They say celebrities get arrested in their development at the age at which they became famous. Coleen Rooney is deeply invested in her own childhood, filling the first half of her autobiography with her pre-tabloid life, in which she thrives on control and adores her community. She celebrates working class Liverpool, with a strong sense that she wishes her own kids, who live in a gated mansion in the countryside, could have the same. As a teenager she doesn’t just babysit for the neighbours, she cleans their whole house (uninvited) and rearranges their furniture too. Putting on a Christmas show with her brothers and cousins gets complicated when she has to play every single role herself, as the others aren’t doing it right.
She’s ambitious at school; her teachers are upset when she quits during A-Levels. But she and Wayne Rooney, who has followed her around everywhere until she agrees to go out with him, are getting very famous, and the opportunities are harder to resist. He proposes to her in a petrol station because they’ve had a row on their way to a Chinese restaurant and Coleen doesn’t fancy going now. “He couldn’t get down on one knee of course — there’s not really the room in a car.” The book is full of droll put-downs like this one; it’s Coleen’s turn to tell it now. And you can’t help but admire her steel, like the time she rings up the Daily Mail switchboard and asks to be put through to the journalist who has just published a hatchet job on her. She gives him a piece of her mind. She is 18 years old.
But it’s the second half of her story, adulthood, that is far funnier. Because for someone so deeply organised and largely sensible, she’s hilariously relaxed about the absolute scenes that occur when she and her mates let their hair down. There’s the trip to Stockholm to see a Swedish House Mafia gig. “I’d been excited about the prospect of going to the after-party and hanging out with the band, but by the time the concert was over, I was starting to wonder if it was a good idea. My sister-in-law Amy fell down some stairs, one of the girls was vomiting and another was wandering around with one missing shoe.”
Her wedding is spent is in an Italian riviera village, where her guests (who she happily describes as “an invasion”) party so hard that the police are called by upset locals. She takes the girls to an Ed Sheeran gig back home and when he offers them a drink backstage, they say they just need a Diet Coke mixer, revealing the vodka they’ve snuck in to the venue in a secret flask. He can’t believe his eyes.
How the hell does her marriage work?
There’s yet another police incident in England, after she gets so drunk that she punches in her security code wrong so many times that an alarm goes off and, once again, the cops turn up. It is, of course, Coleen’s dad who drives over at 4am to look after her. Because to the the outside world, Coleen might seem a mother of four, married to her childhood sweetheart who became a football star. By the end of this book, I felt convinced she was married to her own father, with Wayne being one of her five children. (She says things like “I had no kids then, if you don’t count Wayne.” and “The prospect of having another human being to look after — besides Wayne.”)
It’s her dad she wants in the room when she first gives birth. And it’s her dad who cuts the cord when Wayne, also present, is too nervous. Intriguingly, Dad is Wayne’s polar opposite: an altar boy who remained devout, does endless charitable work with his wife, including caring for disabled kids like Rosie, who comes to them aged two and lives with them, adopted, until she dies at 14. He lacks physical strength, prolapsed discs having interrupted his bricklaying job, but will give his shoes to a homeless man and walk home barefoot. He angrily turns off the telly at anything remotely smutty like Eurotrash. Coleen respects him deeply: he is her rock.
So how the hell does her marriage work? Because yes, the Rebekah Vardy stuff is all in here, but if you’ve seen Coleen’s new Disney Plus documentary and the endless Wagatha Christie coverage then you’ll know most of that already. It’s Wayne’s various sex scandals and infidelities I wanted to hear her take on — and she does indeed go there.
She has often considered leaving the marriage, but says there is more at stake when you love and know someone — and have built a family. She believes it’s an alcohol and mental health situation rather than an ongoing deception. “I sometimes ask myself if he should drink at all,” she says, though it’s not a daily or violent thing, “more like binges when he’s trying to drown something out.” “There have been times when I thought he might be on the brink of a breakdown.” She mentions his depression and inability to show love to himself. “Ultimately, it always comes back to the same thing, the pressure he’s felt ever since he was a young boy.”
She says she simply has to believe it will never happen again, and perhaps it won’t. But I suspect her glamorous new profile, army of supporters and recent victory in the High Court with Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer won’t harm her future either. Just in case. You never know.
