How my son Grayson Perry drove me to the brink of suicide (2024)

The mother of cross- dressing artist Grayson Perry was driven to the brink of suicide by her son’s rejection.

Perry, who has been estranged from his mother Jean Dines, 79, since 1990, repeatedly told her to leave him alone and not to contact him again after she tried to heal the rift in a phone call last month.

‘I was having a sort-out and I found an old address book with his home number in it from years ago, so I thought it might be a sign to get in touch,’ Mrs Dines said.

But when she phoned Perry’s home in North London and said ‘Hi, it’s your old mum’, the acclaimed artist and Turner Prize winner, 55, told her ‘Don’t phone me again’, before hanging up.

Last night, Mrs Dines said: ‘That broke my heart. I’ve never understood why he hasn’t wanted me to be part of his life.’

The rejection came on the eve of tonight’s screening of the artist’s latest project – Grayson Perry’s Dream House – on Channel 4.

A character in the programme, Julie May Cope, is based on Perry’s mother. Like Mrs Dines, the fictional Julie has two marriages, but she dies after being run over by a pizza delivery motorbike.

Mrs Dines, who suffers from poor health following a stroke in 2011, coupled with a chronic and debilitating heart condition, describes the portrayal as ‘cruel beyond belief’.

She adds: ‘Despite what he says, I was a good mother to him and when he was a boy we were incredibly close. But he rejected me when he was about 11 and went to live with his father and he’s been rejecting me ever since.

‘I know I’m close to the end of my life now and it would mean the world to me if we could rebuild our relationship before it’s too late.

‘I think his anger towards me stems from the breakdown of my marriage to his father, Tom, but that was so long ago. I also think Grayson’s wife, Philippa, is at the root of things, discouraging him from allowing me back into his life.

‘But I didn’t want to leave it there so I phoned him again a few days later. I realised that I’d need to persevere so he’d know how much it meant to me. “Don’t drop it, Jean,” I thought.’

The second time, Perry was equally dismissive. ‘Not you again,’ he said when he heard her voice. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you so leave me alone.’

Mrs Dines, who lives in Cardigan Bay, West Wales, says his response threw her into a bout of depression, during which she seriously considered killing herself with an overdose of the many tablets she has been prescribed for her illnesses.

‘His reaction made me desperately unhappy,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t see the point of carrying on if my first-born son no longer cared enough about me to be kind to me.

‘But my daughter, Helen, talked me round and helped me see beyond Grayson.

‘Still, I wanted to keep trying with him, so I rang a third time a week later. This time the number was dead. He’d obviously changed it to stop me phoning again.

‘So that’s that, I’m afraid. He clearly wants nothing more to do with me and my challenge is to accept that now and live for the people who do care about me.’

Perry has always blamed the rift on his mother’s affair with Alan Dines, who was to become the artist’s stepfather.

When he was seven, his father Tom left the family home in Chelmsford and remarried, something Perry says had ‘the largest impact on me in my life’.

When he was 15, after his mother had married Mr Dines, Perry moved in with his father and stepmother.

He realised he was a transvestite during his teens and was thrown out of his father’s house by his stepmother because he was dressing in women’s clothes.

He went back to his childhood home. After graduating in fine art from Portsmouth Polytechnic, he lived a hand-to-mouth existence in squats, at one point sharing a house with milliner Stephen Jones and singer Boy George.

He has rarely commented on the rift with his mother, saying only: ‘I made a pretty cruel decision that it was better for my mental health to not be in contact with her.’

On tonight’s Channel 4 programme, which has as its centrepiece a house in Essex built in collaboration with architect Charles Holland, Perry, 54, says: ‘When I look at the house, I am rewriting my mother’s life, making it as I wish it would have been.

‘There is a very deep need to make something right. The little me is still trying to make it right.

‘There was a feeling in the background that she could have done better as a mother. She basically spent my childhood slagging off my father to me.’

Mrs Dines – who had three more children, Helen, Spencer and Warren – says of the show: ‘I take heart from the fact that he wishes I’d had a better life. The fact that his work has this as its theme, at least in part, that suggests that deep down he still thinks about me. I see this as a positive thing.

‘Julie’s death sounds none too pleasant but I’m putting that down to artistic expression rather than taking it too personally.

‘I have no idea where the notion of a tragic accident involving a pizza delivery bike comes from. It certainly hasn’t featured anywhere in my life, so far at least, thank goodness.’

She will not watch the programme, just as she has not read his autobiography – on the advice of Helen, who warned her it would only upset her.

‘What have I done wrong apart from give birth to the boy?’ she asks. ‘When I nearly died from my stroke almost four years ago, he didn’t even send a card, let alone come and see me. What kind of son treats his mother like that?

‘I was always there when he needed me. When he was thrown out by his father as a teenager because his dad didn’t like him wearing women’s clothes, I took him in and even let him wear my dresses.

‘Alan said I shouldn’t be letting him wear my clothes, but I defended Grayson’s right to do what made him happy and always stood up for him.

‘Years later, when he was a student living in a squat in North London, not so far from the lovely house he lives in now, I’d go and see him and take him fresh food and clothing. I remember being horrified at the sight of his bed. It was a couple of wooden pallets and some hessian sacks.

‘We sat there together on this makeshift bed and he turned to me and said, “Mum, I need a hug.” We just sat there for ages hugging one another. Well, it’s me that needs a hug now and where is Grayson?

‘He’s nowhere near and he doesn’t want to know me any longer. It is too sad for words.

‘If you see my boy, please, please tell him from me that his old mum needs a hug now more than ever.’

Husband Alan, 73, says that although he supports his wife’s wish for a reconciliation with Perry, he is ‘ashamed’ of him.

He said: ‘I’ve got one word to describe Grayson Perry: plonker.’

Grayson Perry’s Dream House is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm, and then on livingarchitecture.co.uk.