UPDATE: On Sunday 5 September, Sarah Harding's mother announced the devastating news that the 39-year-old pop sensation had died. Posting on Instagram, Marie Hardman thanked Sarah's fans for their unwavering support, saying: 'It meant the world to Sarah and it gave her great strength and comfort to know she was loved. I know she won’t want to be remembered for her fight against this terrible disease – she was a bright shining star and I hope that’s how she can be remembered instead.'
In the wake of her death, obituaries about the singer have been posted online. However, a number of them have faced backlash for focusing on her 'party girl' lifestyle. We previously wrote about the disgusting implications of such narratives. Here, we revisit the words of Grazia's assistant editor, Jessica Barrett...
On Wednesday, Girls Aloud singer Sarah Harding revealed via social media that she is undergoing cancer treatment. Writing on Twitter, the 38-year-old told fans she was diagnosed with the disease earlier this year and had more recently received the devastating news this month that the cancer had spread from her breast to other parts of her body. ‘I'm currently undergoing weekly chemotherapy sessions and I am fighting as hard as I possibly can,’ she said.
The response from the Daily Mail online was this headline: ‘Britain’s most glamorous hell-raiser: How Girls Aloud’s ‘Hardcore Harding’ became famous for wild-partying, explosive love affairs and stints in rehab – but now faces a battle against cancer’. The piece detailed how Sarah had been such a party girl during the Noughties that she’d been dubbed ‘Hardcore Harding’, and was well known on London’s ‘party-scene’ for her drinking. It also, weirdly, listed times that Sarah had been photographed holding alcohol, referencing that in 2007 she was ‘photographed swigging from a bottle of scotch whisky after the NME Awards’ and, ‘at a separate event that year, appeared a little worse for wear as she stumbled around on the phone while holding a champagne glass.’
That this damning article should appear just hours after Sarah had revealed she was having weekly cancer treatment demonstrates just how richly judgemental our society can be of women for anything - even having cancer. Without directly saying it the article is pointing the finger at Sarah for her own illness, indirectly posing a correlative question: if she hadn’t been such a 'hellraiser', would any of this even have happened? The answer is it could have been caused by any number of factors, but more importantly: we don’t know, and whoever wrote this article doesn’t know. What we do know is that it’s destructive, unhelpful and deeply hurtful to make assumptions about someone’s lifestyle in the face of a cancer diagnosis. Many Twitter users were shocked at the article, with one writing, ‘Daily Mail coverage of Sarah Harding's 'alcohol fuelled' past. Nice touch.’
Sarah is well aware of the life she has led, and how hard it has been. She has battled mental health issues and addiction issues in the public eye, and now she is getting herself through chemotherapy. The best thing people can do is wish her well, not sift through her life - whether it's her romantic history, feuds with former Girls Aloud members (all of whom have posted on social media of their heartbreak at the news) or pull up old photos of Sarah holding a wine glass.
If you’re lucky enough not to have been affected by cancer, you won’t know the depths of worry and terror that someone faces on that journey. Sarah will undoubtedly be asking, ‘Why me?’, but hopefully will have the information and reassurance that she needs not just to understand that it can happen to anyone but to face what's happening to her head on.
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