Karen McLeod: Lifting Off and Finding Your Way Home
By Sheila Hunter
Karen McLeod has worn many hats: cabin crew, novelist, performer, tutor, writer in residence, founder. These days, she keeps it simple. She is a writer and a performer. Everything else, she says, feeds into that core identity.
That sense of self, hard won and long searched for, sits at the heart of Lifting Off, Karen’s acclaimed memoir. It is a book about identity in its broadest sense: what it means to feel comfortable in your own skin, and what happens when the life you are living no longer fits who you are.
A life in transit
Lifting Off begins in the late 1990s, after Karen leaves art college with ambitions of becoming a performance artist. Reality intervenes quickly. There is no reliable income from art, and living at home is not an option she wants to accept. Coming from a working-class background in Penge, and as the first in her family to attend university, financial independence matters.
A suggestion from her mother changes her course. Why not become cabin crew? Karen loves travel and adventure, and the plan feels temporary. Fly for a few years, see the world, then return to art.
Instead, she spends twelve years in the air.
Getting lost
Those twelve years form the backbone of Lifting Off. Karen writes with honesty about airline life, dismantling its glamorous myth to reveal a culture shaped by alcohol, exhaustion, and quiet conformity. Having come out as a gay woman at art college, she also found herself navigating attitudes that felt outdated and, at times, hostile.
Gradually, the job begins to eclipse her sense of self. The book traces how it feels to get lost inside a role, and the slow, often uncomfortable process of finding a way back. While set in the world of aviation, the story resonates far beyond it. Anyone who has stayed too long in a life that no longer fits will recognise the emotional terrain.
The memoir offers readers not glamour, but recognition.
Early success and its complications
Before Lifting Off, Karen published her debut novel In Search of the Missing Eyelash, an unforgettable title inspired by a conversation with Ali Smith. The novel was published by Jonathan Cape, won the Betty Trask Award, and was shortlisted for Best First Novel Award from the Author's Club.
Success came quickly, but it brought its own conflict. One day Karen was performing at the South Bank, the next she was back on a plane serving passengers. Rather than clarity, recognition raised new questions. Who was she now? Writer or cabin crew?
That tension would later feed directly into Lifting Off. Yet the impact of the novel endures. Nearly twenty years on, it continues to open doors. Republished by Muswell Press in 2024, it has been embraced as a modern lesbian classic and, alongside Lifting Off, has renewed Karen’s sense of herself as a writer.
Telling the truth
Karen did not set out to write a memoir. She initially tried to fictionalise her airline years, but the story resisted. Something about that period demanded honesty.
The book took years to complete. An MA at Goldsmiths, supported by a scholarship, helped shape the work, particularly under the guidance of Blake Morrison. Even so, it was not until around 2018 that the memoir fully came together.
Her father’s death in 2016 gave Karen permission to explore subjects she had previously avoided, including alcohol and family inheritance. While the memoir did not fully take shape until later, it was only after this loss that writing it became a real possibility. With age came a greater freedom from worrying about how her story might be received.
What Lifting Off means
The title Lifting Off works on many levels. It refers to flight, but also to shedding uniforms and expectations. It speaks to the dehumanising nature of large institutions, and the need to uncover what lies beneath imposed identities.
It also alludes to alcohol, and the false sense of escape it once offered. In writing the book, Karen feels she lifted off from earlier versions of herself, making peace with the past while allowing space for a more complex present.
Comedy, failure, and Barbara Brownskirt
Not all of Karen’s creative responses were solemn. Out of frustration emerged Barbara Brownskirt, her much-loved comic character, described by The Sunday Times as “Rik Mayall meets performance art”.
Barbara is intentionally unglamorous, a cagouled, frustrated poet who believes herself to be a genius. The terrible poetry is written deliberately by Karen, crafted to be cringey, funny, and sad for the stage, while Barbara herself remains blissfully unaware. Audiences love her. People, Karen observes, enjoy seeing failure handled with humour. It offers relief, recognition, and permission to laugh at our own shortcomings.
A new Barbara show is planned for later this year.
What comes next
Karen is currently working on a new novel set in Deal and Lesvos, following a woman in her early fifties who moves back in with her mother, who has dementia. It is, she says, a melancholic comedy for our times: funny, sad, and deeply human.
She is also the founder of the South London Writing School, created as an antidote to online isolation. Based around weekly workshops and monthly masterclasses, it is rooted in community and accessibility, with scholarship places offered in honour of the late owner of Bookseller Crow Bookshop in Crystal Palace.
A simple piece of advice
For aspiring writers, Karen’s advice is practical and generous. Do not wait. Buy a notebook. Write every day. Pay attention to the world around you.
It does not have to be good. It just has to begin. Because sometimes, starting is what finally allows you to lift off.
Lifting Off and In Search of the Missing Eyelash are available from all good bookshops and online retailers.
You can follow Karen McLeod on Instagram and Substack for updates on her writing, performances, and the South London Writing School.
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