Podcaster, influencer and presenter’s memoir is full of advice and encouragement for those growing up
When Vogue Williams met her editor after handing over the first copy of her new memoir, Big Mouth, released this May, she had one question: “Do I sound completely unhinged?”
The model, businesswoman and influencer has poured her heart and soul into a collection of short stories about her personal life, and today she says the original title says it all.
“I originally wanted to call it I Thought I was Normal until I Wrote it all Down,” she said.
Sitting in a cafe in Dundrum and wearing a bubble-gum pink coat and jeans, she is every inch the influencer with over a million social media followers in Ireland and the UK.
Ever-open and relatable, her tell-all is billed as a “heart-warming dive” into the “hyperactive” star and will deal with divorce, mental health, death and the trajectory of her relationship with her body and food.
There’s going to be something in it for everyone, but I wanted to make it funny too, so there are a lot of funny stories
“I was kind of shocked at some of the stuff that came out,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I forgot about that’. There’s going to be something in it for everyone, but I wanted to make it funny too, so there are a lot of funny stories.”
Other chapters, she said, were harder to write.
“Just because they were heavy parts of my life... darker periods that I went through.”
These include the admissions about her relationship with food and her continuing need to manage anxiety.
“There is definitely some stuff around eating,” she said. “I think a lot of women have that. Particularly when you’re a teenager growing up, you go through stages of really disliking the way you look. When I was younger I was really tall and my mouth was still huge.
“I’ve kind of grown into it now, but when I was younger I wasn’t the girl everyone fancied. They fancied all my friends. I was desperate looking, so there’s all the growing up stuff in there too.”
She hopes it will be relatable and help others, saying: “A lot of young girls go through stages in life where they feel uncomfortable in their own bodies and I wasn’t different to anyone. I struggled with how I looked.”
She is in Dublin to promote a healthy eating initiative to help beat the end-of-January slump with HelloFresh, a company that delivers healthy meal kits to people’s door to take the headache out of cooking from scratch.
“I didn’t have a clue about food and exercise when I was younger,” she said. “The best tip I have learned is to eat unprocessed food as much as you can. Ultra-processed food makes you hungrier, but there’s so much of it around, so I know it’s hard to avoid. Finding a healthy balance is key.”
The book deals with mental health too, and Williams said career success, family and home have not saved her from the need to manage a long struggle with anxiety.
“Anxiety can’t be fixed, you just learn to live with it and manage it,” she said. When it strikes, “you think about things that haven’t even happened yet”.
I was up until 4am having a meltdown and I knew I was catastrophising over nothing, but I just couldn’t stop
Her last bumpy episode struck on the Amalfi coast while on a getaway with husband Spencer.
“I had a photo-shoot booked in the day before I was flying away from the kids, and I was like, ‘I can’t do that because I have to spend time with the kids before I go’, and then I just spiralled,” she said.
“I was up until 4am having a meltdown and I knew I was catastrophising over nothing, but I just couldn’t stop, and then the next day I was literally like, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry about that, Spenny’.
“So there are quite a few stories about anxiety in the book, and when I was sitting back [seeing it all on the page], I was like, what the hell?”
Asked for an example she said: “Just sometimes intrusive thoughts. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, if people knew what I was thinking, so I have put them in the book. I love hearing other people’s. They’re insane, but lots of people have them.”
