BODY & SOUL

‘I was 14, I didn’t really believe my mother was going to die’

Maddie Mortimer was a teenager, thinking about boys and parties, when her mother died of cancer. Now 26, she has written a powerful novel revisiting her loss

Maddie Mortimer
Maddie Mortimer
GEMMA DAY FOR THE TIMES
The Times

Maddie Mortimer was 14 when her mother, the TV director and journalist Katie Pearson, learnt that her breast cancer had returned, ten years after she hoped she’d seen the last of it. This time it was aggressive and had spread to her liver; it would give her just six months to live. In her final months Pearson wrote a lightly devastating column for this newspaper in which Maddie often featured.

“Eldest daughter tells me how she feels guilty, sometimes forgetting that I’m ill. I couldn’t be more delighted,” she wrote in one column. She recounts their puppy digging up corks and cigarette butts in the garden, evidence of an illicit house party.

At the time Mortimer, now 26, couldn’t fully accept what was happening, she