Daytime TV Personality Reveals ‘Doubt’ Surrounding Her Big Career Move: Charlene White Opens Up

Loose Women panelist Charlene White has shared her experience writing her first memoir, including her initial excitement and subsequent struggles with self-confidence. The television presenter, who first appeared as a guest panelist on the British talk show in 2020 before joining permanently in 2021 following Andrea McLean’s exit, detailed her journey in a Guardian excerpt from her book No Place Like Home.

“When I was given the opportunity to write No Place Like Home, I was bouncing off the walls with excitement,” White, 44, revealed. “I genuinely couldn’t have been happier that I had been entrusted to do something so monumental.”

However, the project faced complications when White had to pause writing to participate in I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!, resulting in a missed deadline. Despite maintaining a composed exterior, she “had to hide the wobbles” from those around her. “When my head hit the pillow at the end of each day, my brain was a whirl of doubts that I could do it. Every night, without fail, I would wake at about 1 a.m., panicking that my lack of confidence had pushed me into a hole that I now couldn’t get out of. I was going to fail, and fail big time. I had backed myself into a corner.”

The broadcaster, who began her career as a journalist at the BBC at age 24, credits her Loose Women experience with facilitating the memoir-writing process. “It’s weird. It’s really, really weird [talking about myself],” she admitted to Express. “I think if I hadn’t done Loose Women the book would have been a lot more difficult for me to write, because I’d be going from journalism to opening up about myself in a book, and that is quite a large leap.”

White’s decision to join Loose Women initially drew criticism from industry colleagues. “There were a handful of other people that said: ‘Oh, no, you can’t do Loose Women. If you do Loose Women it’s the end of your news career.’ Seriously,” she revealed.

However, she remained confident in her professional judgment, explaining, “I know what I’m doing, and I’ve been doing this a really long time. I’ve been a journalist and a presenter for a really long time, so I know what I’m doing. I know that there are certain elements of doing Loose Women that I won’t always get involved in. I leave the other women to do that.”

White overcame her writing challenges by recalling parental advice from her youth that “you just have to have the confidence to believe that you’ll find a way to navigate it” whenever facing difficulties. “Because I’ve had the experience now of doing that for the four years, it meant that sitting down and writing about elements of my life felt less weird than it would have done. It was quite nice to just go back into the memory banks and laugh about certain things and put that down on paper. It was less weird doing it now than if I hadn’t done Loose Women and so I’m thankful for that,” she added.

Released on Sept. 5, No Place Like Home explores White’s experiences as a Jamaican Londoner and examines concepts of heritage, identity, and belonging. The memoir also features perspectives from eight other individuals discussing their relationships with home, addressing themes of conflict and social upheaval in their native countries.