My Public Me – A User’s Guide, Episode 2

THE FACE presents, as a partner to new Sky original I Hate Suzie, a podcast series. My Public Me – A User’s Guide is a four-episode discussion of the issues raised in the Sky show.

In part two, host Chanté Joseph is joined by Yrsa Daley-Ward. Born in Lancashire to a Jamaican mother and Nigerian father, in early adulthood Yrsa was a model and actor working first in the UK, then in South Africa. While in Cape Town she began writing and performing poetry.

Gaining a following as an ​“Instagram poet” (she has 178,000 followers), she self-published her first anthology, Bone, in 2014. In 2019 her memoir The Terrible (Penguin) won the PEN/​Ackerley Prize for ​“a literary biography of excellence”. This year she co-wrote Beyoncé’s Black Is King musical film/​visual album.

In a brilliantly illuminating conversation on the theme of mental health and how it’s perceived in the public and private spheres – challenges that the TV show’s Suzie Pickles (Billie Piper) knows only too well – Yrsa discusses writing poems about the ​“state of the mind”. Art, she says, ​“is the easiest way to talk about” such issues.

She also applauds social media ​“for bringing poetry from… people who are marginalised to the surface. Then there’s the flipside – people will come for you!” she says with a laugh, a real-life echo of the online mob who, in I Hate Suzie, descend on Piper’s character after the contents of her phone is hacked.

The message for both Suzie and Yrsa is clear: no matter how many IG followers you have, or how popular your TV show about ​“Nazi zombies”, neither will ably protect your sanity when the glare of public judgement is upon you.

Then, via her work as a model, Yrsa also knows the pressure of looking a certain way to help her career. ​“I was convinced I had to alter myself to fit the mould,” she admits.

Chanté can relate. ​“As a woman, I often feel like I need to prove myself,” our host replies, ​“at the expense of my own mental health. It doesn’t matter if I’m wilted or tired or overworked – I need to deliver on something. Because people have a stereotype of women who look like me – and now I need to not only deliver but over-deliver.”

These are challenges of which Suzie has been all too aware throughout her working life, starting as she did as a child star. Now, in her mid-thirties, must she accept that ​“aging Disney Princess”, with the emphasis on ​“aging”, is the best she can hope for?

Above all else, though, two sentiments are consistent in Yrsa’s powerfully honest writing. Firstly, ​“I approach situations from a place of love.” Secondly, ​“there really isn’t a boundary in the work.”

In the pages of The Terrible, she adds, ​“everything is out there” – an impulse and drive she shares with Piper and her equally boundary-pushing I Hate Suzie co-creator Lucy Prebble.