
My husband thought I'd zoned out of our marriage & left the family home… but it was Alzheimer's, says Fiona Phillips
Best known for fronting GMTV for over a decade, the broadcaster was a breakfast telly icon with a glittering career and a huge smile.
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But while she looked every inch the success story, her personal life was marred by tragedy and a devastating diagnosis that she did not see coming.
Fiona, 64, revealed she was battling Alzheimer's in 2023 — the same cruel disease that claimed both her parents.
The heartbreaking news made headlines, but the truth behind her journey is even more raw and emotional.
In her new memoir, Remember When: My Life with Alzheimer's, Fiona lifts the lid on her private pain and the devastating toll it took on her marriage to former editor of ITV's This Morning, Martin Frizell, 65.
Martin also shares his side of the story in the book, which they wrote together.
And he makes the brutally honest admission that he wished his wife had been diagnosed with cancer instead, calling Alzheimer's a 'cruel, drawn-out torture' that has turned their world upside down.
Martin has now stepped back from work to care for his wife full-time.
'Left to cope alone'
The pair, married for 28 years, have , which an estimated 982,000 people live with in the UK.
Being brutally honest, I wish Fiona had cancer instead. It's a shocking thing to say but at least then she might have had a chance of a cure.
Martin
They want to highlight that it is not just a condition that affects the elderly, and how the level of care is severely lacking.
Martin writes: 'Being brutally honest, I wish Fiona had contracted cancer instead.
'It's a shocking thing to say, but at least then she might have had a chance of a cure, and certainly would have had a treatment pathway and an array of support and care packages.
'But that's not there for Alzheimer's.
'Just like there are no funny or inspiring TikTok videos or fashion shoots with smiling, healthy, in-remission survivors.'
He goes on: 'After someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, they are pretty much left to their own devices.
'There is nothing more that can be done and you are left to cope alone.'
Back in January 1997, Fiona felt like the 'luckiest woman alive' when she landed the job of a lifetime as lead presenter on GMTV.
But behind the scenes, it was pressure-cooker stuff — 4am starts, non-stop stress and a producer 'barking' in her earpiece.
At home, life was just as intense.
With two young sons, Nathanial and Mackenzie, plus a weekly newspaper column, radio show and endless TV gigs, she was 'running on empty'.
Weekends were spent away in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, caring for her mum Amy, who was slowly slipping away due to Alzheimer's and died in 2006.
Soon after losing his wife, her dad Phil was diagnosed with the same illness.
Fiona previously said the drive from London to Wales every other weekend with the two boys strapped in the backseat 'nearly cracked me up'.
She left GMTV in December 2008 — reportedly midway through a £1.5million contract, which cost her £500,000 — to spend more time with her family.
Fiona admitted back then that the decision was the 'hardest I have ever had to make — like jumping off a cliff and hoping someone will save me halfway down',.
But she revealed she had 'finally discovered that I can't have it all' and felt like she was 'dropping balls' all over the place.
While Fiona finally had more time to dedicate to Martin and the boys, her career never quite recovered.
She took on bits and pieces of work — including a stint on Strictly Come Dancing in 2005 and presenting a Channel 4 documentary titled Mum, Dad, Alzheimer's and Me in 2009.
But Fiona admitted she never felt 'completely right' and became 'disconnected' from her family.
Meanwhile, she was starting to struggle with mood swings, erratic behaviour and an inability to complete everyday tasks, such as going to the bank.
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Things came to a head with Martin in 2021 and he moved out of the family home, accusing her of 'zoning out' of their marriage.
After three weeks apart, the couple met at a hotel and agreed they wanted to stay together — but things had to change.
Fiona had initially suspected the exhaustion, anxiety and brain fog she had been battling was a side effect of Long Covid. She contracted the virus in 2020.
But by then, Fiona was wondering if her symptoms were down to menopause.
Martin urged her to talk to telly doctor Dr Louise Newson, who specialised in menopause and recommended a course of hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
But after several months of seeing little change, Dr Newson recommended she was properly assessed.
In 2022, a consultant broke the heartbreaking news to the couple that Fiona, then 61, had early onset Alzheimer's.
It's something I might have thought I'd get at 80…but I was still only 61. My poor mum was crippled with it, then my dad. It keeps coming back for us.
Fiona
Fiona had secretly feared that one day it would come for her, too, after it 'decimated' her family.
But the news still came as a shock.
Writing in her book, she recalls: 'Neither of us said a word.
'We sat rigid, locked in suspended animation between everything our lives had been before this moment and everything they would become beyond it.'
She previously told the Mirror: 'It's something I might have thought I'd get at 80 . . . but I was still only 61 years old.
"My poor mum was crippled with it, then my dad, my grandparents, my uncle. It just keeps coming back for us.'
Fiona and Martin kept her diagnosis quiet for a year, as she hated the idea of becoming 'an object of gossip or even pity'.
'Horrible secret'
Gradually, the couple began to feel they should tell more people, so Fiona would be understood and not judged if she began behaving strangely.
