BRYONY GORDON: Lily Allen was utterly honest with me when we talked a few weeks ago. I know what’s really going on – and I applaud her decision

Just before Christmas, I was asked to interview singer and actress Lily Allen on stage at an event to mark Addiction Awareness Week.

I’ve interviewed a lot of high profile people in my career, from Prince Harry to President Biden’s son Hunter, but for some reason, Lily was the person I felt most nervous about beforehand.

Maybe it’s because, like me, she’s known as a bolshy, no-holds-barred kind of woman, and I worried we might clash.

Or maybe, it was because I’d been reading stories about her ‘worrying weight loss‘, the fact she posts pictures of her feet on an Only Fans account, and the demise of her marriage. Would she be a preening prima donna who sulked and gave me one-word answers?

Imagine my surprise, then, when a put-together Lily showed up, without an entourage, greeting me with a hug. No airs, no graces, no diva demands.

Backstage, she ate a packet of ready salted crisps and we discussed what we would talk about – she was happy for me to ask her anything I wanted about her sobriety and addiction, but the organisers had made it clear I shouldn’t pose any questions about her husband, the actor David Harbour.

This wasn’t a problem – our job that night was to shine a light on addiction, not her marriage. Like me, Lily is an ambassador for the Forward Trust, a charity that does so much to help people trying to recover from dependency on drugs and alcohol.

Bryony with Lily Allen at an event for Addiction Awareness Week, where the singer spoke openly about her problems 

It’s a role we have both taken on because of our personal experiences – Lily is five years sober, while I am seven.

Perhaps that is why our chat on stage felt surprisingly intimate and warm, with the 39-year-old welling up when we spoke about the guilt we both felt about being mothers in active addiction, and the effect our alcoholism will have had on our children (Allen’s daughters are now 13 and 12).

Lily was incredibly open and honest. She didn’t shy away from discussing how hard it was to be a sober woman in an industry soaked in booze and drugs.

Getting clean hasn’t all been sunshine and flowers – she was forthright about the paralysing anxiety she felt over her songwriting now that she didn’t have anything to numb herself with.

As is so often said to people entering recovery: the best thing about getting sober is that you get your feelings back. And the worst thing? You get your feelings back.

Lily has been more honest than most in detailing just what it’s like to get those feelings back. In the weeks since I interviewed her, she has chronicled the state of her mental health on her podcast, Miss Me?.

Last week, she told listeners she was taking a break from the podcast for a few weeks, to focus on her mental health, and it is said that she has checked in to an £8,000-a-week trauma clinic in the US in an effort to feel better.

‘There will be speculation, because of the amount of time that I’m going to be taking away, that I’m going to drug rehab, and I’m not,’ she explained to her friend and co-host Miquita Oliver.

‘I’ve not relapsed … I’m finding it hard to be interested in anything. I’m not in a good place. I know I’ve been talking about it for months, but I’ve been spiralling and spiralling and spiralling, and it’s got out of control.

‘I came to the Miss Me? Christmas lunch and had a panic attack and had to go home,’ she continued. ‘And I went to the theatre with my friends … and I had to leave at the interval… I can’t concentrate on anything except the pain that I’m going through. And it’s hard.’

There will be people who read this and feel alarmed for Lily, but I am not one of them.

 Lily with her husband David Harbour at the Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2020

Because this looks like the behaviour of an emotionally mature woman, one who has made an incredibly wise decision to look after herself.

I would be far more concerned if Lily was out there walking red carpets. Under the circumstances – the breakdown of her second marriage, and the discovery that her estranged husband is already on the celebrity dating app Raya – checking into a clinic for the sake of her mental health seems eminently sensible to me.

It’s not even unusual for people in recovery. After the initial thrill of stopping drinking wears off, you’re left to face whatever it was you were drinking for.

In 2023, I went to a similar clinic in Europe to ‘top up’ my recovery, and refresh my commitment to sobriety after six-and-a-half years without a drink.

I was depressed – why was I feeling so low given that I was no longer drinking and drugging myself into oblivion? It was at that clinic, that I learnt that sometimes, feeling bad is a sign that you’re doing pretty well.

‘Surrendering to the heaviness of how you feel is a real mark of maturity, Bryony,’ one counsellor explained to me. ‘Active addicts deal with life by avoiding it. Healthy adults deal with it by facing it head on.’

It’s true. And it’s why I applaud Lily for her decision. Like many other people in recovery from addiction, I suspect that it’s not a breakdown she’s experiencing, but a breakthrough

Congratulations to Timothee Chalamet, who managed to find one of the few functioning Lime Bikes in London, which he used to travel to the premiere of his new movie, A Complete Unknown.

If only he’d parked it across the red carpet so none of the other guests could get past, he would have perfectly captured the full frustrating experience of living in a major UK city.

Would anyone miss the Oscars?

Earlier this week there were rumours, now squashed, that the Oscars might be cancelled due to the terrible wildfires in LA.

When I read this, my only thought was: who cares? The Oscars haven’t been relevant, or interesting, for a long time – they’ve only been livened up by Warren Beatty having a senior moment, or Will Smith having an angry one – and I couldn’t name a single film that is getting Academy Award hype.

Indeed, I doubt anyone would notice if, this year, the show doesn’t go on!

 Finally I can officially say I’m fat but fit

As an extremely active obese person, I was cock-a-hoop to read a new report by doctors, which suggests professionals create a ‘fat but healthy’ label for plus-size folk who exercise.

‘Current measures of obesity … provide inadequate information about health at the individual level,’ says the Lancet report.

I hope the NHS will take this on board because if there’s one thing more exhausting than running a marathon, then it’s running a marathon while listening to strangers tell you you’re too fat to be running a marathon!

Confidence clinic

If you’re doing RED January, short for Rise Every Day, a mental health initiative that encourages people to exercise every day of the month, your enthusiasm might be flagging around now. In which case, remember this bit of advice: if I give exercise just one hour of my day, it will give me 23 back!