Steiner, her husband told me, had always wanted to have children and was a very loving mother and the compassion and empathy with which she portrayed Manon Bradshaw’s experience of single life and childlessness, after which she first adopts a child and later becomes pregnant, is striking. While at the Guardian, Steiner met the journalist Tom Happold (who is now director of the creative video agency Happen Digital) they married in 2006, settled in West Hampstead and had two sons, George and Ben. As Birdie says: ‘Whoever said nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, has never set in on her third mince pie.’”) Birdie cropped up in a piece that Steiner wrote about the perils of “ writer’s butt”: “While some authors’ fantasies are about sex and death, mine are very much centred on unfettered access to the crisps aisle. (Posters were clearly something that caught her eye: in Persons Unknown, she introduces the shopkeeper Birdie Fielding, who often consults one emblazoned with the image of Tony Blair for advice. She was cheered, she later recalled, by its “message of stoicism and patience”, although its phenomenal popularity also prompted her to insist, semi-humorously, that she could not be blamed for its subsequent ubiquity. She discovered that it had originated in an independent bookshop in Alnwick, which she contacted so that she could recommend it to readers of Weekend magazine.
She remained at the paper for 11 years, although she was out of the office at a writing retreat in Devon when she spotted a poster on the kitchen wall bearing the words Keep Calm and Carry On.
She started out at the Hendon and Finchley Times before stints at the Times and the Telegraph led her to a job as a features editor and writer at the Guardian in 2001. Born in north London, the daughter of two psychoanalysts, Deborah (nee Pickering) and John Steiner, Susie went to Henrietta Barnett school and read English at York University before embarking on a career in journalism. The impulse to capture detail was typical of her writing. Steiner, unbeknown to her, had written Remain Silent with “a 9cm tumour pushing my brain over its midline” and, in a piece she wrote about writing, cancer and lockdown, she described wishing she could have included the specificity of her treatment in the novel: the hard chairs in waiting rooms, the contrast between vigorous medical staff and depleted patients. Susie Steiner’s novel Remain Silent was published in 2020
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