Well, it isn’t fine now, they said, it’s much worse, and coupled with your hormone levels and your age and – hang on a minute, I thought, your age? In the operating theatre, a baby was passed over the white curtain to me and she was my daughter, she was a broken star, a bloodied astronaut, a bloodied moon. It felt as if something beyond me had written it. I was only just into my 30s – all right, I was 34 – but nobody had ever said your age to me in that tone of voice, suggesting that I had used a lot of my age up already, rather than not had enough of it yet. I went home, shut the door of my apartment and cried for a week. She now lives in Hackney, East London, with her daughter and their dog. I'd never paid a household bill that didn't mention bailiffs, and my idea of exercise was to go and stand outside a famous person's house and stare until I'd convinced myself that I lived in it.But my life in LA was happy; free of care and consequence. See More.

I hadn’t meant not to have a baby either, by which I mean I always thought I’d have children one day. The bad news, however, was that while they were poking around, they had discovered some trouble in my ovaries. What I knew were exciting men, egotistical men, men who ran fast, whom you could sometimes run alongside, as long as you didn’t let out a single whisper of genuine need.

Sophie Heawood grew up in Yorkshire. Sophie Heawood. Even if you don’t like any of the paintings in there, take a close look at the frame.

The numbers balanced out fine after that. So I went straight out and found one for ten dollars at a Goodwill in the Valley, and another for 20 bucks in one of those council thrift stores on Fairfax, West Hollywood. The latter one is particularly fine. Sophie Heawood. Men’s or women’s. I often buy crap paintings with a nice frame and just yank the art out of it when I get home. Something like that. Except it’s not the end, is it? Also any sort of glass dishes to bake things in. Every ticket comes with a copy of The Hungover Games delivered directly to your door! I tried to find a bigger apartment in LA, one more suited to babies and less to parties.

6) ART. Always amazing. © 2020 Sophie Heawood. A wave of anger rushed over me. We had known each other for about seven years by this point, ever since a mutual friend had introduced us backstage after one of his shows and our eyes had locked. Feature writer for The Times. I always said they were idiots.

Finally they told me that there was good news and bad news.

Anyway, I’ve been a repeat offender in charity shops since I was about 13 and developed an obsession with wearing oversized blazers that always made my grandmother protest, “Ugh darling, you can’t possibly buy that, a man surely DIED in it.” I suppose if you’re a granny, you know that charity shops are where clothes go when you die, but 13-year-olds with limited pocket money are immortal. She was the smallest person I had ever held and the biggest thing I had ever seen.

What an idiot I had been, thinking that I could go back and make a family later, that I could work out how to have a relationship with a nice man later. And when my monologue ended, he smiled and said, “Sophie, all the doctors have said to you is that you can only get pregnant on purpose, not by accident.
Want an ad-free experience?Subscribe to Independent Premium. I could barely commit to reading a magazine, and I wrote for magazines for a living.

As a single parent, I have had to provide both things, the romance and the rules. Proper vintage American and looks like it cost ten times that amount. They perform functions like preventing the same content from reappearing, ensuring ads are displayed and, in some cases, selecting content based on your interests. @heawood. I didn’t like it. The structure and playground, walls and soft landing, good cop and bad cop. I find it odd when people say that giving birth was the single best day of their life.

It was an idealised version of home, and it lived somewhere vaguely in my future as an unspecified certainty.

I've spent the past couple of years based in LA, interviewing Hollywood celebrities for The Times, but … I pretended to be doing Dry January, hiding the very confusing, nagging feeling that eventually led to me taking a pregnancy test. In fact, I talked so fast when he answered that he couldn’t hear what I said, which meant I had to take a deep breath and deliver my big news all over again. Sophie Heawood: Can a colour be brought to heel? I have also contributed to the Guardian, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Grazia, NME, Time Out, and others. View all newsletter.

Sophie Heawood: The new cool is... ciggies with no logo, Sophie Heawood: Suddenly, excellence is the new normal, Sophie Heawood: Boring! With my tail between my legs, I moved back to London and began attending antenatal classes, where the husbands and boyfriends were taught all the helpful things they could do. I slammed the laptop shut and got on with my day. SOPHIE HEAWOOD.

A day after that I was in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills. We use cookies on this site to enable certain parts of the site to function and to collect information about your use of the site so that we can improve our visitors’ experience. Sophie has written for many publications including The Times, Guardian, Observer and Vogue. You must only buy the mugs if you never had a father and need to pretend that somebody in your family went on a corporate away-day to SUNSHINE GOLF TAMPA RECRUITMENT JAMBOREE in 1987.

