I find her so interesting and inspiring to be around.” The narrative breezes along, with many tangents and unexpected details of her life: she doesn’t wrap her children’s Christmas presents, is just one shocking example. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny: “Besides permanently trying to make myself look younger and fake tanning all the time, I think I am fairly low maintenance,” she writes.
She is a “passionate” reader. And now a writer. “I just love everything to do with books,” she says. Something happened when she had her first child, Theodore, and she went off books for a while. When she went back to them a few years ago, her husband was surprised. “He said, ‘you’re reading?’ and I was like, yeah, I read all the time … but he didn’t know me as a reader.”
She eventually wants to write fiction. Graham Norton is an inspiration – the Cork chatshow host started off writing memoirs before moving to novels. “I really enjoyed his biographies, I mean he could just leave the pages empty and I’d love them …”. Her goal was 3,000 words a week but “I was going over that, and I realised actually I’m going to finish quite early”.
The book begins with a love letter to Howth, Co Dublin, where she grew up, which somebody from Tourism Ireland needs to immediately turn into an ad. Her childhood was happy, despite the fact that her parents split up when she was six. She thinks her anxiety, which she still suffers from, began as a young child worrying about her late father Freddie who had health and other problems. “Everybody loved him, he was the life and soul of every party,” she says. But “he would have been a nightmare to be married to”.
I saw nothing wrong as a 16-year-old with sneaking out to nightclubs and stealing drinks. I used to drive them insane
— Vogue Williams
The family’s life changed when her mother, the ultra-glamorous and hard-working former air steward Sandra, married Scottish businessman Neil. Her stepfather’s business interests grew to the point where the family moved into a huge house on the cliffs of Howth with two swimming pools and a tennis court. That transition from being the daughter of a single mother in a family that couldn’t afford a car to being called “rich bitch” at school was “weird and brilliant”.
She lived a kind of dual teenage existence; when she stayed with her dad she could do as she pleased. Her stepfather was far more strict. He had grown up poor in the tenements of Dundee. She says her work ethic is thanks to him, but she was “hard work growing up. I loved having fun, doing whatever I wanted to do. I saw nothing wrong as a 16-year-old with sneaking out to nightclubs and stealing drinks. I used to drive them insane.”
Later, in her 20s, Williams would go on to have considerable success as a model in Dublin, although she’s not sure if gigs where she was paid to stick her head in a giant burger – it’s worth googling the photo – can really be described as modelling. A great woman for the side hustle from an early age, she became a DJ and was cast in reality TV show Fade Street, a show Irish people loved to hate. Her father died the first night Fade Street aired in 2010, and one of the best lines in the book is the family joke that “he died because he was so embarrassed for me”.
Williams uses this breezy, humorous tone to deflect, which can often make the darker parts of her memoir more affecting. Here’s how she describes losing her dad after a second heart attack: “My dad died of fun because he was always out drinking and smoking, having the absolute time of his life with zero concern for his health. It wasn’t a surprise to any of us and I’m sure if there is an afterlife he would have been pretty chuffed with getting as far as he did living the life that he led, but it’s still a ball of s**t to lose a parent and it happens to all of us.”
That “ball of s**t” had a deep impact on her life. In an attempt to outrun her grief, she emigrated to Australia not long afterwards with her new boyfriend Brian McFadden from Westlife. Interestingly, she doesn’t mention his or anyone else’s names in the book. She’s aware that many people will open the book and go straight to the chapter called Big Wedding, Small Marriage. Was it difficult to write about?
“Yeah, it was quite challenging,” she says, adding that she “doesn’t want to throw anyone under the bus. You can read between the lines of why it didn’t work out.” Anybody expecting salacious stories of Brian McFadden’s relationship transgressions will be disappointed, although the reader is left under no illusions about the fact that there were some. She’s careful about how she describes the “many reasons” she ended the relationship, saying “there are things that went on in our relationship that will never be forgiven”.
Now 39, she knows they never should have got married; at 26 she was too young. “You don’t know yourself at that age.” She remembers not wanting to ring people to tell them she was getting married “because they’d be p**sed off” which told its own tale. She says she was living “someone else’s life” in Australia. Her career felt less important than his. She wasn’t suited to following someone else around while they work, and she hated being so far from home. The couple eventually moved to London but after four years, the marriage was over.
