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Trashy book lovers avert your eyes, because The Invisible Girl is no girl-meets-boy, girl-leaves-boy, girl-marries-boy easy read. Instead it's the story of comedy writer Debbie Barham, a girl who found comedy, but who also found anorexia and left food, and eventually life, behind. Debbie was a successful writer who upped sticks for the big smoke when still a teenager and ended up writing gags for such luminaries as Clive Anderson and Rory Bremner. But it soon became clear that she didn't quite have the life that others envied her for. Her father, Peter Barham, left his daughter and wife when Debbie was a toddler and flitted in and out of her life only periodically until the day she turned up on his doorstep, weighing just four stone. She moved in with him and for the following nine months he cared for her, worrying each day that he'd find her dead the next morning. The Invisible Girl is his incredibly moving memoir of that time. Debbie died of anorexia in her mid-20s, a reclusive inhabitant of her Docklands flat. The book opens shortly afterwards, with her father's visit to her home, where he discovers that his daughter, who'd spent her last night writing gags for the Daily Mirror, had sent herself helium balloons the day before she died bearing the message, 'Chin up Debs, it can only get better.' For Debbie Barham it didn't, but hopefully other sufferers of this awful illness might read her father's book, and it could. |
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Peter Barham – The Invisible Girl