Lindsay Nicholson MBE, journalist, author and survivor

With a career at Hearst spanning two decades, including 18 years at the helm of Good Housekeeping, numerous awards, an MBE for services to journalism and equality and now two memoirs under her belt, Lindsay Nicholson’s life can at first glance suggest ‘success’. But her journey has been blighted with devastating personal tragedy, including the deaths of her husband and young daughter from leukaemia.  

While being blindsided with grief, Nicholson managed to keep going, balancing her career with single parenting (she was pregnant with her second daughter when her husband died) and went on to marry a second time. Her life was on track, but when in 2016, her car crashed headlong into a lorry, her mental state was no longer able to cope; not just with the impact of the accident, but everything she had endured for more than 20 years.  

Here she explains how her new memoir, Perfect Bound: A memoir of trauma, heartbreak and the words that saved me, describes how she had to learn to stop compartmentalising and live in her body in order to rebuild her life - again. 

In 2016 I was in a terrible accident, where my car crashed headlong into a lorry 

I later learned that it was because a suicidal man had run onto the motorway and the lorry had jackknifed when tried to avoid hitting him. Somehow, everyone involved survived but it was an extraordinary incident and incredibly confusing because although I thought I was fine, I clearly wasn’t. 

The accident brought up all these feelings from the past, when my husband and my child had been ill and then died. Feelings that I thought I’d buried, but they were coming back and I couldn't handle it. I was crying every day but carried on going to work anyway, and after being prescribed antidepressants started to feel slightly better.  

Around the same time by second husband was acting strangely  

And when I found messages from another woman on his phone, I confronted him. He denied there was anything in it, and I chose to believe him. However, days later I found him on the phone to a woman, and while anyone in their right mind would have left there and then, I wasn’t in my right mind and made a grab for his phone to find out who she was. But he whipped his hand away, in doing so sending his phone flying and smashing onto the ground.  

Immediately he called 999 and said his wife had broken his phone, which led to two police officers taking me to the station where I spent the night in the cell. The likelihood of this level of response to a woman reporting a man for breaking her phone is slim and I’ve discovered since this experience that domestic violence accusations against men are so rare that they seem to be taken more seriously; with accused women three times more likely to be arrested than a man. 

This was one of my inspirations for writing Perfect Bound. 

I felt a responsibility to share what I’ve been through in case there are others out there that have too. Since publication, I’ve seen been contacted by women who have been prosecuted for domestic violence without any basis, and the loss to them has been huge - their homes and their children.   

To tell my story authentically I felt I had to share all of it, but I’d hidden my second husband’s infidelity from my mother through a sense of shame. But when I told her, she was incredible and if I could pinpoint one factor that has enabled me to stay resilient through all of this, it is my family and friends. I’m very lucky in that I have close relationships to my mother, brothers, cousins and friends; they are the people that will pick you up when you’re down. 

When life continued to unravel, I found salvation in horses. 

After my marriage broke down I left my home and lived in rented accommodation, but shortly after that, I was made redundant from my role as editorial director for Good Housekeeping. I had always loved work, I had dedicated huge swathes of my life to it – it was my safe space. In fact, the day after I was released from the police cell I went straight back to work, mortified that I’d even had one day off. So I was unprepared for losing it all and found myself hitting absolute rock bottom.  

I was lucky to have the opportunity to travel to California where there is the practice of using horses as therapy, as they are more sensitive than other animals. 

During one of my first sessions I was in thrown off the back of a horse, and the trainer called out ‘Can you feel your feet?’. I thought ‘What? I’m lying on the floor with horse hooves dangerously close to my head!’. But her point was if you can’t feel your feet, if you’re not connected to the earth, you are always in danger. There was nothing else to do but breathe, and learn to feel my feet. 

I now understand the quote: ‘The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master’ 

I thought the mind was everything and that you could think through everything. When creating magazines I would get all the research, focus groups etc, calculate them all together and then produce ‘the ideal magazine’.   

But I didn't realise that the mind will tell you stories the whole time, it will rationalise things, it will fail to notice things. When I discovered my ex-husband was cheating on me, my body would have said: run, get out of this situation, but I didn’t hear it because I was living up in my head saying, “This isn’t happening to me”. 

But our bodies aren’t just robots that carry our brains around, they tell us how we feel about all our senses, so what I would say to anyone now is: you have to live through your entire body, to live well.  

I’m grateful for a lot of what has happened to me. 

I will never be okay with the terrible deaths of my husband and child, but the man who ran in front of the lorry actually did me an enormous favour. In his terrible, terrible desire to end his life he inadvertently exposed all the things I was refusing to admit. I didn't know it, but before that night, I was only living half a life. 

• Perfect Bound: A memoir of trauma, heartbreak and the words that saved me, (Mudlark, £20) is out now.

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