The mother of all blogs

If you’re one of the estimated 50 million and counting bloggers across the world hoping to find fame and fortune with online diaries, brace yourself. 

Less than six weeks after launching her blog 'Wife in the North' in January last year, Judith O’Reilly secured a £70,000 publishing deal with Viking Penguin. And that was just the start. Her 'blook' (painful new-speak for a blog that has been turned into a book) is being printed in 12 countries at time of writing; has been serialised in The Sunday Times and The Telegraph; and was chosen as Radio 4’s Book of the Week.

Wife in the North documents Judith's bittersweet travails after her husband Alastair somehow manages to persuade his successful, cosmopolitan, heavily pregnant and London-loving wife that life in rural Northumberland would be much better for them and their then two - now three – children.

Judith did not realise quite how challenging her new environment would be, especially with her husband schlepping down to London for work pretty much constantly, leaving her alone and lonely. 

The strapline of the blog reads: 'Just how grim can it get up north? Very. One woman's lonely journey into the Northern heartlands.'

When she started the blog it was in the dark, early days of the family’s relocation and she did it as a way of alleviating her loneliness.

“It was a diversion, a way of reaching out and communicating with others,” she says. “I had never experienced loneliness like it before and one evening, when my husband was – as usual – away in London working and the kids were in bed, I thought: ‘Why not?’.”

Judith’s rise into the publishing stratosphere has been jaw-droppingly speedy; but before the phenomenon that is Wife in the North she spent years honing her craft as a journalist on local and national newspapers. Judith was also a political producer for Channel 4 News and BBC2's Newsnight. Most recently, she was the education correspondent for the Sunday Times.

"Although I had been a journalist for years, I had never really written in this way before outside of letters to friends and relatives; in a humorous, first-person way. At the end of the day you can either write or you can’t.”

And write she can. Judith's pithy and poignant observations make me laugh out loud – only Spike Milligan, James Herriot and, more recently, Giles Coren have hitherto managed this.

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Excerpt from Wife in the North by Judith O'Reilly:

I have had enough babies to know I do not like health visitors. If I were to write a dictionary for mothers based on experience accumulated over the years, my definition of a ‘health visitor’ would read:

Someone who arrives uninvited on your doorstep soon after you have returned from an overcrowded maternity ward with your new baby who screams like a banshee if put down for a blink. You are so frightened by the noise that you decide you are a believer in kangaroo care and that you do not want to put the baby down even for a cup of tea. This is the first of many lies you tell yourself as a mother. You neither know, nor care, where your husband is. You do not like him any more. You are, of course, holding the baby when there is a ring on the doorbell. You are wearing a grubby cotton waffle dressing gown. It is tied with a worn pair of black nylon maternity tights and you sport a muslin square on your shoulder. You and the muslin square do not smell nice.

‘Hello,’ says the woman on the doorstep on Anywhere Street, Anyplace Town. ‘I am your health visitor. This is Mary Jane’ – and she points to a large girl with a bob standing next to her. ‘She is training to be a health visitor. I hope it’s all right if she sits in.’

Black-eyed with exhaustion and grim-faced from the agony of learning how to breastfeed, you nod at Mary Jane, who nods back. ‘Right,’ says the health visitor, settling herself into the only armchair without laundry on it. Mary Jane perches her ample posterior on the sofa. The health visitor gets out a clipboard and a Biro. ‘We haven’t met before, have we? How are you getting on? Is that the baby? Sweet.’ She asks a few questions, ticks a few boxes. She leans in a little, pen poised. ‘“In the last seven days, the thought of harming myself has occurred to me . . .?” ’ She looks straight at you. ‘“Quite often, sometimes, hardly ever, never?”’ She waits. Mary Jane waits. The noose is knotted and swinging expectantly from the plastic flex going into a dusty cream lampshade on the landing. In the sitting room, you widen your eyes slightly. ‘No. Gosh. Suicide? Golly. Never. I’m fine, thank you.’
She ticks a box.

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Judith tinkered around with the blog for a few weeks before publishing it, then used her journalistic nouse to promote it. “I had always read the MP Tom Watson’s blog, so I emailed him asking him what he thought of mine and whether he had any tips to improve it.” Tom didn’t have any tips to improve it; he thought it was excellent as it was and immediately linked to it from his site. The following day the political commentator Iain Dale, another prolific blogger, added a link on his site. It was then picked up by blog god and Daily Dish writer Andrew Sullivan in the States. "I started getting thousands of hits daily then; it really took off," says Judith.  It wasn’t long before publishing agents were hot on her tail. 

“The speed with which it happened was incredible,” says O’Reilly. “One minute I was sitting alone hacking away at a computer for no other reason than something to do, the next I was being feted by publishers, and people were banging on about getting it onto TV.”

So we’ve established that Judith is an excellent writer – but there are many talented writers out there. Why does she think she has been so spectacularly successful?

“The book touches many themes close to people’s hearts, especially women's hearts," says Judith. "Giving birth, moving house, coping with elderly parents, finding new friends. Then there’s the discussion around women’s roles as wives and mothers, and of loss and self-sacrifice and all the pressures that puts on you.

"And then there’s the poetic side in descriptions of the beauty of Northumbria, and it is a stunningly beautiful place. Although I try to write in a comical way, a lot of what I write about is not funny at all, and I think the themes touch many people.” 

Why Northumberland, I ask. If your husband wanted green spaces while you wanted Soho House, what was wrong with the Home Counties?  "My husband sees Northumberland as his spiritual home," says O’Reilly. "He spent many happy childhood holidays here and wanted our children to enjoy the same. We’d been on holiday there many times over the years and, when he saw a cottage for sale, I think he thought it was fate."

Judith has become something of a local celebrity since all this Wife in the North stuff started, being called upon to open fetes and what not, but what do the locals make of finding themselves laid bare in her blog and book?

"I’ve yet to be met with a negative reaction,” she says. “The way I portray people is entirely affectionate. I would never dream of slagging off someone I know. I’ve had nothing but a positive response from people around here, and of course the Northumberland Tourist Board is over the moon about the whole thing.”

It probably says more about me than I feel absolutely comfortable revealing when I say I expected to dislike Wife in the North. I assumed it would be a kind of knock-off Bridget Jones Goes North complete with patronising passages about how a welly-flinging contest is the highlight of the local social calendar. But O’Reilly gets the balance between metropolitan snob and country ingénue spot on. It’s a warm, engaging, moving and, most of all, funny tale, full of self-mockery, and one that deserves the many plaudits it is bound to receive. 

Wife in the North by Judith O'Reilly is published by Penguin, RRP £7.99. Order your copy.

www.wifeinthenorth.com