At the age of 34, Sophie Heawood had a happily chaotic life. She had left her loving but overbearing family behind in Yorkshire to live in a one-bedroom rented apartment on the seedy side of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip and interview celebrities. One day, she assumed, she would have children with a yet-to-materialise partner, but there was no particular urgency. Then, she found out she was pregnant.
Those who have read Heawood’s columns in Vice and The Guardian will be familiar with her dispatches about being a single mother in Hackney. The Hungover Games is about what came before; from Heawood cobbling together her last $9 to pay for a pregnancy test and realising the baby’s father didn’t want the child she was already falling in love with, to eventually coming back to the UK.
There she lived a double life. By day she went to antenatal groups, tolerating smug parents whom she calls “The Hallouminati”, while trying to make a living as a freelance journalist. By night, unlike the “yummy mummies and rad dads”, she went out in Dalston and tried to go on dates. Except that’s not easy when you have a baby at home and your breasts are leaking.
Heawood’s romantic fantasy isn’t wild. All she wants is a man like the one in a poem she once read, who wakes up early to put his wife’s second best bra on the radiator so it’s warm for her. The book is honest, moving and funny. A passage where she realises she will always worry about whether her daughter is warm enough made me cry, but she never mentions her, or her daughter’s father by name, calling him only The Musician. The book is more about her experiences and will help other women who have to deal with insensitive health visitors assuming that their baby has a “daddy”. And although she puts a lot of effort into not hating The Musician, I felt exasperated at his behaviour.
The Los Angeles sections unfold in the Gwyneth Paltrow heartland, and Heawood satirises the types that thrive there, who look “natural” with the help of $100 skincare regimes. There are a few celebrity cameos. She interviews Goldie Hawn and Jodie Foster, who come across as kind, but then Heawood knows how to play the Hollywood publicity machine, “kiss arse” and write in a way that’s sharp enough to impress but not offend. At another point she asks an LA gynaecologist about masturbating while pregnant. The doctor can’t bring herself to say clitoris, only that her clients “use their vibrators on the front part”. It’s brilliant. Heawood has a good sense of humour, but is never bitter or cruel. Above all, she has written a tender book about parental love that she and her daughter should be proud of.
The Hungover Games by Sophie Heawood (Vintage, £14.99), buy it here.
