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How Constance Hall’s bold parenting commentary attracted a million 'queens'

Jenna Clarke

"Oh my god. Can we get a shot?" blogger Constance Hall yells out in a packed pub well before happy hour. "We're doing shots, babe. I wish I had longer for you, but at least we can do a cocksucking cowboy together."

The "babe" in question is just one of the hundreds of Hall's fans who have gathered on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Newcastle, two hours' drive north of Sydney, to meet their internet idol in the flesh. Instead of selfies and small talk, the pair are locked in a deep discussion about the woman's miscarriage and subsequent marriage breakdown. 

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Constance Hall's thank you

Online blogger Constance Hall delivers an emotional thank you as donations for her fundraiser for abused girls continue to come in.

This ugly underbelly of motherhood is a space that Hall owns, and thrives in. Which is perhaps why she's become one of this year's biggest social media stars. After launching her Facebook page in late 2015, she now has more than a million fans on social media, all drawn by her blunt, often brutal, assessment of marriage and parenthood.

In person, Hall is exactly like her online persona: she's warm and funny and swears like a sailor while being as eloquent as a European royal. She's the personification of a pop concert – full of energy, rarely still and decorated in colourful props that include chandelier earrings, floral crowns and 11 tattoos.

A married mother of four from Perth, the 33-year-old has the life experience of someone twice her age. In her early 20s, she met and fell in love with British carpenter Bill Mahon, and despite a tumultuous start to the relationship, they soon welcomed a baby, Billie-Violet, now seven. 

The couple then married, and Arlo, now five, followed soon after. A rough patch saw the couple's status change to "it's complicated" when Mahon moved out and Hall began sleeping with someone new two weeks later. They reconciled, resulting in the conception of twins, Snow and Rumi (named after the 13th-century Muslim poet), now aged two. "Today, I can't imagine my life without Bill," she says.

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To her followers, she is considered a queen, but to Hall all women are monarchs. She actively counters the unfortunate tendency for mummy-judgment that has permeated parenting blogs. She also counters society's tendency to relegate stay-at-home mothers, like herself, to the scrap heap.

"I don't have 'followers', they're not 'following' me – they're queens," she quips. "What I'm doing is tipping my crown to them – we've got each other's backs. It was never meant to be the huge movement that it's become. 

"These women love me and I love them. I get goosebumps just talking about them because we are so close, which sounds bizarre and really stupid, but I really feel we are," she tells me after her time in Newcastle, where she hosted her seventh sold-out Q&A; session to promote her self-published memoir, Like a Queen.

These meet-ups – 12 in Australia, three in New Zealand, and with a UK leg to come – are organised solely through social media and attract diverse crowds of women. There's wine, there's swearing and there are public autopsies of a range of hard-hitting issues, including postnatal depression and the loneliness of motherhood. 

Despite being wooed by four major publishing houses who tried to secure the rights to her first book earlier this year, Hall decided to self-publish Like a Queen. She says she was offered advances of $50,000, but baulked at the fine print of the contracts giving the publishers global rights.

She borrowed money from her stepfather for the initial print run of 400 books. She won't be drawn on how many she's sold so far, but there have been at least three print runs, with more expected in the lead-up to Christmas. She's since had to employ a team to handle printing, international distribution and her Facebook administration. 

Essentially, what I do is share my shit and give people a hand up. I know how to talk to people who are struggling.

But despite the hassle of selfpublishing, it's a decision Hall is glad she made. "I have a crusade going on because no one's ever listened to me before and everything that I've got I've gained from my supporters, my queens," Hall says. "So for somebody now to come and pluck me away from them and feed me back to them in their own way – as kind and lovely as they all were – didn't feel natural to me. I want the book and my posts to be from me to the queens with no censoring."

Hall is an accessible, trash-talking, modern-day parenting oracle, loved by her local fans as well as more high-profile followers like actor Ashton Kutcher.

Her popularity skyrocketed in January when a post about "parent sex" went viral, chalking up more than 160,000 likes and being shared about 38,000 times. (No mean feat considering the last post by Kim Kardashian West, who has more than 29 million fans, clocked up 175,000 likes and was shared 3000 times.) 

