Exclusive interview with author Brigid Keenan about her new book about her unlikely journey from India to fashion journalism
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I fell in love…but he was a development economist, later a diplomat, and his work and life were clearly going to be abroad,” says Full Marks for Trying author Brigid Keenan. “So, I had a choice. Career or love. Of course I choose love…which meant that I spent the next 40 years worrying about what to do as I followed him round the world.” Keenan, already a London journalist, became an author.
Full Marks for Trying is an autobiography. Keenan’s father is an army officer in the closing days of British rule over India. At age eight Keenan and her family move to London. Sent to finishing school in Paris, she comes back to London and is a debutante. She overhears her mother say she’s desperately plain and decides to make a name for herself. By age 21 she’s the fashion editor at the Sunday Times. Celebrities she hangs out with include English fashion photographer David Bailey and the first supermodel, Jean Shrimpton. Next, Keenan meets her future husband.
Keenan’s writing is honest with British dry wit sprinkled liberally in the mix. Shes wistful about the past, but she’s still up on the current trends and technology. It’s the Swinging Sixties with the young in-crowd in London fashion.
“When I met my future husband in 1970 I was working at The Observer as woman’s editor then, but had previously worked on The Sunday Times and as assistant editor on Nova magazine,” says Keenan. “This was the magazine of the 60s and early 70s. I’d also tried to be a war correspondent in Vietnam, and failed. In our first posting in Brussels, I finished a book, The Women We Wanted to Look Like, which was a history of fashion in 20th century, told via the women who wore the clothes, that is, Jackie Kennedy. After a visit to Kashmir, I wrote a book about that country while we were posted to the Caribbean.”
“For Full Marks for Trying I had to be very sure of my facts about the Partition of India,” says Keenan. “I quote from my father’s letters. He witnessed horrors at this time. I did this at the British Library which holds the old India Office Library.”
Posted to Kazakhstan, Keenan didn’t speak Russian or Kazakh. “And there were no old buildings to write about, so I was in despair. Then I thought of turning the diary I had always kept, jotted down on the backs of envelopes or loose bits of paper, into a book about being what it is like being a trailing spouse.” That book, Diplomatic Baggage, became a bestseller.
The sequel, Packing Up, is about the couple’s last posting in Azerbaijan.
Keenan says becoming a fashion editor at The Sunday Times in 1961 when she was only 21 was a piece of luck. “I felt I wanted to write about that so I did flashbacks in Packing Up. But, my most wonderful editor at Bloomsbury, Alexandra Pringle, decided to take out the flashbacks as it was all getting a bit complicated.” The cuts became Keenan’s latest book, Full Marks for Trying.
Keenan wrote Dior in Vogue published by Octopus Press, The Women We Wanted to Look Like by Macmillan, Travels in Kashmir by OUP, Damascus, Hidden Treasures of the Old City by Thames & Hudson, Diplomatic Baggage by John Murray, Packing Up by Bloomsbury and Full Marks for Trying by Bloomsbury.
Keenan is now the fashion editor of The Oldie magazine in UK. “I interview a well-known person each month and ask them about their clothes and views on fashion.”
Keenan is currently revising The Women We Wanted to Look Like, to bring it up to date from when it was first published forty years ago. She’s also writing Alphabet for children, her own version of the alphabet that she taught her children to read with. An artist friend is doing the illustrations. Keenan is contemplating writing a cookbook, with recipes learned as an ambassador’s wife.
Keenan divides her time between the family home in Somerset and a small flat in London. She was born in India, in Ambala, Punjab. She’s been married for 43 years, is 76, and has two daughters and four grandchildren.
Full Marks for Trying: An unlikely journey from the Raj to the Rag Trade by Brigid Keenan. Hardcover: 208 pages, Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing (August 2, 2016). Language: English, ISBN: 9781408852279 $26.00
