By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY
NEW YORK � On a first meeting, Sarah Ferguson does not seem like a woman mired in insecurity and self-loathing.
By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY
Lost and found: Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson opens up about her life in a new book.
By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY
Lost and found: Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson opens up about her life in a new book.
The Duchess of York strides into her publisher's Midtown office crisply dressed in a blazer and dress that accentuate her shapely figure. She's spent the past hour tied up in traffic but doesn't appear rattled. Offering a smile and a handshake, she sits down to talk about her latest book, Finding Sarah: A Duchess's Journey to Find Herself (Atria, $25.99).
Which means rehashing what Ferguson, 51, describes as a life-long struggle for both self-acceptance and the approval of others. It's the subject both of her memoir and a six-part "docu-series" on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), also called Finding Sarah. The fourth installment airs July 10 at 9 p.m. ET/8 CT, with a repeat of the premiere episode set to run Sunday.
The author of numerous children's and lifestyle books, Ferguson had originally wanted her new book to focus on mothering. "It's the one job I think I've done brilliantly," says Ferguson, mum to Princesses Beatrice, 22, and Eugenie, 20, by ex-husband Prince Andrew, whom she divorced in 1996.
That plan dissolved in May 2010, when Ferguson ? no stranger to scandal during her marriage to Andrew ? was unwittingly taped by a British tabloid reporter who was posing as a businessman interested in investing in her philanthropic pursuits. In a portion of the video that Ferguson says was taken out of context, she suggested that a donation might "open doors" to Andrew.
Other press outlets quickly seized on the story "and turned it into something disgustingly awful," Ferguson says. "It was so sad. Friends said to me, 'We love you, but we don't understand ? who is this person?' I fell into a trap. I was drinking (in the video). I looked ? decadent. My instincts were, what am I doing?"
Ferguson remains adamant that she "didn't sell Andrew ? I didn't sell access to him. But it appeared like that."
The incident is the starting point of the book, which Ferguson culled largely from diary entries, "massaged" with help from Maggie Greenwood-Robinson (The Biggest Loser). The OWN series was conceived later by Winfrey, who has interviewed Ferguson several times and seems to have made her rehabilitation a personal mission.
The many guides in Ferguson's journey include celebrity gurus and Winfrey acolytes such as Dr. Phil McGraw, life coach Martha Beck and financial adviser Suze Orman. Most assure Ferguson, in one way or another, that her lack of self-worth ? stemming from her mother's abandoning her at 12 to run off with an Argentine lover ? is at the root of her problems.
Atria executive vice president and publisher Judith Curr, who in the OWN series is shown helping persuade a wary duchess to take the book in its revelatory direction, thought that Ferguson's "access to all these excellent people" would help make her journey attractive and accessible to readers. "We all have issues to deal with, though maybe not so many at once," Curr says.
Asked if she ever worried that delving into those issues so publicly would encourage yet more criticism, Ferguson simply says, "I couldn't have more than I've already had." Besides, she's proud of her progress.
"I'm healing myself," she says. For instance, the U.K.'s most recent royal wedding ? to which Ferguson, famously, was not invited ? initially caused her "sadness and regret, a feeling of, 'What did I do wrong?'" Now, she says, she's thrilled for Prince William and the new Duchess of Cambridge. "The last bride down that aisle (at Westminster Abbey in 1986) was me, but now it's on to Kate, and it's exciting."
Ferguson has her own ventures to attend to, among them her Helping Hand Books for kids; four new entries were made available by Sterling Press in June, with more due in August. Ballerina Rosie is due from Simon & Schuster in September 2012, and she's planning a novel for St. Martin's Press, about an 18th-century redhead named Lady Margaret (her middle name). "It's Pride and Prejudice meets 24," she says.
Romance is a trickier subject. Ferguson is still close to Andrew, of whom she writes adoringly. He supported her through recent financial troubles and she still lives on his estate when in England. Though she dismisses any chance of reconciliation, she admits, "I don't date. There are no takers, really. You have to be really strong to have the public eye on you, and if you're with me, it will be."
She pauses, though, and brightens a bit. "But maybe now the energy will change. I wasn't open to it before, because my heart was shut down. Maybe. We'll see."
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