I will survive

Autobiography: The dark and troubling story behind a rags to riches fairytale life

Autobiography

I met Kerry Katona once. She was at the launch of one of the You're a Star competitions in Dublin. While interviewing her I remember thinking the former Atomic Kitten, all shiny blonde hair, cute brown eyes and proudly displayed baby bump, seemed like a nice girl. Bubbly, the tabloids would say. Up for a laugh. Later I went to the bathroom and she was in there puffing away on a cigarette despite the bump and having an argument with someone on her flashy mobile phone.

I kept thinking about that candid glimpse of Katona as I read her autobiography, Too Much Too Young. She seems to have had a worse childhood than that other "famous for being famous" young woman, Jade Goody. Towards the end of the book, written with ghostwriter Fanny Blake, Kerry is diagnosed with depression having had what amounted to a nervous break down after her split from ex- husband and ex-Westlifer Brian McFadden. When you read the book the diagnosis has an inevitability about it. The real surprise when it comes to Kerry Katona is that she managed to survive past her childhood at all.

It's hard to avoid the fairytale analogy, such is the literal rags to riches journey Katona has been on. So here goes: Once upon a time there was a little girl called Kerry who lived in Warrington, Cheshire, and later in London's East End with a series of foster parents or people she was told to call "Dad" who weren't her real "Dad" at all.

Her mother Sue had also grown up fatherless, shunted from one foster parent to another, in a childhood eerily similiar to Kerry's. Sue Katona was a manic depressive, desperate to be loved, blocking out real life with drink and drugs.

Things only got worse when she had Kerry after an affair with a married man who didn't want to know about his child. Happily ever after was not on the cards for either mother or daughter.

Katona's earliest memory is of watching as her mother slit her wrists after a row with her husband, one of several suicide attempts. She was a three-year-old in a red pinafore and white knee socks and shiny black patent shoes, watching as her mother ran a razor across her wrist. "I watch the blood streaming from her arm on to her tight blue jeans. I'm screaming and crying . . . that's my first memory and it's something no little girl should ever see."

Growing up, Katona was surrounded by her mother's gangster and heroin addict friends, often sleeping curled up on a chair in the pub while her mother engaged in increasingly abusive relationships. One of her "Dads", Dave Wheat, was especially dangerous. One night a row in the pub led to him stabbing her mother in the leg and threatening to gouge her daughter's eyes out. It's the most uncomfortable read in what is in parts a deeply uncomfortable book, Katona often having to act as protector to her mother instead of the other way around. After this incident, Sue was told to choose between Kerry and Dave. She chose him, which meant Kerry spent the next three years in care.

Sue and Kerry remain close despite everything.

By her mid-teens, Kerry was living in a hostel, desperate to become a page three model and trying lap dancing as a career before she was spotted in a nightclub and groomed to be one third of Atomic Kitten.

"I thought life would be different when I became famous," she says in the book. "But fame finds any cracks in your life and makes them bigger, takes a hundred photos of them and plasters them all over the front pages . . . your life stops being your own."

She met and fell in love with Dubliner Bryan McFadden on tour with the Kittens. Determined to invest everything in the relationship, she decided to leave the band and went to live with McFadden in Ireland.

Here, it seemed, was the grounded family life she craved. There was the marriage in Slane Castle in 2002, the two children and the posh house, all of which seemed like her happy ever after. It was an illusion though.

She recounts how after winning I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! in February 2004 her marriage began to fall apart. When McFadden ended the relationship over the phone she began abusing drink and drugs and ended up in rehab being diagnosed with depression.

I couldn't help rooting for Kerry Katona when, in the final chapter of the book, she informs us with characteristic optimism of a new phase in her life. It may seem too soon after her split with McFadden two years ago but she is now engaged again to a former taxi-driver, with another baby on the way. Her main ambition, she says, is to be a good mother. Against the odds she has achieved that and much more.

With this book Kerry Katona is no longer famous for just being famous. She's famous for having survived. And that's a much better place to be.

Róisín Ingle is an Irish Times journalist and presents Weekend Blend on Newstalk 106

Too Much Too Young Kerry Katona Ebury Press, 320pp. €14.99