YouSaid · the spoken record

Baroness Lola Young

lines on the record: 55
first: 2025-01-06
most recent: 2025-01-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I was stunned, to be honest, because this package came out of the blue. I hadn't got any warning that this package of stuff would come. And it was not that long after my mother died. And if I sound a bit vague about these dates, it's because there's a lot of confusing and sometimes contradictory information and sometimes I was left out of key communications. So I don't even have a clear sort of date in my mind as to when that was. But this little package, because as I say in that chapter, I'd never had, I'd never possessed a photograph of my mother.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that is an interesting question because we bandy about terms quite sort of in a footloose kind of way, you know, when you think about being traumatized or having cathartic experiences and everything. So I don't want to kind of make it, you know, too much sound like I'm some kind of amateur psychiatrist or whatever. But what I would say was a relief. Any respect, you know, to go through some of that stuff, and particularly when I found in the records some things that corroborated what I'd remembered and what I'd felt and other things that gave me kind of fresh insights into some of the characters, shall we say, that are scattered throughout that narrative.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that part of the process I found fascinating. And I did several kind of writers' retreats with the Alvon Foundation and tried to sort of work through it in a logical, systematic way. But when you're writing your life, just like life itself, it doesn't quite work out that way. So there was lots of kind of to-ing and fro-ing in terms of myself, let alone when it got to the point of editors looking at it. So the process was tough but necessary and ultimately.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's interesting because I had written a book before, but it was a very different kind of a book. It was an academic book, and that's more or less straightforward. You just got to plough through it and read all your sources and everything. But when you're drawing on yourself, not only in terms of factual information, but in terms of that emotional landscape and trying to think back through the decades to do what it felt like then. Inevitably you're imposing a kind of current framework on it, but you're trying also to capture, to evoke a different period and a different way of thinking, a different kind of cultural outlook to what we have to do.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the short answer to that is that originally I didn't want to write this book, but various friends and people said, look, this is a really interesting story. If you don't write it, maybe somebody else will own it and it'll not be in your own words. So I thought about it and I started on it quite some time ago, several years ago, but realized that it kind of wasn't going anywhere. It was kind of neat story, if you like, you know, from foster care to House of Lords and all of that. But it didn't kind of. didn't kind of move me in a funny sort of way. And then I discovered this whole thing about the care records. And that was a pivotal moment because it then added in this new ingredient. And although it was quite fraught, the process of finding them and reading them, in the end I think it was worthwhile.”
2025-01-06 · Intelligence Squared · My Childhood in the Care System, with Baroness Lola Young · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT