Dawn O’Porter has reflected on the “trauma” she experienced during childhood as a result of her mother’s death, linking it to desire to be famous.
The presenter and writer, 45, said that her trauma “got buried” because of the lack of conversations about it when she was growing up in Guernsey. However, O’Porter recognised that it drove her “need to be liked and well known and on TV”.
In a new interview in The Times, she said she now realises just how much the loss affected her when she was young, especially as her children are currently the same age she and her sister Jane Porter were at the time.
O’Porter’s sons Art and Valentine – who she shares with husband and actor Chris O’Dowd – are now aged nine and seven; the same ages she and Jane were when they lost mum Carol to breast cancer.
“I always thought I was a baby, I can’t really have known what was going on, but now I realise children that young know everything,” she told the publication. “If this happened to Valentine now it would put trauma into his body forever, but my trauma got buried.”
O’Porter said that this, combined with her Guernsey upbringing in which “no one talked about” it, resulted in her need for attention.
She added that this also manifested in her “need to be liked and well known and on TV”.
“Losing a parent and that subsequent feeling of not belonging made me so independent and gave me unbelievable drive,” O’Porter said. “I am everything I am because this happened to me.”
In an earlier interview with The Express, O’Porter spoke candidly about how similar grief is to shame, and how that affected her as a young girl after her mother died.
“When you’re young and you’ve lost a parent, and you’re different from everyone else, it can make you feel a bit dirty,” she said, adding that it made things awkward for her and other people.
She tried to diffuse the awkwardness by being “funny and loud and just trying to get everyone to love me”. But inside, she said: “It’s emotional torture. You are left with this gap inside of you.”
In 2016, she shared a moving tribute to her mother on her 30th death anniversary in an Instagram post. Alongside an old photograph of Carol and herself, as a child, she wrote: “When you’re a little girl and you lose your mum there is obviously an awful lot of attention centred around sympathy for you and making sure you’re alright.
“Well I am alright, and the older I’ve got the less I think about myself in terms of her death and I just feel so, so sorry for her. Poor Mum, she must have been so frightened. I wish she’d had the chance to live longer, to keep loving life the way that she did.”
She also used her post to encourage other women to check their breasts regularly for cancer. “Check your boobs. Have a really good feel. That’s the message I want to pass on today.”
O’Porter and O’Dowd have been married since 2012 and recently moved to London after living for many years in California.
She is preparing to release a new novel titled Honeybee on 26 September.
Read more about grief and loss:
