‘I’ve done the limbo with Salman Rushdie, eaten oysters with Helen Garner’

The best thing about being a writer is that you can work in your PJs all day, drink heavily on the job and have affairs and call them “research”. But I principally became an author as it involves no heavy lifting. Except for those writers who lift whole sections of other people’s work and then call them their own. But hey, you can’t have all work and no plagiarism, right?

If you really want to be a writer, your most important assignment is to think of a witty epitaph. Spike Milligan’s was: “I told you I was sick.” I think mine will be: “Finally – a good plot.”

I’ve been writing novels since my teens, so have developed quite a tan from basking in the reflected glory of some of literature’s greats. I’ve done the limbo with Salman Rushdie, waltzed with Julian Barnes and tangoed with Clive James. I’ve gone to a lap-dancing club with John Mortimer and prowled funeral parlours with Jessica Mitford. I’ve climbed Uluru with Tom Keneally and bodysurfed with Ian McEwan.

I’ve eaten oysters in Paris with Helen Garner and downed martinis in New York with Christopher Hitchens. I’ve sung duets with Douglas Adams accompanied by Procol Harum. I’ve had pyjama parties with Fay Weldon and crashed parties with Richard Flanagan. I’ve enjoyed intimate dinners with Margaret Atwood, Gore Vidal, Zadie Smith, Stephen Fry, Joanna Trollope, Ben Elton, Tim Winton, Jeanette Winterson, Neil Gaiman, Ben Okri, Shirley Hazzard and whole shelves of inspirational scribblers – and been drunk under the table by most of them.

So, why are writers my favourite species? Well, having left school at 16, books have been my education. I’m an autodidact – clearly, it’s a word I taught myself. Writers have helped me make sense of the world. And offered me escape from it. Grounded by COVID-19, books became my only means of travel, offering endless flights of fancy. As Dr Johnson observed, “The true end of literature is to enable the reader better to enjoy life or better to endure it.”

It’s been said that everyone has a novel inside them. And, in my experience, that’s probably the best place to keep it. But if you are a budding author, I’d advise you to strap yourself into a publishing simulator to see if you have what it takes, because the list of requirements is gruelling.

It’s been said that everyone has a novel inside them. And, in my experience, that’s probably the best place to keep it.

First is the honing of cheerfulness to chat-show perfection. Then there’s the mandatory haemorrhaging of charisma at book signings. Worst of all is the tour which involves flying hundreds of miles from Dipstick, Ohio, to Buffalo Fart, Wyoming, for a one-minute slot on breakfast radio with a member of the illiterati whose reading material is limited to his Instagram posts. I honestly think there should be an RSPCW, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Writers. Especially when it comes to US book tours, which are the ultimate exercise in humiliation.

One night in Pittsburgh, I sashayed onto the stage and launched into my funny feminist routine about the sex war. I knew it was amusing because I’d road-tested it in New York. But the silence was ear-splitting. Panicking, I then shot from the lip with my most lethal one-liners. Surely the audience would undergo collective quip-lash now? But no. Cue slow hand-clapping.