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Maggie & Me
- Author: Damian Barr
- Category: Non-fiction Biography / Memoir Current Affairs / Politics
- Publisher: Bloomsbury
- Pub date: 25 April 2013
- Length: 256 pages
About Maggie & Me
Born in 1976, Damian Barr is a child of Thatcher. She is his other mother. There for him when his parents were not, Maggie offered tough love during her eleven years as Prime Minister. A platinum blond symbol of power and order, she revolutionised the nation and dominated his often chaotic world. With wit and warmth MAGGIE & ME traces Barr’s chaotic childhood during dramatic social shifts. Each chapter explores the impact on him of Maggie’s controversial policies: how privatisation closed the steelworks his father worked in, how Section 28 stopped his teachers talking to him about growing up gay, and how Care In the Community led a mad aunt out of the asylum and into his home. MAGGIE & ME is a unique take on the 1980s and the clash between the personal and the political. Growing up in a former coal-mining village in Scotland, Barr was taught to hate Maggie but was ultimately freed by Thatcherism. In a new era of Conservative government, and with Meryl Streep immortalising The Iron Lady in film, his startlingly honest story is more relevant than ever.
About the Author
Damian Barr, is a writer, columnist, playwright and salonnière. He has co-written two plays for BBC Radio Four and his first book was published by Hodder. Get It Together made the quarterlife crisis the must-have modern malaise. He has been shortlisted for a British Press Award and written for The Times, Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, Evening Standard, Esquire, Harpers, Arena, GQ and Granta.
He made headlines as the world’s first ‘reader in residence’ travelling the world reading stories aloud to hotel guests in his PJs. He is creator and host of the hugely successful Shoreditch House Literary Salon whose guests include Diana Athill, David Nicholls, John Waters, Helen Fielding, Geoff Dyer and James Frey. He also runs Reading Weekend. At home in Brighton Damian grooms his fancy chickens and tirelessly mixes cocktails in his quest for the perfect martini.