Your teenage daughter is beautiful, clever, happy and loving. But do you know where she was last night? In her novel In Bloom, Cordelia Feldman will tell you. And, as the Jewish phrase goes — start worrying now.
The novel opens as Cordelia’s protagonist, Tanya, and her friends are sparkling up for a night at Magic Realms night club. As they arrive, Tanya spots one of “the boys.”
“Benjy, have you got any sweeties?” I ask.`
“Maybe,” he says in a hushed voice, looking around, anxious. . . He likes to think he’s a dealer. Generally he just buys a few pills and the odd gram of speed at any one time.
“What’ve you got?”
“Christmas trees and green tulips.”
“Which one are better?”
“The green tulips are uplifting, giggly and floaty. The Christmas trees are heavier and more intense, people say they have heroin in them.”
It is 1997. Tanya and her friends take the pills, as they do every Thursday, and their night descends into a blur of dancing, tripping and sharing secrets with strangers; jaws gurning and legs wobbling before an eventual bleary-eyed taxi journey home as the sun comes up. Monday morning, they’re back at their prestigious private school, sitting A-levels. The fun descends into nightmare as just one of them, Tanya, develops a serious mental illness.
But this is no fiction.
Tanya is Cordelia, who based the novel on her own teenage years, when she and her nicely-brought-up Jewish friends spent their days revising and going to Topshop. Nights involved popping pills at raves. Cordelia was diagnosed as bipolar when she was 22, her life blighted by the disorder which, her parents believe — and her psychiatrist confirmed — could have been triggered by those “sweeties” so freely exchanged between her and her friends.
Cordelia Feldman as a teenager
Cordelia Feldman as a teenager
Cordelia had a story-book childhood. She was brought up in the wealthy suburb of Radlett where her parents, Teresa and Keith, my brother, are staunch members of a local synagogue. It was a safe, highly protected life of family outings, country excursions, horse-riding, and family teas at my father’s house every Saturday, when all the grandchildren would play hide and seek, or set off to the park. Later, she’d participate with gusto in our habitual raucous debates over the smoked salmon and cheesecake before she headed out for her nights of excess.
Cordelia was an exceptionally gifted child. She and her brother, Alexander, now 40, attended private schools where she excelled at every subject. She was reading at the age of three, started to write stories soon afterwards, and when she was eight she even had a poem published – in the Jewish Chronicle.
Like Tanya in her story, Cordelia began to experiment with drugs when she was 17. But signs of her mental illness only began to emerge when she was at Oxford University studying history. Scandalously, her condition went unnoticed at her college, where pastoral care seems to have been worse than cursory. It wasn’t until she came home after graduation and Teresa quickly saw that something was very wrong. That was when she began to see a psychiatrist. But she didn’t tell him about the drugs, so at first no one grasped the extent or nature of her illness.
Eventually she suffered a breakdown, described in agonising detail in the novel. She had woken up in a strange bed, covered in bruises and with no idea what had happened to her. She contacted the police who examined her and took her home to a frantically worried Teresa. She ended up in a psychiatric hospital for six weeks where she was finally diagnosed with what her psychiatrist said was a severe form of bipolar disorder.
I remember visiting her there when she was so frighteningly disoriented. But what was even more upsetting was the sight of her parents: my brother Keith slumped and ghostly pale, numbly bewildered. And Teresa, trying to be calm while trembling with barely-held-back tears.
Even then, her parents had no idea about the drug-taking until, when the police returned Cordelia’s clothes, Teresa found a pair of Ecstasy tablets in her bra. The incident is dramatised in the novel with a raw honesty.
“‘How could you do this to me, Tanya… You lied to me,’ she says. ‘I trusted you. How many times have you…?’. . . She looks so tired. She looks angry, of course. But she has aged about 100 years since I’ve been ill.”
What shocks her mother most, though, is the realisation that Tanya is not the only drug-user.
“It’s all my nice Jewish friends who you like… Nice girls do it too.”
I sound like an advert for Ecstasy.: ‘Ecstasy – the leisure drug of choice for middle-class private-educated teens. Nice girls do it too.’”
“Well they didn’t in my day,” Mum says, her voice quavering. “Nice girls didn’t take drugs then. I would never have smoked cannabis or taken LSD.”
“So, now they do. Things have changed. Everyone takes them now. It’s normal.
“I make my own decisions. I chose to take it. I wanted to.”
“Why do you have to reject everything your father and I believe in?”
Of course, all teenagers will rebel against the constraints of home. For Cordelia, living with such protective parents must have felt suffocating at times, just as she began to resent the quiet safety of her Radlett life.
“I wish we lived further into town in a less Jewish area,” Tanya remarks to a friend.
“It’s like living in a ghetto.”
After the initial crisis, though, Cordelia began to find ways to deal with her condition and to live as normal life as possible in her own Golders Green flat. For 14 years, she worked part-time for a literary and theatrical agency. A lifelong animal lover, she also began a new career as a dog-walker, which she found a calming antidote to the maelstrom of her violent mood swings. There were boyfriends, parties, holidays. She took a MA in creative writing and began working on In Bloom.
But then came the next devastating blow. At 33, Cordelia was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. Although her prognosis was somewhat gloomy she survived for more than eight years, though she is now very ill.
For her parents, it was simply the worst news any family could face. Cordelia herself, though, seemed to find a new resilience, determined once again to make the most of the life she had left. She threw herself into a flurry of new experiences.
Having studied tarot, she began to earn money giving readings online, and then went on to do a course in astrology, much to the surprise of her scientist parents.
Throughout these years Cordelia had kept a daily blog which not only detailed her own experiences, but also offered advice to others.
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Cordelia with her mother, Teresa and brother Alexander
And that’s what gave her the idea of publishing a second book, this time a memoir: an account of her life interspersed with lists of tips for others with cancer — everything from how to talk to people when you’re depressed, to the best make-up during chemotherapy.
Clearly, she was not going to go quietly. Instead, she would do all she could to leave a lasting legacy. In Bloom was published with an audio version which she read herself. Well Done Me came out last month.
As she became weaker, she began to rely on Teresa to copyedit and type the books. And I can’t help thinking that this was perhaps the most selfless of all the sacrifices she made for her daughter. How painful it must have been to relive her child’s traumas, and to tolerate the not always positive portrayals of herself?
Keith and Teresa must take some comfort from knowing that Cordelia was well aware of their unending devotion.
“Even though it’s not my fault, I can’t help feeling a sense of guilt that their lives are so miserable,” she wrote in Well Done Me. “Rather than spending their retirement on cruise ships and taking their grandchildren on days out, as all their friends do, they look after me and ferry me to and from hospital appointments and scans and trips to see my psychiatrist.”
And at least Cordelia has made sure that she will never, ever be forgotten.
In Bloom and Well Done Me by Cordelia Feldman are available on Amazon
