AS SEEN ON LORRAINE AND FEATURED IN THE TIMES
'Stacey Heale ... has such a muscular take on grief, and her ideas around how we live with profound loss are truly original.' Clover Stroud
When Stacey Heale's husband, Greg, was diagnosed with incurable cancer on their daughter's first birthday, everything changed. She quickly realised how little is spoken about what the harder times in our lives really look like, leaving us lost to navigate the unknown alone.
Confronted with a new life she was not prepared for, Stacey began to untangle the brutal realities of life and death - and the fundamental differences between our expectations and reality.
Now is Not the Time for Flowers is Stacey's unflinchingly beautiful and raw memoir that addresses the big conversations that imminent death dictates, boldly taking the reader on a journey through the full spectrum of our lives and their complexities. Told through vignettes of her own life and the death of her husband, Stacey offers a movingly honest, insightful and humorous account of modern womanhood through the lenses of love, desire, motherhood, death, grief, identity, personal growth and the challenges and questions that our lives force upon us.
Now is Not the Time for Flowers is a powerful call to arms for us to discuss the messy and unexpected truths of our nuanced lives.
'To tell the explicit truths of lives is critical; to refrain from doing so keeps us lonely and isolated. Women are shamed for their emotional natures and their desire to talk so much, so we've shut down these avenues between us. ... To be honest is to show care, for ourselves and others. There is integrity in truth; it is freeing even when it's painful and hard. Sometimes it can land like a blow to the head, but its ripples are in no way as far-reaching as secrets.' Stacey Heale is a writer, speaker, curator, fashion academic and campaigner who is inspiring radically honest discussions on the lived experience of women, focusing on the realities of difficult times and how to rebuild your life from the ground up. Her academic research centres around the use of creativity to process trauma and the concept of the teenage bedroom as a site for identity construction. Stacey's 2018 TED talk focused on post-traumatic growth and the power of social media during a personal crisis. In November 2016, her husband, Delays lead singer Greg Gilbert, was diagnosed with incurable bowel cancer and died in 2021. In that time, she has campaigned for lowering the age of bowel cancer screening in the UK, research into treatments for stage IV cancer patients, access to unfunded drugs on the NHS and the financial rights of widows.
Stacey lives on the south coast of England with her two daughters and their blind toy poodle Milk. A movingly honest and insightful account of modern womanhood filtered through the lenses of love, desire, loss and grief. Stacey is a fashion professor and effortlessly cool, with the followers to boot - with support from Jo Elvin, Sophie Ellis Bextor, Clover Stroud, the Bibliofilles and more, and was a good friend of Deborah James aka BowelBabe, after campaigning together for the Bowel Cancer UK charity. She's also a spokesperson for the F**k Cancer Club, a group of women giving support and a voice to those affected by cancer at a young age. She's also a contributor to the Times and Guardian, as well as Substack. Her husband, Greg Gilbert, was the lead singer of indie group The Delays - Elton John is a huge fan! - so that reach is not to be sniffed at. Stacey has an engaged Instagram community of over 30k followers.
