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The debut author sits down with Hadley Stewart to talk about being a woman who loves women, her relationship with her body, and the hierarchy of grief.
Roxy Bourdillon walks towards me massaging the palm of her hand. Moments earlier, I saw the debut author and editor-in-chief of DIVA jump out of her skin like a cartoon character being electrocuted, as she leant against one of the radiators that line the walls of Senate House Library, the setting for our photoshoot. “I didn’t realise it was so hot,” she whispers, as she walks down the staircase from the balcony, shaking the pain from her palm that has already turned red. The incident went almost unnoticed by the handful of university students hunched over desks on the floor below, their Friday morning hangovers slowly dissipating above their heads, as the spring morning sunlight beams through the library’s many windows.
When I ask Bourdillon if the burn on her hand has healed a couple of weeks later, she tells me she’s forgotten all about it. “Oh my god!” she laughs over Zoom from her home in Hastings, burying her head in her hands. “It’s fine, honestly. I thought it was hilarious.” It’s perhaps testament to Bourdillon’s character: somehow finding levity and humour in moments of pain. At least, that’s how she comes across in the pages of her debut book, What a Girl Wants. The memoir recalls how she navigated the highs and lows of life, figuring out who she is as a woman, friend, lover and loved one. With a flick of the page, Bourdillon will take you from crying with laughter to crying with grief, yet she somehow manages to lift you up. Her writing has unquestionably a sense of humour and, most importantly, a sense of hope.
(Isaac Qureshi/Vada Magazine)Bourdillon is perhaps simultaneously her biggest cheerleader and critic in this book, in what feels like an exploration of her past that doesn’t sugarcoat. How honest did she want to be, I ask her. “I wanted to be truthful and honest, which I have been,” she replies, adding that she didn’t want to lie to the reader. “I wanted to convey both the joys and triumphs and beautiful things that I’ve had in my life, but I didn’t want to shy away from the pain and the trauma and the shame and the failure too.”
The humour that weaves the different fabrics of this book together, is something that she believes comes from growing up as a queer teenager who struggled with who they were. “I think that, as queer people, humour is such a powerful way for us to navigate the challenges that face us,” she says. “There are so many funny gay people, and there’s a reason why.” Yet as well as wanting the book to be entertaining and funny, she admits that she equally thought long and hard about how the other people who form part of her story were portrayed. “It’s a memoir, so there are other people in it,” she reasons. “I never want anyone to feel exposed… That’s not what I’m interested in. I’m not interested in throwing anybody under any buses in my life.”
It could be argued that one of the most important people in Bourdillon’s life today is her partner, Naomi. As well as featuring heavily in the book, Naomi also happens to be the book’s first reader. It’s part of her writing process, Bourdillon explains to me, whereby she will begin to write something in isolation, before reading it aloud to Naomi: “I gauge from her reaction whether or not what I thought is funny is actually funny, whether it’s interesting, or whether it’s not.”
Were there any parts that were tricky to read to Naomi? “I can tell you that she didn’t love that process when I was talking about my ex-girlfriends.” I begin to nod my head and smile, knowing exactly what she means. “Yeah, those parts,” she says, pointing at the screen. “But when we got to the part about meeting her, I think she loved it.” Bourdillon has included WhatsApp messages from when the pair first met, which she adds was a “joyful” experience of digging into the app’s archive and reflecting on how much they’ve both been through together. “It was like a gorgeous trip down memory lane.”
(Isaac Qureshi/Vada Magazine)Born and raised in the suburbs of Leeds, Bourdillon says that she’s fascinated about being northern. “There’s a shorthand, a shared sense of humour, a common ground,” she says of northerners. She moved down the road to Manchester for university, where she met her now ex-girlfriend and moved to Sydney, Australia with her. She then moved back to the UK, settling in London, before heading to Hastings, on the south coast, where she currently lives with her partner. Despite now living on the other side of the country, Bourdillon tells me she’ll always see herself as “a lezza from Leeds” – her accent and sense of humour leaving no doubt about her West Yorkshire roots.
As part of writing her memoir, she looked back on growing up just outside of Leeds. Bourdillon was, in her words, a tortured queer teenager, who grew up without a sense of belonging. Little did she know that Leeds’ queer community was booming during her coming of age. “Leeds was a hotbed of homosexual activity the whole time!” she beams, later discovering what the city’s queer scene had to offer. Bourdillon goes on to tell me that Leeds is home to the country’s oldest gay pub, but momentarily forgets the name. She opens up a new tab on her browser, and begins typing into Google. “Just fact-checking myself, live on air!” she narrates, whilst squinting at the screen, before finding the name she’s looking for: The New Penny.
It’s these little relics of LGBTQ+ history that she’s keen to share with readers of her book, as well as the notion of puncturing London’s queer scene bubble: “There’s a lot to be said about London’s queer nightlife, but actually, there’s loads of gorgeous stuff going on up north, which I think is brilliant and really worth celebrating and shouting about.”
(Isaac Qureshi/Vada Magazine)This certainly speaks to Bourdillon’s vocation as a journalist, opening the hearts and minds of readers to LGBTQ+ people, experiences and history. It was witnessing first-hand the power of queer storytelling though her work at DIVA that inspired her to write a memoir. “It really has taught me the power and the joy and the beauty of sharing our stories as queer people,” she says of being a journalist. “And the impact that has on people; how that can make people feel less alone, less ashamed, more connected to themselves and to the community.” Now, it is her turn to dispel some of that shame, by telling her own story.