"You know what parent sex is, it's that 3½ minutes you get in between changing nappies and making food," Hall wrote. Soon after, Kutcher sang the praises of her parenting style to his 17.5 million Facebook fans.

While some brands and personalities game the Facebook algorithm by paying to boost posts on the platform, Hall doesn't. "I've been blacklisted," she says of her sometimes expletive-ridden updates, "so I have to rely on my content being good enough that people will share it.

"Essentially, what I do is share my shit and give people a hand up. I know how to talk to people who are struggling, because that's where I've been for so long."

Hall never talks down to women, never patronises. In between the crass talk and photos of her on the toilet, halfnaked in a change room with her arms stuck in a dress three sizes too small, or flipping the bird, she is kind, wise and psychologically astute. She knows how to talk to her audience and it shows with her ability to convert "likes" on a page into reality. At her first Like a Queen event in Perth, people queued for two hours just to meet her. 

Back in July, she felt compelled to weigh in on Sonia Kruger's controversial comments on Muslim immigration. But while other commentators were crucifying the Today Extra host, Hall performed a master class in diplomacy. She was sympathetic to Kruger yet firmly denounced her views. 

"To see people piling hate on her – I hate that about the internet," she says. "One minute she's being celebrated because she's an older woman having a baby, the next minute we all hate her because she's racist, it's just so silly. So it broke my heart. It always breaks my heart when the internet turns on anybody."

There's more to Hall's popularity than banging the drum in the pro-women band, and that starts with Hall and Mahon's life being an open book – a refreshing antidote to the carefully Photoshopped, stage-managed stories we are fed from other high-profile personalities. On the day we meet, she and Mahon "are arguing". When I ask her if, as a former hairdresser, she misses her old life, she admits she got up early to blow-dry her manager's hair. "I miss going to the salon to gossip and bitch and chat, but the pay is shit," she says.

She flaunts her "flawsome" life both online and in the book, where she reveals intimate details about a rocky marriage plagued with infidelity, her history of hard partying, and battles with anxiety and bulimia. But these sombre topics are lightened by tales of the time she toilet-trained her kids in the backyard, and how her first boyfriend's mother was convinced her son was a reincarnated dolphin. 

These more revealing aspects come naturally to Hall, a self-described extrovert who was once a contestant on Big Brother. (She was the first housemate of the 2005 series to be evicted, because she had lied about her relationship status during the audition process.) 

"It was just fun, I didn't see it as being anything other than that. I didn't expect a career out of it, while a lot of the girls in my year had to see psychiatrists and psychologists because they were so into it. You get treated like a celebrity and then two hours later, you're just dumped.

"The Big Brother thing is maybe why I'm so anti-establishment now. That was the crux of being 'owned' and not having any control over anything."

She admits that this become something of an Achilles heel for her. "I can be a bit controlling and it's really scary to be anywhere where people tell me not to do that, not to say that. I'm so sensitive to criticism," she says. "I'm not getting a pay cheque every month, I'm not taking anything, so I can just keep doing my thing and if I don't want to be criticised, I won't."

When Hall does lose control, drama ensues. Earlier this year, she became embroiled in controversy when a follower posted a photo to Hall's page of her son dressed up for a school parade. In the photo, the son's white skin was painted brown to look like his hero, Fijian West Coast Eagles star Nic Naitanui. 

Hall did not endorse the photo in any way, but bore the brunt of the media storm. The stress, combined with arguments with Mahon, saw her flee to a hotel. As usual, her followers had a front-row seat at the drama, with Hall posting a tear-stained selfie to Facebook.

But she's unapologetic about her tendency to overshare. "I post stuff like that hotel-room selfie because I feel like they are my friends," she says. "The minute you say to them, 'Can you guys just lay off because I'm not coping?', they do. You're going to make the people who love you louder and the rest of the shit is just flooded away by a wave of support."

Hall now plans to ride that positive wave by turning her movement into a tangible network by developing an app.

"I've noticed how women need to find friends near them, so I want to use some of the profits from my book to give back to my community and make, like, a Tinder for queens," she says. "When women don't connect, we fall apart. That's the way we are wired."

A few days later, and feeling particularly lonely, I receive an unprompted text from Hall. "I was totally hoping we would have a beer together," she writes. 

And that's when I realise "queening" isn't a brand for Hall, it's a way of life.