Kate Figes, feminist author on family life, dies at 62

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Kate Figes, feminist author on family life, dies at 62
Figes’ most successful book, a bestseller in the United Kingdom that enabled her to break into the U.S. market, was “Life After Birth” (1998).

by Hephzibah Anderson



NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Kate Figes, a feminist writer known for her shrewd, sisterly books about family life, among them a primer on the turmoil of new motherhood and investigations into long-term relationships and infidelity, died Dec. 7 at her home in London. She was 62.

Felicity Rubinstein, her literary agent, said the cause was cancer.

Figes’ most successful book, a bestseller in the United Kingdom that enabled her to break into the U.S. market, was “Life After Birth” (1998). In the book, drawing on interviews with hundreds of new mothers, she explored the extreme shifts in identity that women undergo after childbirth as well as topics like sexual desire, sleeplessness and maternal ambivalence, a virtually taboo subject at the time (and one that elicited hate mail).

Figes contended that a mother’s unconditional love for her child does not necessarily come at birth; it grows as the physical shock fades and may well be preceded by unhappiness, confusion and disillusionment. Admitting to this does not make you a bad mother, she insisted. She was also critical of natural childbirth, viewing the injuries some women in labor suffer as unnecessary.

“She was extraordinarily honest, brave, funny, and intent on making a difference through understanding the relationships of our lives,” her editor and publisher, Lennie Goodings, the chairwoman of the London-based Virago Press, said by email.

Goodings became her editor after she and Figes (pronounced FIE-jez) appeared together on a panel at a girls school and got to chatting about how “girl talk” of the complaining sort can be both a bonding tool and cathartic release. The encounter led to Figes’ writing “The Big Fat Bitch Book for Girls” (2009) for Virago, which specializes in books by and about women.

She furthered her exploration of female experiences in two more books for the publisher, “Couples: How We Make Love Last” (2010) and “Our Cheating Hearts: Love and Loyalty, Lust and Lies” (2013).

Figes didn’t begin writing full time until her early 30s. Though she was reared by a single mother, Eva Figes, herself a feminist author, Figes initially felt inhibited about writing. “It’s not easy to believe you can when your own mother is one, too,” she once said.

Until then, she had worked in publishing, first as a sales representative to bookstores and then as a publicist and editor for the feminist imprint Pandora Press. “She was very much part of the feminist community,” Goodings said.

Figes’ first book was in fact an appraisal of feminism, “Because of Her Sex: The Myth of Equality for Women in Britain,” published in 1994 by Macmillan, where Rubinstein was her commissioning editor.

“People weren’t really talking about feminism in the early ’90s,” Rubinstein said in a phone interview. “Kate did a huge amount of research and synthesized it all into something readable and personal.”

That personal tone would define all nine of Figes’ books, even those dealing with topics in which she acknowledged she was inexperienced, like cheating spouses.

Figes had left publishing to write for newspapers and work part time as fiction editor for the British edition of Cosmopolitan magazine when she went to Rubinstein with an idea for a second book. Rubinstein, in her own career shift, had by then become a book agent.

Figes had given birth to the first of her two daughters in 1989 and found that while there were plenty of books about pregnancy and child development on the market, there were none that dealt with the wrenching transformations that motherhood required.

“The literature seemed to hurdle over the mother as if she didn’t exist or wasn’t crucial to bringing up a happy, healthy child,” she later wrote.

Her brainstorming with Rubinstein led to “Life After Birth.”

“When I became a mother myself,” Rubinstein said, “that book saved my life.”

Catherine Jane Figes was born in London on Nov. 6, 1957, to John and Eva (Unger) Figes. Her father, whom Figes characterized as “absent” and “unreliable,” ran an employment agency. Her parents’ marriage ended in a bitter divorce when Kate was 5.

Eva Figes, who was Jewish, had fled Nazi Germany as a child with her parents in 1939. She became an acclaimed novelist, though it was for her nonfiction polemic, “Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society,” that she is best known. The book, published in 1970, joined Germaine Greer’s “Female Eunuch” and Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” as among the most important feminist treatises of that time.

Figes’ relationship with her mother was complex and difficult, Figes wrote. Though she was close to her younger brother, Orlando Figes, who became a historian and an author, theirs was a “chaotic and insecure” childhood, she wrote. She left home for good at 17 after having what she described as “a blazing row with my mother.”

Figes was vague about what she did immediately after leaving home, but she went on to study Arabic and Russian at the Polytechnic of Central London, now known as the University of Westminster, graduating in 1981. In 1988 she married Christopher Wyld, a BBC News foreign editor who became director of the Foreign Press Association in London.

Her husband and brother survive her, as do two daughters, Eleanor and Grace Wyld. Figes and her husband had lived in the same house in North London since they were married.

In the years before she developed breast cancer, which ultimately spread to her bones, Figes trained as a relationship counselor, a role that flowed naturally from her writing, Rubinstein said. In her books on female issues, she said, Figes “would explain to readers what was happening, would put it into words; she would be funny about it, consoling; she would normalize it.”

Figes’ final book, “On Smaller Dogs and Larger Life Questions,” published in 2018, charts the changes in life that middle age brings (including her bonding with a miniature wire-haired dachshund named Zeus). With her cancer diagnosis — breast cancer that had gone undetected in routine mammograms — it also became a book about facing mortality.

In one part of the book Figes described how she discovered tennis in her middle years and developed a passion to win. Tennis, she said, gave her a freedom that she had spent her writing life fighting for on behalf of her readers.

“I know that a ‘good’ girl is supposed to be kind, enabling of others, nice — not expressing all those natural human emotions of anger and selfishness,” she wrote. “But in tennis there is a freedom within the white lines of the court to be me — sweaty and sunburnt, exuberantly lost in all the joy of play, competitive and crafty.”

© 2019 The New York Times Company










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