Vogue Williams - Best of Ireland Cover Story: "Where you're from becomes a part of you. It's where you feel your most calm and happiest"

When Juliet’s immortalised words “What’s in a name?” were whispered in a fictional Veronese orchard, perhaps Shakespeare did not keep one eye to the future. Enter Vogue Williams. With a first name that conjures synonyms like “fashionable” and “trendy”, it’s impossible to imagine the Dubliner as anything but.

The term “multi-hyphenate” is often overused but here it works, as “media personality–businesswoman–model–DJ” is quite the mouthful. Now, Vogue is tacking “author” onto the job title, having recently released her highly entertaining, tell-all book Big Mouth.

The title is a nod to Vogue’s “big mouth” in the literal sense, but also echoes the sentiment she offers in the early pages of the book: “My mouth is my medium”. So, what’s in a title? A lot, it seems.

“Physically speaking, I have a massive mouth,” laughs Vogue, firing on all conversational cylinders. “Now, I’ve certainly grown into it, but if you saw pictures of me as a child, my face has this huge mouth stuck onto it. It became something I was known for.

“Then, on the other hand, I was permanently in trouble for talking in school. On all of my report cards, there’d be a note that, ‘She needs to stop talking, and has to concentrate’. That sums up my whole life. I’ve now made a career from talking, so always been about the mouth”.

And she’s not lying! With an undeniable gift of the gab, Vogue is the presenter of three widely-popular podcasts, the most successful being My Therapist Ghosted Me, which she co-hosts with her close friend, comedian Joanne McNally.

All this - and more - led to the creation of Big Mouth, the star’s sharply-observed memoir that takes readers through her life in and out of the spotlight: the good, the bad and the refreshingly puckish.

Big Mouth by Vogue Williams.

WRITING AS AN ANCHOR

In writing her first memoir, the idea of relenting control of her life story to publishers sat uneasily. At any rate, Vogue found the writing process to be not only empowering, but also healing.

“I wanted this book to be as much ‘me’ as possible,” she says. “So it was very important to be involved in the entire process of writing and editing it. I found the book very therapeutic at times. Writing anchored me in that way. I’d just sit with my dogs at my feet and set my own deadlines on my weekly word count, to make sure I’d finish on time.

“Some parts were quite hard to write. My dad’s death was especially difficult to put down on paper. He’s gone about 15 years now, but I still find it really sad, just in the way everything went and knowing he didn’t want to die.”

As her father Freddie’s health began to fail, Vogue’s career was only just starting to take off, as she was cast in the Irish reality television series Fade Street. On the night the first episode aired, Freddie Williams died of a stroke.

It was during this time that Vogue also began to experience symptoms of anxiety, which she says were never fully realised until she started writing Big Mouth. Even still, inklings of anxiety came to the fore when she divorced her first husband, Westlife’s Brian McFadden, after a rocky relationship.

“What I realised from the book was that my anxiety did not come from my divorce, but it set it off for the first time,” says Williams. “I realised that my anxiety started from a very young age. My dad was always sick and I often felt the stress of worrying about him in the hospital. I think that’s what the anxiety originally stemmed from.

“I used to never understand why people keep journals, but now I do. When you sit down to write about yourself, it can feel very unusual. I certainly found it very unusual at the start, because I don’t journal or anything like that. But it’s a very useful practice in understanding yourself. I’d implore people to do it where you can, just to see what you get from it.”

The writing process also helped Vogue sift through the debris following her divorce from McFadden. The relationship and its aftermath saw Vogue become fodder for tabloid gossip that watched her every move for a flicker of scandal. Perhaps writing a memoir was an attempt to reclaim her narrative.

“You know, you’d think that,” she considers, “and that’s what I was initially hoping from it! But before the book came out, I was quite stressed about the possible click-bait headlines, where they’d take a line from my book out of context which might not sound great, and use it as the headline. But that actually didn’t happen.

“I was very careful in the way I wrote about people, because I didn’t want to upset them. I feel very lucky with my family and everyone I have around me. So I wanted to make sure I portrayed them properly, which I think I did.

“If I wrote this book 10 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have been as mature as I am now, and there would’ve been more anger with certain situations. But I’ve gotten to a point where I don’t have any resentment or anger anymore. I think holding onto hatred is really bad.”

Vogue Williams. Photo: Ruth Rose.

She elaborates on the theme.

“My mom always said to me, ‘Never say you hate anyone, because it takes a lot of effort to hate someone and they probably don’t even care,’” Williams continues. “There’s no point to hatred, and I didn’t want to have negativity like that in the book. I kind of imagine people sitting on the beach, reading the book and having a little giggle, rather than thinking, ‘Oh God, I can’t believe she went there.’”

