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Saturday Live: Matt Haig

Matt Haig

BBC Radio 4 - Saturday Live, Matt Haig

Ex-cult member Bexy Cameron and the Inheritance Tracks of Anita Rani.

Author Matt Haig, Bexy Cameron on documenting US cults, Debbie Money on throwing dinner parties in honour of her late mother and writer Charlie Gilmour on fatherhood.

Matt Haig is an award-winning author of fiction for both adults and children and his memoir of depression and anxiety Reasons to Stay Alive became a runaway bestseller. He joins Richard Coles and Nikki Bedi to discuss the inspiration for his latest non-fiction work The Comfort Book.

Bexy Cameron was born into the Children of God cult and moved around the world with the notorious group. She escaped at fifteen but later felt compelled to document religious sects in order to better understand her childhood and her parents’ motivation for remaining in one. Her book Cult Following explores her childhood and her extraordinary journey through US religious cults.

Debbie Money recently discovered her mum’s recipe book spanning five decades. From conch fritters to cheese and pineapple hedgehogs, Debbie is recreating her parents’ dinner parties to honour her mum, who died earlier this year, and to time travel through food. 

Charlie Gilmour was photographed hanging off the Cenotaph in Whitehall in 2010, an act that would see him imprisoned for violent disorder. Charlie was going through emotional turmoil at the time, having been abandoned by his biological father. Years later, Charlie would take an abandoned magpie chick under his wing and the bird flourished under his care, opening his own path to fatherhood. He joins us to talk about what it means to be a father and his book, Featherhood.

And we hear the Inheritance Tracks of broadcaster Anita Rani.

Producer: Laura Northedge
Editor: Richard Hooper

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