Being divorced at 30, when her plan was to be settled with children by then, was disorienting. She did a lot of therapy, discovering things about herself like the fact that she is drawn to men with alcohol issues, depression or anxiety. She doesn’t like calling her dad an alcoholic, but she writes in the book that he was “functioning that way for most of my life”. The main way it affected her was that she has often ended up with people who are too “fond of the drink” which is her preferred phrase when talking about her dad’s issues.
She often chose men she imagined she could “fix”, realising over time that it’s impossible to help anyone who doesn’t want to help themselves. “I mean I had pictures of people like Eric Cantona and Liam Gallagher on my wall from age eight or nine, so from a young age I was drawn to people like that.”
At this point the conversation is interrupted by Spencer Matthews. “He keeps doing this,” Williams laughs, with an eyeroll. Has he read her book? “I’ve not quite finished it,” he says, looking handsome and healthy and sounding extremely posh. “But it’s very well written, she is a literal marvel.” What does he think about the bits about him? “Well, firstly I have no say in those bits and I imagine it’s all accurate.” Williams confirms that she didn’t run those parts past him before publication.
The UK media has been full of speculation that they are divorcing, ever since they called time on their podcast Spencer & Vogue. It’s fake news, apparently. Williams explains in the book that there were artistic podcasting differences; she enjoys light-hearted easy topics, whereas Spencer wanted more serious content. Despite having his exit planned months in advance, “everyone decided we were getting a divorce”. They are very much together on the evidence of this interview.
With Spencer gone, we return to the subject of relationships. This tendency to be attracted to certain types continued with Matthews, who she met on reality television skiing contest The Jump. “Spencer ran towards me with red flags hanging off him in every direction,” she says. “I thought ‘oh, he’s right up my street, I’ll have him‘.” She had made assumptions based on his Made In Chelsea persona and “what I’d seen or read about him”. He was the villain of that show, playing the part of a hard-drinking, ladies man. In reality, she says, he was “really kind and fun to be around”.
I remember Spenny once asking me if I had any friends that aren’t gay. I said [her sister] Amber, then I remembered she is gay. So yeah, I’d say my friends are 90 per cent gay
— Vogue Williams
But Spencer was also “too fond of the drink” and it did cause issues in their relationship. She recounts in the book that at one point his drinking got so bad she couldn’t even trust him to take their dogs for a walk. She hated seeing him waste his potential. Williams is ambitious and wants her partner to be ambitious too. She says she didn’t give him an ultimatum, but explained she “couldn’t continue if he wanted to carry on the way he was drinking”.
“I much prefer him now he’s not boozing. He has really grown up and matured over the years.” When he quit drinking – “I still drink sometimes but mostly I am sober” he clarified to me earlier – he started an alcohol-free drinks company called CleanCo and has become a marathon runner, taking that to astonishing extremes. Last year, he ran 30 marathons in 30 days in the Jordanian desert, and he recently completed the London marathon in three hours and six minutes.
They are solid, it seems, but Williams is sanguine in the book, saying that having experienced the breakdown of several long-term relationships, “it’s more realistic to think they will all go the same way. I do believe, though, that I have met someone I want to spend the rest of my life with and I feel very fortunate.”
She used the book to explore things she hasn’t talked about on her various podcasts. She experienced a miscarriage after having their first son. Despite appearances, she says “I can be surprisingly private about certain things”. She didn’t talk much about her pregnancy loss at the time because she had a friend who was much further on in her first pregnancy, and “had to give birth to the baby, and lost her baby”.
Although her own miscarriage was “incredibly sad, it was very early on and I already had a child. It was so devastating to watch my friend go through that, and it’s not that I felt my own wasn’t as important but I just didn’t feel the need to talk about it at the time.”
Writing about it didn’t feel like a “huge, massive” thing but one detail stands out. She was away on holiday when it happened, and when they went to a London clinic for confirmation, the doctor did a scan and just announced, “Yes, that was a miscarriage, see ya later, bye”. “I suppose they are used to it, but a bit of a nicer bedside manner would have been really appreciated,” she writes in the book.
