The Bookseller.com

2nd December 2008

Alastair Campbell novel gets BBC boost

17.09.08 Philip Jones

Alastair Campbell is to feature in a new BBC documentary about his mental breakdown that will be broadcast shortly before the publication of his debut novel about mental illness All in the Mind.

The BBC2 show will air next month, slightly ahead of the publication of the hardback edition on 6th November—the fiction title charts the mental collapse of a prominent psychiatrist. Campbell suffered from a breakdown in 1986 while working as a journalist: he later became political editor of the Mirror, before joining the former Prime Minister Tony Blair as his official spokesman.

In an interview with The Bookseller this week about his debut novel, the former Labour Party spin-doctor said that part of the purpose of writing the novel, and in doing a documentary about his own breakdown, was to change attitudes to mental illness. "I think it will help remove some of the stigma that attaches to mental health: not just the novel, but that fact that I'll talk about it and that will make people feel emboldened."

Campbell first broached the subject of mental health as part of an earlier work of fiction back in 1986, but it was deleted. "It was a way of giving a creative expression to a pretty horrific time."

Despite returning to the theme of his own breakdown in the BBC2 show, and of mental illness in the novel, Campbell said the book was not autobiographical. "There are, and there aren't [comparisons]. I don't have depression as bad as [one character] David. I've had a drink problem, but not as bad as the MP; and I've had a breakdown. These are things I can draw upon and and I do draw upon them in all sorts of ways, phrases I've used, techniques that I've known about. But I've never been burnt, I've not been raped, I don't know what it is like to be a refugee. . . I don't want people to think I'm a compulsive sex addict [as is one character in the book]."

The book has received the backing of actor Stephen Fry, who suffered from a nervous breakdown in 1995. Fry wrote: "It is the devastating penetration of the human mind that takes this novel out of the ordinary. I have rarely read a book where the agonies and insecurities of mental trauma have been so well chronicled. For all that, this is not a depressing read, although it nails depression as it surely as it ever has been nailed."

Campbell also revealed that his has written a second novel, and has ideas about a third. "I've done a lot of things since I left government, I'd say this is close to being the thing I've enjoyed the most."

Philip Jones BBC Random House Alastair Campbell Home All in the Mind

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