Kirsty Young reveals birth father’s ‘rejection’ of her – and opens up about the famous face who annoyed her
Kirsty Young says she holds no grudge against her estranged birth father, who abandoned her when she was just a few weeks’ old, saying ‘there’s no scores to be settled’.
In a candid admission, the 56-year-old former Desert Island Discs host told Elizabeth Day’s podcast How to Fail that one of her biggest failures was ‘failing in exciting the interest of my birth father enough for him to stick around beyond a few weeks.’
Young says she grew up ‘very deeply cared for and deeply loved’ by her mother, and was ‘cared for very well by my stepdad’.
However, she added that that there was a point of realisation that her birth father, who she has met just once ‘briefly’ as a teenager, had ‘rejected’ her.
The broadcaster, who has two grown-up children with ex Soho House CEO Nick Jones, told the series: ‘Essentially, I mean it’s very uncomfortable to use the word rejection, but of course that’s what it is.’
She explained: ‘My mother was in an extremely difficult marriage where she was treated very, very poorly and ended up on her own with two children because she couldn’t put up with my biological father’s behaviour and he didn’t appear to want to be engaged in his two tiny children’s lives. I’m going to leave it at that.’
Day asked the TV presenter, who returned to broadcasting after four years out with chronic pain condition fibromyalgia to host the late Queen’s funeral in 2022, if she had forgiven her father.
The BBC star, originally from East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, said: ‘I don’t know him and I don’t know his story because I don’t have a relationship with him.
The BBC broadcaster, 56, told How to Fail with Elizabeth Day that she had met her biological father just once ‘briefly’ at 16
Young was speaking to Elizabeth Day on the latest episode of How to Fail: She told the podcaster that she has contemplated if her career choice had been influenced by her biological father’s rejection of her
‘It’s not something I harbour or feel that there’s a score to be settled. It’s just what happened.’
Young added that her father’s absence had perhaps influenced her career choice, saying: ‘I chose something that was in front of the camera or on mic. And why did I choose that?
‘Partly because that’s where my capabilities lay, but also I think because I like people to like me. Do you like me? Do you like me now? Am I nice? Is this good enough? It doesn’t feel like that. That’s not the thing at the front of one’s head. It surely is in the mix.’
The broadcaster, who presents her own podcast, Young Again, for the BBC, also revealed how she wishes she hadn’t been so nice when author Malcom Gladwell recently tried to change one of her questions on the series.
Young’s first question to the Canadian author and journalist, who wrote the bestseller Outliers, was reworked on air by Gladwell.
In the awkward exchange, he told her ‘A good question is…’ and began changing the question she’d originally asked on regrets.
Too nice? Young reflected on an awkward encounter with author Malcolm Gladwell, in which he reworked the question she’d asked him
Young replied: ‘Are you telling me I’ve asked a bad question?’
Speaking to Day after reflecting on the exchange, she said she wouldn’t have responded in the same way, saying: ‘I actually spent quite a lot of time afterwards thinking about that and I think I was too nice. I think I was the good girl.
‘And it annoyed me that on mic I didn’t say to him, I’ll tell you what, when you’re interviewing me, you can come up with the questions.
‘But as long as I’m interviewing you, this is my job. I should have said that. I didn’t say that. I was too polite. I was too nice.’
The 55-year-old former Desert Island Discs host left her Radio 4 show in 2018 as she underwent treatment for the syndrome and rheumatoid arthritis.
On How to Fail, released today, she said the condition is now on an ‘even keel’.
She said: ‘It has at times been very difficult and painful and excruciating and frustrating and all those things and right now I’m pretty good.
‘I mean, it has little flares and I have to be mindful of that’s the sort of pain stuff, but I do things that are important to keep me on an even keel.
She told Radio 4’s Today programme in the summer that with fibromyalgia ‘your pain centre is overinterpreting things that would happen normally in your body’, and also explained symptoms also include brain fog and chronic fatigue.
She added: ‘I have at my worst felt as though someone has drugged my cup of tea, almost sort of swaying with fatigue, and (I feel like) just having to just opt out of doing anything because the fatigue is almost like cement in your body.’
Young recalled that she spent a ‘long time’ in pain, which started in her elbow joints, before being diagnosed.
Young also told the podcast that her fibromyalgia, which was initially dismissed by doctors and ended up sparking a four-year break from broadcasting, is currently on an ‘even keel’
‘I wasn’t managing,’ she added. ‘I had it for probably about a year to a year and a half, increasing, it increased over time and the migraines became more, the pain became more, the fatigue became more, so it kind of increased over time before I successfully managed (to get medical advice).’
Young said that when she asked a medical professional about it being fibromyalgia, she ‘memorably’ dismissed her concerns.
She added: ‘I said “I’ve read about this thing called fibromyalgia, could it be fibromyalgia?” They actually did snort… She snorted… I said “Is that not a thing?”.
‘She said “That’s not a thing, that’s where we put people when they don’t have something, just to say they’ve got something”.
‘I now, of course, realise the depths of that particular medic’s ignorance on the subject.’
Young says when she was ‘finally’ diagnosed, she no longer felt like ‘a crazy lady’, and could explain how she was feeling, and also recalled difficulties managing her pain.
‘I think I coped chaotically and badly,’ she said. Young said she was ‘quite horrible to be married to’, and ‘prioritised’ work and her children over the rest of her life as she could not manage with anything else.
