Laura Dockrill: ‘I say the words I love you, I love you… he says nothing back’

Author Laura Dockrill was just 14 years old when she first set eyes on her husband, musician and former Maccabees guitarist Hugo White.

The young teenagers from London quickly developed an intense friendship, exchanging carefully curated mixtapes and letters doused in Body Shop perfume. Despite a longing on both sides, the pair never let their friendship spill over into romance.

Five years into their platonic relationship however, Dockrill decided to make her feelings known.

“Cut to age 19…and I find myself in my first ever bikini in a shower (don’t ask) saying how I felt … I’m just saying the words, ‘I love you. I love you’ over and over again,” she tells Róisín Ingle on the latest episode of The Irish Times Women’s Podcast.

“He says nothing back. And we don’t see each other for 10 years,” she adds.

In the decade that followed that awkward shower interaction, their communication was mostly limited to exchanging ‘Happy Birthday’ messages on Facebook. However, when the band that Hugo was a part of broke up in 2017, Dockrill decided to reach out.

“I kind of got in touch out of the blue… I just wanted to say to him: ‘if younger you could look back and see everything you’ve achieved, your number one albums and your awards and your accolades, how incredibly proud you would be of yourself,” she says.

“And I just thought he wouldn’t reply and he was just like, ‘do you fancy a coffee?’ and it all just kind of kicked off from there really”.

It is this personal tale of intense first love and all that followed that serves as the inspiration for Dockrill’s new novel, ‘I Love You, I Love You, I Love You’. The book follows the story of childhood sweethearts Ella and Lowe, who spend their early years friend zoning each other, before eventually losing touch.

In this episode, Dockrill also speaks about her experience of postpartum psychosis following the birth of her son Jet in 2018. She wrote about that experience in her 2020 memoir ‘What Have I Done?’.

Dockrill explains that within three weeks of giving birth by emergency C-section, she was hospitalised after becoming “suicidal”, “delusional” and deeply terrifed”.

“It’s extreme anxiety, which then just turns into paranoia, conspiracy theories, delusions, I believed that the teddy bear had CCTV in its eyes and was watching me and that Hugo was building a plot to take my son away from me,” she says.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Dockrill tells how she found her sense of self again in recovery, how giving up alcohol (and Instagram) has given her a new perspective on life and the support of her close friend singer Adele.

You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or where ever you get your podcasts.