The Susan Boyle story: If only she could freeze-frame this moment

David Hinckley
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
If the world wants Susan Boyle's story to forever remain as soaring and inspiring as it feels on the video clip that more than 200 million people have watched, we need to move in right now and freeze-frame that moment.

Boyle's audition for "Britain's Got Talent," where she sang "I Dreamed a Dream," was a moment of pure unblemished exuberance. This ordinary middle-aged woman in an ordinary dress, unknown outside her small village in Scotland, catapulted herself in five minutes onto an international stage ordinarily reserved for those who meet a carefully promoted standard of elegance and glamour.

It's no mystery to anyone who watches that video clip how Susan Boyle made hundreds of millions of people just plain feel good. But no triumph comes without a cost, and for Boyle, part of the price is having her life suddenly peeled back, while just as suddenly having no idea where it will go from here.

Her life was not, it turns out, such a happy story before, and there are many ways it could become a troubling story again. Which is why the only way to ensure that one moment remains uncompromised would be to erase all the time before and stop all the time after.

That's just how life works, a fact of which Susan Boyle is well aware. She was born June 15, 1961, in the small Scottish town of Blackburn, West Lothian, and brought home to the modest "council house" where she lives today.

She says she still sleeps in the same room. Her parents were Irish Catholics who moved to Scotland so her father Patrick could work as a storeman at the British Leyland factory.

Her mother Bridget was a shorthand typist, but spent much of her time at home raising 10 children – six boys, four girls. Her mother was 47 when Susan was born, six years after her next-youngest sibling George.

A difficult birth left Susan briefly deprived of oxygen, leaving her with a learning disability. In the whirlwind of interviews she has given since her "Talent" audition aired in Britain on April 11, Boyle hasn't spoken in much detail about her childhood.

But as the baby in a family of 10, she seems to have felt distant from siblings who in some cases were old enough to be her parents and gradually over the years all moved away.

Two brothers who have since surfaced – George, now 53, and John, now 59 – remember Susan as a shy child, an inclination likely reinforced by her difficulty in learning and thus with fitting in.

In early photos, Boyle looks like a typical Scottish child, with a broad, friendly face. But her learning disability made her different and children being a cruel lot, her classmates took to calling her "Susie Simple."

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