Sure, some readers might raise their eyebrows at occasional chapter titles like ‘Dry Riding’, but this confessional spirit runs the gamut of Vogue Williams’ comedic ethos. Even when she talks about meeting her second husband, Spencer Matthews, on the reality series The Jump, she quips that he was “covered in red flags” and it wasn’t exactly love at first sight.

“I always had a tendency to go for people who weren’t sturdy or put together, and basically had demons. That was my bread and butter,” Vogue jests. “But I think the best thing that ever happened to me was forcing myself to be single. I absolutely hated it at the start and was so concerned about being on my own, because I had never done it. But I got used to it and began to feel more responsible for myself. Having that time to figure out my own stuff and learn more about myself was really good for me.”

“Then Spencer came along and, of course, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on him because he was full of red flags. I was hesitant at first, though. It was one of those situations where I judged a book by its cover, and I had read things about him and thought he wasn’t great. But I should have made up my own mind about him, which I did in the end. He has a real kindness to him. Deep down, he’s a very nice, generous and fun person. The takeaway there was that I shouldn’t have preconceived ideas of people, because they’re usually bullshit.”

“Before I did the podcast, My Therapist Ghosted Me, with Joanne, I think a lot of people had preconceived ideas about me and didn’t know much besides what I’d put up on Instagram. Eventually, they got to know my personality a bit better. And it’s the same with Spencer.”

Vogue reflects further on Matthews.

“He was on a TV show, Made In Chelsea, in his twenties, and that followed him around for most of his life,” she says. “It’s only starting to go away now. But I think if someone reads or sees something bad about you, they tend to believe it a little bit. I did it myself, and I’m very wary of doing that now”.

UNIVERSAL EXPERIENCES

Vogue’s tell-all memoir sheds a light on the universal experiences that some shy away from divulging, and follows a similar path to her and McNally’s podcast, My Therapist Ghosted Me. Notably on the agenda is her journey with anxiety and grief. Such experiences are often overlooked when scrolling through pictures of happy families and sunny holidays on Instagram.

Sure, the book is loaded with outrageous anecdotes that would curl the lips of even the most serious person. But the intention is to resonate with readers, even if such an act of honesty might be construed as radical.

“I think that people see some people’s lives on Instagram, and think it’s all bells-and-whistles and there’s nothing really difficult going on,” says Vogue. “But, of course, everybody has difficult stages in their lives. I just wanted to make sure I put that in there to show that everybody is the same and we all have these problems.

“In writing Big Mouth, I began to understand how things stem from different things. I also realised I was quite a strong and resilient person. I think that resilience came from childhood because my parents broke up when I was young and I didn’t have that stability for so long. But you figure things out and you change. Nobody has this picture perfect, white-picket-fence life.

“A woman came up to me at a book launch yesterday and said, ‘I love your anxiety’. I thought it was very unusual and I’ve never had somebody say that to me (laughs). But she said, ‘I just love it because I can’t believe you have anxiety and that you spoke about it’. I thought it was very important to get that point across and put the darker parts of my life in the book.”

Many of these “darker parts” unfold with North Dublin in the background - between the walls of her Sutton secondary school, and between her divorced parents’ houses. But the romantic vision of Vogue’s youth, roaming the peninsular sea cliffs, is hardly lost on her. While she currently lives with her family in south-west London, she always makes a point of revisiting Dublin’s Northside whenever she returns.

“When I’m back, I love doing an early morning cliff walk when no one’s out,” she enthuse. “Then I’ll walk down to the harbour and get a lovely lunch somewhere. I love King Sitric, they do great crab claws and chicken wings. O’Connell’s Pub also does fantastic chicken wings. I love the Brass Monkey, I actually used to work there!

“My local Chinese is the Dragon Boat in Howth. I can still remember their old number! I brought my mom and sister to Yang’s in Clontarf the other night and it was absolutely delicious. I love Chinese food because everyone shares, so you get bits of everything.

“Where you’re from becomes a part of you. It’s where you feel your most calm and happiest, at least for me anyway. I had a really nice time growing up there and all of my best friends still live there. I always sit on the left side of the plane when I’m landing back in Dublin so I get to see Howth. It’s my calm oasis that I love returning to.”

Bet of is out now.

The new edition of Best Of Ireland is available to pre-order now – also featuring Vogue Williams, Evanne Kilgallon, Niall Quinn, Andrea Mara, Robert Grace, Demi Isaac and more...