Parky Profiles: Linda Grant

Novelist tells us about her long path to diagnosis and reveals she's at work on a novel about Parkinson's

This Saturday Movers and Shakers launches a short summer series of Parky Profiles, conversations with four fascinating people living with Parkinson’s. Our first subject is the novelist Linda Grant. I have long been a fan of Linda’s writing - from the Orange Prize winning When I Lived in Modern Times, to The Clothes on Their Backs and The Dark Circle she is a great story teller, with vivid characters, often, as the child of Jewish refugees, focusing on the experiences of outsiders.

I first met her last year when she invited me to come to speak about the Movers and Shakers podcast to the walking football class she attends at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium. Back then she felt she was not ready to go public about her Parkinson’s although obviously her family and friends knew. But this May, when I approached her about being the subject of a ‘Parky Profile’, she decided that the time had come to talk in public about her condition and we are immensely grateful that she chose Movers and Shakers for her first interview.

She paints such a vivid and entertaining picture of her life before and after Parkinson’s that I would rather you just listened to it but here are a few quotes to whet your appetite.

On growing up in Liverpool and becoming a teenager just as Beatlemania broke out:

“We lived around the corner from Paul McCartney and John Lennon in the other direction, and on the way home from school, we used to get off the bus two stops early and go and stand outside Paul McCartney's house hoping he'd come out. One very, very wet day when I was the only fool to be hanging around, his dad opened the door and said, ‘You'll get soaked out there. Come in,’ and he gave me a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit.”

On her early realisation that she wanted to be a writer:

“I was an only child till I was eight, and I read all the time. There was no daytime television, so I just read incessantly and wrote. And I discovered that you could earn a living as a writer.”

On her feelings when, after years as a journalist, she got her first book published:

“I think I felt that the universe had righted itself, and I was doing the thing that I was always meant to do, and I'd stopped myself from doing because I didn’t have enough confidence.”

Her first symptoms began in 2020 during the Covid lockdown:

“What happened in lockdown was I became, understandably, like many other people, very anxious. The anxiety was to do with lockdown, but my hands were shaking, and I enrolled in the ‘University of Google medical school’ because I thought immediately -Parkinson's.”

But there then followed a long, tortuous process, where doctors first assured her that all she had was benign essential tremor before she eventually got seen at the UK’s top neurological hospital at Queen Square in London:

“When they said to me, ‘you've got Parkinson's ‘ at Queen Square, I said ‘I wasn't expecting that.’ And my sister, who was with me, said ‘I was’ and I said, ‘Why did you think that?’ And she said, ‘you became slow.’… Something that she said, which I think is quite significant, is it's often people who are close to you who have a much more accurate reading of what's going on than you do yourself.”

When asked what had been her most useful source of information about Parkinson’s Linda pointed to the podcast:

“The most useful thing was Movers and Shakers, which started just around the time that I was diagnosed, that was the single most useful thing.”

We asked Linda why she had delayed talking in public about her diagnosis:

“I had a book just about to come out two months after the diagnosis, and I talked to my publicist, and she said, If you come out about it now, then all the interviews will be about Parkinson's and not about the book.”

But Linda Grant then delivers us a scoop. After initially being certain that the one subject she did not want to write about was Parkinson’s she has changed her mind. She has started work on a new novel about a woman called Lydia who has recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Like Linda, Lydia attends a walking football class at Arsenal’s stadium, and we were treated to a reading of a passage about the class.

When she had finished her reading, which was interrupted by guffaws and nods of recognition, I asked Linda when the novel would be out. “When it’s finished,” she replied. I can’t wait..

Please don’t forget to sign our Parliamentary Petition calling for better Parkinson’s care. We have had a good week with signatures now approaching 50,000 but we have to double that by September 10th if the petition is to trigger a Commons debate. So please sign it and ask your friends to give their support. Click here and it will be done in a matter of moments.