Alongside the desire to tell her own story, Bourdillon explains that she was also fascinated to explore the contrast between two key points in her life: the closeted teenager who grew up in West Yorkshire, and the out and proud lesbian she has become. “I can see me at thirteen and me in my 30s, and how far I’ve come,” says Bourdillon, who adds that she often thinks about her teenage self. “Here I am, an out woman in my 30s with a long time girlfriend, editor-in-chief of the biggest sapphic magazine in the world. Like, super turbo gay, lesbian to the max… Comparing that with me at 13 years old, so deeply in the closet, so tortured, so drenched in shame. Snogging a girl, but not even being able to talk to her about it.”
(Isaac Qureshi/Vada Magazine)Alongside exploring her own journey when it comes to romantic and sexual relationships with women, the process of writing this book was also an opportunity for Bourdillon to hold a mirror up to the relationship she has with herself. One of the most striking things about the book, I tell her, is the way she writes about the relationship she has with her body – something which I’m sure will resonate with queer people of all genders. What made her include this in the book? “I cannot remember a time in my life when I have not been at war with my body,” she replies, explaining that body image forms part of one of her earliest memories as a child. Bourdillon says that she can remember being shamed about her weight at the age of four. “You carry that in you, as part of your shame and this feeling of wrongness.”
It’s this memory during her formative years that would ultimately go on to frame the way she felt about and viewed her body, adding that she always felt her body was “unruly” and something that she couldn’t get control of. Somewhat of an epiphany would come when Bourdillon slept with a woman whose body was similar to hers, an experience she writes about in the book. “She was the first woman who I’d ever slept with who had a body that was like mine – a curvaceous, naturally voluptuous figure,” she tells me. “I was like, this is undeniable. It’s sexy and it’s beautiful and it’s lovely.”
The experience presented somewhat of a counter-narrative to what Bourdillon argues society and the media put out when it comes to women’s bodies: “There was a realisation for me that actually women’s bodies don’t have to be a certain thing to be beautiful, and that if I can find the beauty in other women’s bodies, perhaps that can help me appreciate and celebrate the beauty of mine.” Although she acknowledges that sleeping with women hasn’t remedied her demons entirely, it has gone some way to making her feel “less horrific” about her body.
Now at the head of one of the most influential LGBTQ+ publications in the world, Bourdillon tells me that the responsibility to get it right for the community often plays on her mind. Not only do the life experiences she writes about in her memoir inform the editorial decisions she makes today, the magazine also has a sentimental connection. DIVA, the title which she now edits, punctuated those teenage years when she was still figuring out who she was. As someone who always loved magazines, Bourdillon recalls how she would hide a copy of DIVA between the pages of Cosmopolitan (only to hide it from other customers, she assures me, not to shoplift) whilst her cheeks turned red as she approached the newsagent’s counter to pay. Once home, the magazine provided her with a window into another world; one where she felt seen and accepted for who she was. It’s this sentiment that she hopes to provide to the current readers of the magazine.
There is also an undeniable pressure to meet the expectations of the magazine’s readers. When I ask her about this, she says that it can be challenging for one person or publication to tell the story of such a diverse community. “Because we’re in a marginalised community as queer people, sometimes there’s a lot of pressure on an individual to tell the story for everybody,” she explains. “And actually what I think is better is if we can have more queer voices, more queer stories. There are an infinite number of lesbian stories, there are an infinite number of queer stories. Just as there are an infinite number of straight stories. Everybody is their own unique person.”
In her book, she writes about discovering the TV series ‘The L Word’ and the positive impact that lesbian visibility on the small screen had on her. That said, when Bourdillon went in search of other lesbian storytelling, she struggled to find any. “It was like a desert wasteland, where inclusive queer representation should have been,” she recalls of that time. Today the pendulum, according to Bourdillon, might be swinging the other way when it comes to sapphic presentation in TV, film and music: “They’re calling it a lesbian renaissance!”
(Isaac Qureshi/Vada Magazine)Another topic that Bourdillon examines in her book is the heartbreak she has experienced in her life. Whilst she acknowledges that people might assume her book is solely about love in the romantic sense, I tell her I was particularly touched by the way she wrote about the love she has for her grandmother. “I couldn’t have written a book about being a woman who loves women, without talking about my granny,” she replies. “You’ve never seen any nan as glam as mine. She was just the absolute light of my life, and I adored her with my bones, and I still do.” Describing her granny as the Grace Kelly of grandmothers, it seems clear to me that her glamorous essence lives on in Bourdillon today.
In her memoir, Bourdillon writes about when her grandmother passed away, a time in Bourdillon’s life when things were coming to a head. It was, as she evokes, a moment of great change. I ask her about the singularity of grief she expresses in her book. “It’s not necessarily treated with the same gravitas as the grief of losing a parent, or a partner or, you know, another relative or a loved one,” she says of the grief of losing a grandparent. There is, in her view, a hierarchy of grief in society that doesn’t always account for the various nuanced relationships individuals have with different people in their lives. “I think that I felt self conscious about the size of my grief for my granny,” she admits. “But how much pain you feel is a testament to how much love there is.”
The book is, in many ways, an exploration of the different iterations of love. “It’s a book about being a woman who loves women in all senses of the word,” she says. “I couldn’t have written about who I am as a person and how I move through the world, and how I want to move through the world, without talking about the impact of that gorgeous relationship and that fabulous woman.”
Roxy Bourdillon is featured on Vada’s latest digital cover, photographed at Senate House Library in London by Isaac Qureshi. Her debut book, What A Girl Wants: A (True) Story Of Sexuality And Self-discovery, is published by Bluebird Pan Macmillan and is on sale now.