Realising the impact she could have by raising awareness of the disease's symptoms, the star decided to go public in July 2023.
Fiona characteristically insisted she was 'getting on with it', adding of her illness: 'I'm not taking notice of it.
'I'm just doing what I normally do.
'I don't want to not work, be sitting around playing with my fingers or watching telly.
'I just like doing things.'
She told the Mirror: 'All over the country, there are people of all different ages whose lives are being affected by it — it's heartbreaking.
'I just hope I can help find a cure which might make things better for others in the future . . . it's a horrible bloody secret to divulge.'
While there is no cure for Alzheimer's, Fiona is currently taking drugs to slow the illness's progression.
She also joined a trial programme for a drug called Miridesap at University College Hospital in London, in a bid to slow the effects of the disease.
But Fiona now needs a lot of help with everyday tasks including showering, brushing her teeth and getting dressed.
Martin said his wife is 'existing', unable to remember 'anything from 30 seconds ago', and she 'can't think about or imagine a future'.
At times, she becomes distressed and confused, shouting at him that he isn't her husband.
It is something he finds difficult, but understands that the illness has 'taken her mind'.
Martin admitted the journey is an exhausting and lonely one, writing that it breaks his heart to see his 'strong, independent wife has become so vulnerable'.
He adds: 'I'd like to tell you Fiona is content in the situation into which she has been forced.
'I'd like to give readers some sense that she is at peace.
'But that wouldn't be the truth.
'She isn't — she is frustrated every single day. And depressed.
'I miss her. I miss my wife.'
Remember When: My Life With Alzheimer's by Fiona Phillips (Macmillan, £22), is out July 17.
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Daily Mail
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Telegraph
14 minutes ago
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The Salt Path scandal has killed the middle-class fantasy of escapism
Authenticity is the enemy of art – and yet our hunger for it has been allowed to cloud almost every corner of creativity. You see it in the proliferation of TV dramas 'based on a true story'; in the expectation for actors to have 'lived experience' of the roles in which they are cast; and in the rise of autofiction (novels constructed from the facts of the author's own life) and memoir. In this age of fake news, and mistrusted politicians, I can understand why people might seek something 'real' in the films they watch and the books that they read. Yet while great art should speak universal truths, it must also be free from a slavish adherence to hard facts. As Mark Twain once wrote: 'Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.' Then, last weekend, came an exposé in The Observer which claimed that several aspects of The Salt Path – Raynor Winn's best-selling 2018 account of her and her husband Moth's 630-mile trek along the South West Coast Path – were, in fact, fabricated. 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But to do so, is to ignore a bigger problem: The Salt Path is sold on certain truths – that Moth was diagnosed with a terminal brain condition and that the couple were left homeless after a bad business deal, for example – which are now being called into question. It's hard to believe The Salt Path would have achieved the same success (selling two million copies, winning awards and being made into a popular film) had the protagonists been plucked from Winn's imagination. The book is also, to use a modern cliché, a tale of triumph over adversity, which is now the order of the day for us mawkish Brits. 'If we hadn't done this there'd always have been things we wouldn't have known,' Winn writes, 'a part of ourselves we wouldn't have found, resilience we didn't know we had.' This isn't quite psychobabble, but there is an element of solipsism which is linked to the burgeoning cult of the individual. 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In literature, we tend to think of two medieval works in particular – Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland, which both combine the idea of an actual physical journey with an internal religious experience. Indeed, in some ways, you can trace a link between the social interaction of Chaucer's pilgrims and the exchanges between the Winns and the people they encounter on their trek. Yet while both authors highlight the importance of community, in The Salt Path that is ultimately supplanted by the need for self-discovery. If you want to explore the idea of the pilgrimage in more recent literature, there are far better examples than The Salt Path. I would recommend Graham Swift's 1996 Booker Prize-winner Last Orders which owes a debt to Chaucer but recalibrates the story as a tale of fractured male friendships in which three war veterans travel from London to Margate to scatter the ashes of Jack Dodds, the first of the gang to die. This isn't a sentimental 'journey' through picturesque locations; the stop-off points include the unlovely environs of New Cross and Dartford, and its power lies in the stubborn emotional inarticulacy of its ageing protagonists. Cinema offers equally rich examples: of course the road movie is often a kind of pilgrimage, even one with as tragic an end as Thelma and Louise, in which two women find their freedom on the open road. My personal favourite, The Straight Story, considers the 240-mile pilgrimage of an old man, Alvin Straight, through Wisconsin and Iowa, as he attempts reconciliation with his ailing brother. Like The Salt Path, the film (directed by David Lynch in 1999) is based on a true story, but it is also unyielding to any sort of sentimentality and all the more powerful for it. We don't yet know about the future of The Salt Path – what the scandal will mean for Raynor Winn, her publisher, or her future book sales. But if the controversy serves finally to spoil the middle-class appetite for 'real' stories, and leaves readers hungry instead for something of greater substance than this sort of mid-brow lite-lit that does nothing to push literature forward, we will all be the better for it. As far as I'm concerned, authenticity can take a hike.