[ Even the word ‘miscarriage’ seems to suggest the mother is somehow at faultOpens in new window ]
She also describes the book as her Botox coming out party. “I’ve literally got a bruise on my forehead right now,” she laughs. She goes to an “amazing” woman in a dermatology clinic in Dublin, every three or four months. “I’m in and out in 10 minutes, which suits me … I want to age disgracefully.”
She suffers with anxiety and hopes that her writing about it in painful yet typically funny detail might help other people. She has never actually been tested for ADHD, but she probably will at some point because her therapist thinks it might help her anxiety. “Whatever I have, it suits me down to the ground right now,” she says. And the way her life is going, you can’t really argue with that.
Williams is an engaging interviewee; few subjects are off-limits. She writes in the book that in addition to what she calls her “big meat cleaver hands” she also has a deep voice and says that when she orders room service in a hotel, she’ll often be asked ‘is that everything, Sir’? Before moving to the UK, she made several documentaries in Ireland including one called Transgender, an attempt to educate people on the trans community. While filming she was mistaken for a trans person herself.
What did she make of the recent Supreme Court decision in the UK which ruled that a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law? She gets more serious for a moment. “It’s caused a huge amount of pain,” she says. “I have a really good friend who is trans, and as soon as that ruling came out, I texted her, and she was like, ‘it’s really nice to hear from you and know that you’re thinking of me through all of that.’ Because I can’t imagine how difficult that is … I learned so much from doing that documentary. I just don’t understand it. I never will. It’s the same with marriage equality. I never understood why people would care if somebody wanted to love somebody else. I don’t get it. I just try and be as supportive as I can with all my friends within that community. It’s all you can do at the moment, the whole thing is disappointing.”
She writes a lot about friendship in the book, her gay friends in particular. “I remember Spenny once asking me if I had any friends that aren’t gay. I said [her sister] Amber, then I remembered she is gay. So yeah, I’d say my friends are 90 per cent gay.”
She loves working out. One of the many rings on her fingers is a “fitness ring” which tells her how many steps she’s done. This morning she did a 5km run with friends and cycled in and out of town, an hour round-trip that, she points out, would have taken almost twice that in a car. Also, on one of her fingers, is half of her dad’s wedding ring. Her sister Amber wears the other half. “I’d die if I lost that,” she says.
She doesn’t like to describe herself as an entrepreneur – “it’s such a cringe word; I prefer business owner” – but she exudes Big Entrepreneur Energy. “I’m quite a creative brain, I go through phases where my brain is on fire and I have so much going on, whether it be TV or the next book I am planning, I’m always creating something fun and new.”
Her ambition is almost blinding. She has three ideas for novels which she is bringing to HarperCollins and wants to do more TV work “a big shiny floor show”. At the moment she’s filming home improvement programme Renovation Rescue, which makes good use of her degree in construction and quantity surveying. She did it in Aberdeen, encouraged by her stepfather Neil, who said if she completed the degree she’d have his blessing to go and pursue a showbiz career. (He’s retired in Spain now, but still looks after her finances. And her husband’s too. “It’s practically his full time job.”)
She’d like to do more radio. “I like covering for Ryan [Tubridy],” she says of her occasional stints on Virgin Radio. Her clothing line Gen, designed to be shared by siblings, is stocked in M&S and Next, while her Bare tanning products are in Boots. “Because they did so well in Boots Ireland, we’re now in the UK stores so thank you everyone in Ireland, we love you so much.”
She is also in the process of trying to sell her duplex apartment in Battersea – “Do you want to buy it?” – so the couple can buy a “forever home” in the same locality, close to the children’s school. “It’s a really family oriented area,” she says.
What does she hope people take from her book? “First of all I hope people don’t think I’m regurgitating the stuff that I talk about all the time. Because it’s not that,” she says.
“I want people to be able to laugh through parts, but to take things from certain stories, whether I’m talking about anxiety or death or grieving or break-ups. I hope people might learn from things that I’ve learned and mistakes that I’ve made. Mainly, I just really envision people sitting on the beach, having a cocktail and enjoying it. That’s what I really want.”
And then she’s off, walking to the school gate to pick up her children, a woman with a big mouth and even bigger ambition, who has a lot more to do.
Big Mouth by Vogue Williams is published by HarperCollins
