The Hungover Games by Sophie Heawood review: motherhood, mosh pits, and a rather deceptive baby bump

There is a lucrative new theme in publishing: motherhood, warts and all. After centuries of women being told talking about babies was either tedious or grotesque – Rachel Cusk’s frank account of childbirth A Life’s Work was met with horror as recently as 2001 – now it’s all the rage. In 2017, Ariel Levy stunned readers with her harrowing memoir of a miscarriage, The Rules Do Not Apply; this year, Clover Stroud’s My Wild and Sleepless Nights painted a raw, animalistic portrait of child rearing; recent novels by Kiley Reid, Diana Evans and Lara Feigel have all explored motherhood’s dark side.

And now celebrity interviewer Sophie Heawood treats the genre to a further tonal shift: The Hungover Games is a joyfully crude and hilarious memoir about “What To Expect When You Weren’t Even F------ Expecting To Be Expecting”.

Heawood decamped from London to Los Angeles when she realised newspapers and magazines no longer had the budgets to fly journalists out to Hollywood for a story. The years followed in a bleary whirlwind of wild nights on Sunset Boulevard and drunken write-ups at dawn, while Heawood gradually nudged herself into the good books of Hollywood’s gatekeepers, ensuring “one-on-one access to the preened and the perfected and the shining to try to get them to say things into my Dictaphone that would reveal them to be unravelled and rotten and broken, so that normal people could read about them in the papers and gasp”.

It is Heawood’s gasp, however, that we hear when she realises, back in 2012 aged 34, that she is pregnant, despite a doctor’s prognosis of infertility. The father is an unnamed musician she met during a frisky night at the Chateau Marmont, she will be a single mother, and the LA party circuit does not cater to newborns. Yet Heawood, ever the optimist, only has one question for her gynaecologist: is it safe to use a vibrator?

Unplanned motherhood is frightening territory, but Heawood’s readers aren’t her shoulders to cry on – she wants to make us laugh. With all the dramatic flourishes of a seasoned magazine writer and the intimacy of a teenage diarist, Heawood tells us about the night she showed off her growing baby bump at a party, only to realise a few hours later that her “bump” was just post-pizza flatulence: “I made some of the most beautiful people in LA rub my fart.” She goes on to describe a weekend at Coachella during which she brazenly reviewed gigs for NME from her bed, rather than actually attending the concert (for fear of “moshing the baby into early labour”).

Later she drives her inebriated friends home from a party without a driving licence, or indeed more than two driving lessons. Some might shake their heads at a pregnant woman’s reckless behaviour, but Heawood is refreshingly unapologetic – weeks after Coachella, she even downs a glass of wine to recover from a panic attack, and while on medication for a chemically induced birth, she leaves the hospital for a trip to the deli. Who are we to judge?

Every now and then, Heawood’s jokes are rather too obvious in their rigging, and a little too corny to land. I sometimes find that funny female writers make themselves overly ludicrous for a punchline, which suggests they don’t have faith in their own wit. Heawood should have more confidence – her analysis of how Britons, Californians and New Yorkers all reacted to her due date being the 10th anniversary of 9/11 made me laugh out loud, as did her recommendation of a “long and sexual holiday” to the nursery teacher who called her daughter overly exuberant aged two. If only she mocked others more often.

In fact, I can think of many in the West Coast’s snoot brigade who could benefit from a dose of Heawood’s delightful vulgarity. Gwyneth Paltrow, perhaps?

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