There was a time when Clare Bowditch believed you couldn’t be overweight and successful as a female Australian musician. A time when she felt too big, too loud, too much.
In the burgeoning stages of Bowditch’s music career, it was the local Melbourne rag, The Leader, that first asked to take her photograph after she won her first recording grant in 2002. She didn’t feel pretty enough or thin enough to be in the public spotlight.
Agreeing to be photographed took a small step of courage, but was a giant leap forward to Bowditch accepting that she deserved to be seen. Still, many of the pictures of her during those tentative early days in music are shot from the side, blurry or pixelated.
Now, Bowditch is fully in focus. When we meet, she’s glorious and glamorous, wearing a fiery red lipstick that matches her hair, bangles, handmade Kingston earrings and a dress she designed and had made from Frida Kahlo-inspired material gifted to her by Melbourne artist Violet Hartley. She embodies lyrics from her single Woman released this year: ‘‘Stand up and show me you/ I’m a woman now, you can see.’’
Clare Bowditch performing in May.Credit:Darren Middleton
Bowditch’s memoir Your Own Kind of Girl is an act of standing up and showing herself to the world. And if there’s one simple takeaway, it’s that Bowditch is everyone’s kind of girl. Her story — of struggle and survival — is one we can all share. At its heart, Bowditch writes, her memoir is ‘‘the story of the stories we tell ourselves and what happens when we believe them’’.
Clare Bowditch’s memoir is called Your Own Kind of Girl. Credit:James Brickwood
It is a story she promised she would share when she was 21 after suffering a nervous breakdown — ‘‘this whole story — the bad bits, and the good bits — so that whoever was reading it would know that they were not alone and that recovery was possible’’.
Now 44, Bowditch has found her place: in music, as an ARIA Award-winner with seven albums to her name and an eighth on the way next year; on radio as an ABC presenter; on TV in the series Offspring, and in social enterprise, as the founder of Big Hearted Business which helps forge links between creative and business industries.
But Bowditch’s story starts long before such success. In fact, her memoir doesn’t even cover her rise to become one of Australia’s most-loved personalities who crosses generational divides as smoothly as she does genres. Born the youngest of five, Bowditch was raised in a Catholic household by her nurse mother, who was born in Amsterdam, and her Australian father, a former Olympian fencer.
It is disturbing to read how young Bowditch was when she first felt aware of her size and started to link her body to her happiness and unhappiness, success and failure, inclusion and exclusion. In kindergarten, Bowditch remembers ‘‘wanting to be small, like the other children, and I remember how I never felt small, only big. Too big, even when I was very little.’’
In those formative early school years, Bowditch’s sister, Rowie, who was about two years older than her, was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of multiple sclerosis that left her in an intensive care ward for two years before she died. In that period, she was legally blind and unable to feel anything from the neck down.
Clare Bowditch, pictured centre, with her band the Feeding Set, from left, Libby Chow, J. Walker, Warren Bloomer and Marty Brown in 2003.
The young Clare didn’t have the language or cognition to deal with the grief and powerlessness she experienced after her sister’s illness and death, and her weight and food came sharply into focus. She was teased at school for her size, called Big Bird and Fatty-boom-bah. She felt ashamed, and it didn’t help that she couldn’t fit into shop clothes and had no larger role models to inspire her.
Her parents defended her weight, and pushed the idea that it was what was inside her that mattered. But in year four, Bowditch pleaded to be taken to a diet doctor and was put on an impossibly strict low-fat, low-carb, no dairy, no sugar diet. In year six, she used her pocket money to buy her first calorie counting book at the newsagency; at 12 she tried bulimia.
When she did lose weight, she was rewarded with the admiration of her peers and even their parents. Well-meaning comments entrenched themselves in her psyche, equating thinness with worthiness. Bowditch says she ‘‘made quite a f—ing job of my teenage years’’ — drinking, smoking, boys — and all the while she was stuck in a cycle of losing weight and putting it back on. When she was 21, she travelled to London and experienced a nervous breakdown.
The place of our power, the process of our power, is watching the thoughts that we think, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
It was the Australian doctor and health writer Claire Weekes, who Bowditch calls "the old gangster of mindfulness" – that helped her see a way forward. Bowditch still has Weekes’ 1962 book Self Help For Your Nerves, given to her by one of her mum’s friends after she returned to Australia from London. It’s tattered and dog-eared now, but Bowditch has continued to hold onto its ideas throughout her life. Most important for her as a young woman was the realisation that she has ‘‘some possibility of controlling the stories I tell myself and which ones I choose to believe.’’
"The place of our power, the process of our power, is watching the thoughts that we think, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, understanding that even though we didn't put those stories there, we have the power to change them," Bowditch says.
A precious Bowditch family photo taken a few months before Clare’s sister, Rowie, was moved into hospital. The children from left are Rowie, Anna, James, Lisa and Clare.
"And that's important. It's never about the weight, it's not about the diet, it's not about the emotion. It's not about who wants to f— us or not f— us, it's about this question of what are we telling ourselves about ourselves. What is acceptable for us, what stories that we're telling ourselves are we willing to swallow and which ones are we willing to actively and proactively change?"
Telling new stories was the key to her recovery from her nervous breakdown and helped give Bowditch the courage to pursue a career in music. She trained herself to disrupt her negative thoughts (now known broadly as cognitive behaviour therapy). She named the unhelpful voice Frank — and ‘‘f— off, Frank’’ is still her rallying cry. Frank had told her she was too big to be a musician and now she knew what to tell Frank.
Bowditch tried to write her memoir a couple of times in her 20s, and then shortly after she turned 40, she heard an interview with Dr Weekes, who died in 1990, replayed on the radio and remembered her promise to herself. She returned to the diaries she had kept since she was 13 — hundreds of them stacked under beds, in chests and filing cabinets and at her mother’s home.
"I knew 21 years ago that I would write this book and I'm really proud to have written it," Bowditch says. "I'm really proud to be a part of this conversation which is just a hopeful broadening of the conversation around how we deal with the human experience, the long tale of childhood trauma, the expectations of the world around us, and how we find independence and power in that.
"So, look, it's taken me a long time to get the courage to tell this story but now that I'm here, with the love and backing of my family and my community, it's actually a pretty empowering place to be.
"When I was 21, I had my one and only, genuine, authentic nervous breakdown, which was re-framed for me as breakthrough. And that proved to be true; I never had to go back there to that place again once I had a framework for understanding where to go with my suffering, how to transform it into something useful or potentially beautiful through my work.
"But the process of writing this book was at times deeply harrowing, and there were moments where I thought, 'Holy shit, in 20 years' time, I'm going to be writing a book about the breakdown I had now writing this book about the breakdown in my youth'."
She has been with with her partner, Marty Brown, a member of Melbourne band Art of Fighting, for 18 years. He was a drummer and self-taught sound engineer who recorded songs in his bedroom when they met through a mutual friend, John Hedigan, and formed a band called Red Raku. Their friendship turned into romance, and they now share three children – daughter, Asha, 16, and twins Oscar and Elijah, 12 – and still make music together.
Most days, Bowditch says, she feels comfortable in her body. In moments of doubt, she thinks of the importance of showing up for other women and girls like her.
"My body is a miracle," she says. "It gave birth to all these children, it has this voice that sings out of it, it's the source of all my pleasure, and I spent too many years in a bad relationship with it. So I work really hard on keeping that relationship good now.
"My head will always have a habit of trying to convince me to count myself out because of my size. But I've noticed over my many years and many different body shapes that this habit exists whether I'm small or large, and I just tell it 'f— off, Frank'. You know, I absolutely refuse to let it win."
How does memoir-making compare to music-making?
Clare (centre), aged 11 or 12, with her sisters Lisa and Anna.
"You always have a place to hide when you're writing a song," Bowditch says. "It's not necessarily about you. You can draw from your own experience but you can always hide. There's always the beauty of the melody, there's the other players, there's the way it's recorded and all of those choices. Writing a book is much rawer."
But as she sung so powerfully in her first single, Human Being, released in 2003: "I'm a human being. These storms make me ever more so."
Your Own Kind of Girl is published by Allen & Unwin at $29.99. Clare Bowditch will be in conversation with Yumi Stynes tonight from 6.30pm at St Stephen’s Anglican Church in Newtown.
Source: Read Full Article
