By Ann Marie Hourihane, Irish Times
EVERYONE SAYS THAT Kate McCann has got very thin. “She looks gaunt,” a woman said to me after her appearance last week on The Late Late Show, with her husband, Gerry. It is four years since their daughter, Madeleine, disappeared while they were on holiday in Portugal. The McCanns are now so saturated in public attention that their faces – well, Madeleine and Kate McCann’s faces; Gerry McCann is less distinctive – are etched on to our brains. And in that time our various obsessions about the adult McCanns have remained remarkably constant.
“Reports of my weight loss were greatly exaggerated,” Kate McCann writes of the period immediately after Madeleine’s disappearance. “In the first week I did lose about 4½ pounds, which I could ill afford, and which it took me months to regain, but nowhere near the stone removed from me by some of the press. I have always been thin. It’s the way I’m made.”
This is in several ways a terrible book. At its heart is a child who is missing and quite possibly dead. It is written by a desperate mother and was published on what is to be hoped was Madeleine’s eighth birthday, lest she be forgotten. It recalls the media circus sparked by the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in May 2007, from which no one emerged very well except, bizarrely, Clement Freud.
