Kate Figes obituary
Writer who excelled as an astute observer of people, in books exploring relationships and family life
“I don’t believe that any of us can ever accept the inevitability of our own death. Life is too bloody wonderful.” So wrote Kate Figes, who has died of cancer aged 62, in her final piece of journalism, published only a fortnight ago. After listing some of the medical crises that had made her life rather less than wonderful over the last few months, she concluded that even this terrible year had its “surprising silver lining”, in that “by coming that much closer to dying I have learned a little more about how to live well.” Living well, for Figes, meant continuing to look beyond her own determined struggle to beat the odds.
Born in London into a family of writers, she found her own writing niche as a smart and accessible synthesiser of complex information, an indefatigable interviewer and an astute observer of people. It was not until her early 30s that she plucked up the courage to write full-time, because “it’s not easy to believe you can when your own mother is one too”.
