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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
Lifestyle
Hebe Campbell

Jilly Cooper reflects on early career sacking in one of her final interviews

Jilly Cooper reflected on her struggle to hold down a job before finding fame as an author, in a resurfaced clip following her death at the age of 88.

“I wasn’t very good at anything,” she told the BBC’s In My Own Words series in 2024. “I  had endless jobs, in shorthand and typist, and all sorts of awful things like that. Nobody would employ me because I couldn't type very well.”

“I got sacked or I walked out. I got bored by them.”

Cooper, who started out as a journalist, became an author in the 1960s with her first book, How to Stay Married, being published in 1969.

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