"My mother was a difficult woman, which I have probably inherited,” says Jenni Murray. “We’re not afraid in coming forward.” The Woman’s Hour presenter, it seems, is aware of her reputation. Before the interview I am warned several times that Murray can be a handful.

This is a woman who has silenced Margaret Thatcher and who, when she stumbled across a squatter in her London flat, handed him a dustpan and ordered him to clean up before she calmly called the police.

As it turns out, she is perfectly lovely. The veteran broadcaster is about to appear in Brighton to talk about her latest book – Memoirs Of A Not So Dutiful Daughter.

Murray has referred to it as, “The diary of a terrible year” – it saw the death of both her parents and her own diagnosis of breast cancer, which she perkily announced at the end of her Radio 4 show Woman’s Hour. “I shan’t be around for a while in the New Year because I’ve just been diagnosed with breast cancer.”

Murray told her concerned and loyal listeners the prognosis was good before wishing them a “lovely Christmas” and disappearing for treatment.

Eighteen months on Murray is doing well, but her illness isn’t the focus of the book, it’s more her fraught relationship with her mother. At times it sounds as though Murray was the daughter her mother never wanted. In the book she recalls when her own son was born and her mother snatched him away and said, “At last, my boy”. “In four short words... she had wiped me out.”

Then there was the time she was studying at university in Hull (French and drama) and her mother declared, “What in God’s name has happened to you?

You look like Ten Ton Tess”. Murray went straight to the doctor’s and was given a prescription for diet pills, which turned out be amphetamines. She lost four stone and was so frail her mother had to spend the summer looking after her.

But there are other stories which almost make you smile.

“When I appeared on Newsnight I’d phone her up every night,” Murray says. “I would ask, ‘What did you think of my interview with Norman Tebbit?’ and she would say, ‘Did you interview Norman Tebbit? You know that red top you had on? Well you have quite high colouring and it didn’t suit you.’ Or, ‘You know they say television puts five pounds on you – they’re right.’ “Getting a job on radio was wonderful – she could hear me but she couldn’t see me.”

Murray can laugh now but you get the feeling there were many times she couldn’t. What compelled her to write about it?

“It was almost like something sitting in the middle of the room that was really, really difficult to deal with. My parents were clearly on their way out and there had been tremendous differences in the past which we had somehow begun to resolve in the last years of their lives and I just began writing about it.

“I have gone round the country talking about this book and so many women have said, ‘You have written my life’.”

Those tremendous differences, she says, were caused by a domestic culture clash – growing up with parents who were raised by Edwardians when you yourself felt you had the world at your feet. “Many mothers found it difficult to accept their daughters’ divergent ideas.”

To complicate matters, there was the ongoing competition for her father’s affection. On the day Murray discovered she had breast cancer, her mother died. She arrived in Barnsley to find her father weeping and wrote in her diary, “I feel jealous. Will she never cease to be my rival for his attentions, I think – then immediately feel ashamed that I’m being so selfish”.

But her mother’s long struggle with dementia meant things were slowly resolved. Murray says if her book has a message, “not that I like messages”, it is that lots of people have difficult relationships with their mothers and, “If you can try to open up some areas that caused grief in the past before that person dies,” it is, she says, “beneficial to both sides”.

She says her mother never told her she was proud but would hear otherwise from friends – no doubt the fact her daughter ended up fronting Woman’s Hour, the programme they listened to together when Murray was growing up, made her happy, even if she kept it quiet.

She says she would often be sent on “spurious errands to the kitchen during the racier parts of the programme”. Racier being the menopause and birth control – “Those stories came with a health warning”.

Murray has been at Woman’s Hour since taking over from Sue MacGregor in 1987 following stints at local radio, South Today and presenting Newsnight and Radio 4’s Today.

During her long career she has interviewed everyone who’s anyone. Murray is the woman who famously asked the then junior health minister Edwina Currie when she last had a smear test, and Gordon Brown, during his Chancellor years, whether he would show his wife his tax returns.

Then there was Margaret Thatcher – “an utter nightmare” – because she was so well-researched. But Murray can lay claim to being one of the very few to silence the Iron Lady.

When she asked the usually unflappable PM what she made of President Mitterrand saying she had the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe, and Alan Clark saying she had attractive ankles, and the talk of her “handbagging”, Thatcher was speechless.

“She looked at me completely astounded and said nothing.” Murray says the then editor of the Radio Times told her it was the only time his radio froze over.

She says it’s only now, after seeing last year’s drama documentary on Thatcher – The Long Road To Finchley – she understands the reason for that silence.

“I realised it had all come as a complete shock to her. Her press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham was so efficient and he never gave her the derogatory stuff – she had no idea Mitterrand had said that, or about the handbagging.”

But for Murray, her most memorable interview was with her hero, folk singer Joan Baez. “My friend Linda – a great, great friend – and I grew our hair long so we looked like her, but we didn’t have the cheekbones, and we’d go to the folk club in Barnsley and perform her songs.” Before meeting her, Murray’s one concern was what if she turned out to be a complete cow? “Suddenly I thought, ‘What if she’s horrible?’ I had a sleepless night worrying, but she was delightful.” A bit like Murray herself.

  • Jenni Murray will be talking with Simon Fanshawe as part of Brighton Festival at Sallis Benney Theatre, Grand Parade, Brighton, May 13, 7.30pm, £8, 01273 709709
  • Memoirs Of A Not So Dutiful Daughter by Jenni Murray (Black Swan, £7.99)