Marjorie Wallace – författare

'A fearless campaigner without whom none of us would be here now fighting for mental health.' Sir Stephen Fry Marjorie's ambition was to be a war reporter – yet it was not in conflict zones but behind the net curtains of ordinary living-rooms that she found her front line. She fought for those whose lives had been blighted by loss, disability or dispossession, and as a television reporter, director and then investigative journalist, used her gifts as a writer to give a voice to the less fortunate. Known as a social reformer of the nineteenth century, Marjorie battled to change the perceptions and understanding of mental illness.All the time she was absorbed in other people's sorrows, Marjorie was struggling to keep her own at bay. She reveals the causes of the pain that drove her passions and recalls her heady time in television filming the embers of 'Swinging London', her succession of doomed romances with some of the best-known men of her generation, her life as a single mother and her turbulent marriage to a Polish aristocrat and psychoanalyst. For more than four decades Marjorie investigated a series of 'strange tales of the mind', the most astonishing of which is described in her celebrated book The Silent Twins In 1986, Marjorie founded SANE and created the UK's first specialist mental health helpline, open 365 days a year. She continues to fight her corner in the cut-throat world of philanthropy and charity.Not Quite Sane is a candid, achingly honest and often funny memoir, recounting one woman's epic life and the perils of being a pioneering campaigner. Marjorie's courage and self-awareness will inspire and console many who, like her, have found life a difficult and often solitary journey.