B
ack in the early noughties
Lisa Faulkner was one of
TV’s rising stars, appearing
in dramas such as Spooks,
Dangerfield, New Street Law
and Holby City. When pictures emerged
in glossy magazines of her fairy-tale
wedding to fellow actor Chris Coghill,
it was easy to assume her personal life
was equally charmed.
But behind closed doors it was
a very different story. Despite having a
successful career and a husband she
loved, something was missing from
Lisa’s life – a baby. She desperately
wanted to be a mother.
Lisa had been trying to conceive for
five months when she discovered she
was pregnant. But her happiness was
short-lived. Just a few days after the
discovery, she was rushed to hospital
in agony and told she had an ectopic
pregnancy. The foetus had implanted
in the fallopian tube rather than the
womb and the tube had ruptured. The
surgeon was forced to remove it – along
with the foetus.
Lisa’s ectopic pregnancy marked the
start of an emotional five-year battle
in which she tried every means
possible to conceive again.
And it is this struggle
that inspired her
to write her deeply
personal memoir,
Meant To Be:
My Journey to
Motherhood. She
admits that on her
darkest days she
wished she’d had
a similar book to
support and guide
her through her own
difficult period.
“I’ve met quite a few
people over the years who have
said to me, ‘I had a nightmare trying to
have kids and doing IVF and I didn’t
know what the next stage was.’ They
were stuck,” says Lisa, 47. “I didn’t
have a hand to hold when I was going
through it, either, and I often felt very
lonely. It was a long and difficult journey.
So this time last year I started writing
the book.”
Eventually, Lisa adopted and is now
mum to 12-year-old Billie. But her
daughter’s arrival is only one part of
the story. The rest of her book focuses
on the gruelling processes she went
through beforehand: the alternativetherapies, medications, IUI (intrauterine
insemination), IVF (in vitro fertilisation)
and an investigation into surrogacy.
It is an extremely raw account that
at times makes for difficult reading.
For Lisa, though, the task of actually
writing the book was easier than she
had expected.
“My dad is reading my book at the
moment and he said, ‘Did you find it
easy? Because it’s not easy stuff to
read.’ And I told him that it just flew
out of me. I couldn’t stop once I started.
There was so much that I wanted to
write down and it felt like therapy. It’s
amazing because at the start you’re
thinking, ‘It’s this many thousand
words, I’ll never make that,’ and before
you know it, you’re there.”
To give as detailed an account as
possible, Lisa dug out the diaries she
had kept religiously during those years
and extracts from them feature in the
book. She also made a difficult return
visit to Dr Mohamed Taranissi, the
Harley Street specialist she saw during
her IVF treatment.
“When I walked through those doors,
I was like, ‘Oh gosh, here I am again,’
and it brought back loads of stuff,” she
says. “It was hard. Dr Taranissi was so
lovely and he remembered me. He had
my files and I ended up in tears as we
were talking.
“IVF didn’t work out for me, but that
doesn’t mean he wasn’t brilliant,” she
adds. “He was a big part of my life. IVF
is really tough. People don’t think about
how hard it is. They just go, ‘OK, now
we’re going to do IVF,’ and actually the
emotional stress of it is brutal.”
Lisa’s three failed attempts at IVF
nearly broke her emotionally, physically
and financially. After the third failure,
both she and Dr Taranissi agreed they
had come to the end of the road.
Throughout that period, Lisa was
fortunate to have an amazing support
network. Although she and Chris have
now gone their separate ways, in the
book she speaks highly of her former
husband. Her friends and fellow
actresses Nicola Stephenson and
Angela Griffin were always on the other
end of the phone when she needed
them and her father and her younger
sister Victoria rallied round, too.
Lisa’s mother died of cancer when
her eldest daughter was just 16 and
the actress reflects that this loss –
something she dedicates a chapter of
her book to – brought her and VictoriaS MAGAZINE ★ 28 JULY 2019 25
INTERVIEW
love
“IVF is
really tough.
The emotional
stress is
brutal”
PHOTOGRAPHS: TOBY GLANVILLE