There’s a scene in the new series of
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s dark comedy
Fleabag that stands out. In the middle of an awkward family dinner, the heroine’s sister Claire (Sian Clifford) rushes to the bathroom. Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag follows, offering her a wad of tissue, assuming it’s a heavy period. It isn’t. It’s a miscarriage.
For journalist and author Elizabeth Day, it struck a particular chord. It was her own restaurant miscarriage that inspired it – “although mine was over brunch not dinner”, the 40-year-old tells me, in an airy bookshop cafe in central London. “Phoebe’s a good friend,” she explains. “She called me months ago to say she’d just written an episode and unwittingly put something in it that I’d told her.”
To some, the thought of having an experience you’d lived through turned into television would induce an avalanche of anxiety – especially one as traumatic as this. But Day was more than happy for the
Killing Eve writer to use her story.
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