Unknown writer, 'TV3's toxin avenger vows she will never give up' (Interview) - The Sunday Star Times, 25 May 2008 Searingly honest and frank … A very personal tale that makes you laugh and cry … captivating’ Telegraph Just at the point where my career at The Times was ascendant, and he, at 63, was happily anticipating the prospect of being a kept man in retirement, I blew it. In print, Reid is able to mask some of her pain. Her public persona is steely, but in real life she is a discomfiting blend of resilience and fragility; defiance and (unjustified) guilt. There are many points in our conversation where tears are running down her face. But when I ask her if she wants to stop, she plays it down."Oh, I cry easily and a lot," she says. This lovely place” is, indeed, gorgeous: a 300-year-old smallholding that’s as impractical as they come. “We came here 22 years ago and it’s just impossible to leave. We should have moved to a little bungalow in suburbia with a tarmac drive that I could have rolled down to go to the local shop and get my own papers, instead of being up in the hills in my eyrie, looking at the view.”

Melanie Reid will be in conversation with Libby Purves as part of the Cheltenham Literature Festival, from October 3-12; www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/literatureShe doesn't shy away from the toll it took. "There you have it – the core of loss. The stone heart of longing, envy and emotional shut-down which is a woman’s self-defence against disability," she writes. Karen's story is more similar to Melanie's, but her outlook is very different. Her passivity has always fascinated Melanie - can she learn anything from it?

Fascinating place, abrupt old age. There were new tribal routines. Topics of conversation, for a start. The inescapable one: ‘Did you sleep well?’ Couples don’t ask each other this! They already know! But when you’re no longer young hotties entwined all night, you don’t. Now it’s only polite to ask, to celebrate making it alive to morning. It’s an opportunity to discuss cold feet and sore hips.

And I’d say, ‘In your dreams,’ in a fond sort of way and we carried on being fit and healthy and middle-aged. And then I carry the coffees out to the table (“Every hand’s a help”) drenched with yesterday’s rain, to sit and talk, with the sun-warmed world at our feet. Although aspects of the job felt "agonising", Reid displayed a flair for finding stories and getting people talk to her. While on secondment to NBC in San Francisco, she waltzed into one of the most dangerous parts of town to round up possible witnesses to a murder involving rival Mexican and Samoan gangs. "NBC just thought I was a complete liability”. Today, she can drive an adapted vehicle, which has given her more freedom, and she has learned to enjoy the small pleasures of nature: the scuttling of a beetle across the floor; the stalking of sparrowhawk round the shrubs. "In this way, you learn to rediscover joy," she writes.

We live in a world of body fascism,” Melanie says, with a gentleness that contradicts her feelings. “Sometimes, when I look at glossy magazines and see nothing but gorgeous, airbrushed women; people fretting about the shape of their feet” – she laughs – “or that their hips are a bit too wide; I just think, ‘Gosh! It’s so unreal’. I genuinely now understand that there’s a parallel world of very ordinary people, who have illnesses, who aren’t pretty, who don’t have beautiful bodies; who are just trying to make their way. And this is the beauty myth – this madness that prevails in the media and on the internet.”I never plan anything,” she gaffaws. But she’s also amazed she’s managed to sneak so many unpalatable truths from darkness into the light. “It astonishes me. I used to be an editor and I know how editors have a built-in aversion to putting anything into the paper about poo and pee.” If Reid and Jennings sound a little paranoid, consider this: late last year the ESR chief executive John Hay wrote to the judges of the Qantas Television Awards, strongly urging them not to honour Let Us Spray, given that it was in "blatant breach" of broadcasting standards and the subject of a BSA complaint. But, there again, there’s enough wisdom to be gained in simply listening to Melanie Reid talk about the changing shades of her copper beech, her pink and yellow roses, the beautiful hydrangea someone brought to her recent ‘no-presents’ party. When we married, my husband expressed glee that I was 12 years younger than him because it would be useful when he got older. From the birth of TV3 in 1989, journalist Melanie Reid became a fixture on the channel's current affairs shows, often reporting on battles against bureaucracy.

She is, for example, repelled by the notion of suffering as redemption, and yet she refers repeatedly to the wisdom she has gained from her own. As a child she read the morality tales What Katy Did and Pollyanna. What unites the heroines of these books is that they become temporarily paralysed, regaining the use of their legs only after they have learned the virtues of patience and humility. A It is madness, the expense is colossal. I think it is one of the reasons my first marriage broke up. My husband said it was crazy, like digging a hole and throwing money into it. The World I Fell Out Of is a vital, profound story shot through with insight and revelations. Melanie Reid has written the most important book of 2019.' -Susanna Forrest, author of If Wishes Were Horses

The World I Fell Out Of

You’ll be able to push me to the pub in a wheelchair,’ Dave said. ‘And empty colostomy bags, that sort of stuff.’ And then – who knows; maybe as a result of that - a beautiful young woman named Bethany Townsend recently tweeted a picture of herself in a bikini, with two colostomy bags. It was a much-feted photo that went viral. Dave is completely blond; a ditsy blond. But he’s been amazing. He is the most amazing man to have coped with what he’s coped with because he didn’t marry me for this.” Melanie has, from time to time, offered him an ‘out’ clause – “almost etiquette”, she calls it. It’s moments like that that leap out from the humour; moments that are stark and uncompromising; that occasionally make the column difficult to read.