By the time we got home I was unable to sit down. Targeting cookies are used to make advertising messages more relevant to you and your interests.

I took a big gulp of the whisky that was on my side of the bed while I laughed and said that we didn’t need to use anything, because I definitely couldn’t get pregnant. That was, until I came down to earth - with a bump.So this is the story of how I staggered from partying in Hollywood to bringing up a baby in Piss Alley, Dalston; how I never did find a copy of What To Expect When You Weren't Even Fucking Expecting To Be Expecting, and why paternity testing is not a good topic for a first-date conversation.People always said I'd find love where I least expected it.

Schools.

So you can be too, All hail, the new suffragettes. These phone conversations continued, over the weeks, turning into a big old argument: disbelief, terror and sometimes tenderness, too.

This was unreal life, where a friend offered me a free place on a health retreat on a ranch in Mexico, and I’d go to power yoga lessons where they told me and the wealthy Californians who surrounded me to feel the pain, and I felt the pain so much that I could barely manage the trip back to LA.

**AN OBSERVER, EVENING STANDARD, RED AND COSMOPOLITAN BEST BOOK OF 2020**. It wasn’t clear to anyone quite where this agony was coming from, or if it had anything to do with the exercise at all.

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Regardless, the doctor continued, I had the best kind of infertility, because I could still carry a child in my own womb.

Oh, I know about that, I said, I was diagnosed as having polycystic ovary syndrome in my 20s, I’ve been told it’s probably fine.

4) BLAZERS, macs and woollen winter coats. This was not how I had grown up, but it wasn’t a million miles from it either. Analytics cookies help us to improve our website by collecting and reporting information on how you use it.

The journalist Sophie Heawood always assumed she would have a baby. About Sophie Heawood. Exactly how I thought La Vida Farmhouse was going to appear when I was, in fact, living in a one-bedroom rented apartment in West Hollywood in 2010 isn’t clear. A couple of days after the test, I had to tell him. Nobody would rent one to me, not once they’d taken a look at my rapidly growing bump and my rapidly shrinking income. I had to summon up all of the strength inside me to break it to the Musician that he was going to be a father. The world has limited resources – why not buy stuff that already smells a bit. I remember hearing a noise and looking up and seeing him, a man I’ll call the Musician, grinning down at me. Old dead people always have the best vases and you can pick them up for about dirt cheap. Then I was beside the swimming pool, deserted but still floodlit.

The good news was that the MRI scan had revealed the main problem: I had something like a slipped disc and it would resolve itself naturally within a week or two if I was sensible, and simply became addicted to industrial-strength painkillers instead. Her parents were thrilled. I realise that buying second-hand electrical goods gives you the winning card in the How To Die In A House Fire game, but all I can say is that I am Not Dead Yet. Was I taunting myself with a child who had already turned out to be a ghost? She was a missile coming straight for me; an answer to the question that my body asked without me knowing. I can safely say that giving birth was the single worst day of my life. Charlotte Church: The voice of an angel gets down and dirty, Sophie Heawood: Jodie Foster's 'not-coming-out' speech can bring about, David Bowie has gone from new to old – and what a beautiful thing it, Sometimes, competitive blokes are best ignored, Kate Winslet's third attempt: The importance of being married, There's a book for everyone – even royalty, Amazon should be paying more tax, so let's boycott them until they do, I was scared into not drinking during pregnancy. I hadn’t meant not to have a baby either, by which I mean I always thought I’d have children one day. Sophie Heawood I hadn’t meant to have a baby at all.

It came from me like a bark. Sophie Heawood is a leading British journalist, who writes about modern life and interviews celebrities for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and Vogue, leading to a nomination for Interviewer of the Year at the British Press Awards, 2019. I had a relationship with reality that could at best be described as negligible. All right, the single worst two days of my life.

Of course, this shouldn’t have been a thing in open-minded London in the 21st century. The loneliness of the long-distance runner has nothing on the loneliness of the single person in an antenatal class. My specialist subject was celebrities, and my own relationships made their marriages look eternal. … Here is what you should buy in charity shops: 1) VASES. The next day, when I got home, I sat down at my computer, opened a blank document and typed a paragraph that began with these words: “And one day I will tell you all about how you were conceived in a hotel room in Hollywood.” My hands seemed to be typing by themselves. What happens when a one-night stand has life-changing consequences. I spent a whole day being wheeled around to different tests, and having a cash machine wheeled right up to my face by a credit-cardiologist. I’ve just been reading Vogue and it’s full of eulogies for autumn 2010’s camel-coloured wool coats.

Charity shops are full of death, but a nice sort of death that really wants to come to life again.