NEW BOOK IS BORN
Becky is back in Kinsella’s latest
Sophie Kinsella has more than 30,000 Instagram and Twitter followers, 36 million copies of her books sold in more than 60 countries and an impossible-to-count number of shoes in her closet. For all intents and purposes, she is the ever likable heroine and success story that all of her characters happen to be — borrowing more than just a page from her real-life story.
Having started out as a financial journalist in London, writing reports and columns at Pensions World by day — “It was literally the only job I could get” — and fantasizing about writing fiction by night during her commute home, Kinsella injected a little bit of her own beginnings into the character she has written most, and who will likely remain her legacy in the literary rom-com world: Confessions of a Shopaholic’s Becky Bloomwood, a charming finance expert who also happens to be a very big spender.
“The idea of her came to me while I was in a shop,” Kinsella says with a laugh at Penguin Random House Canada’s Toronto offices. “The first inspiration was what really turned into the first chapter, which was a girl opening a Visa bill and that swell of emotions, which I used to feel. I still look at a bill and go, ‘What? Really? I plead amnesia!’”
Although she had written several bestsellers under her real name — the just-as-charming Madeleine Wickham — before she ever dreamt up Bloomwood, Kinsella assumed her now-famous pseudonym in hopes of adopting a “fresher, funnier, more confessional” restart. She began writing her most infamous character in 2000 and, nearly two decades later, still has no plans to let her go.
“She feels very real to me,” Kinsella says. “Her universe feels very, very real. Anytime I want, I can dip back in and catch up with her adventures. Which I don’t feel with all my characters. A lot feel like they’ve finished and I wave them goodbye, whereas Becky feels close to me.”
Kinsella has managed to share that intimacy with her readers, who have long dubbed her “the queen of chick lit.”
But the term “chick lit” has carried a certain stigma, targeted at pink-jacketed fiction often dismissed as nothing more than “fluff ” about women sipping martinis and complaining about their jobs.
“That phrase and I go way back — we’re old friends,” Kinsella says, just as easily dismissing the stigma. “And I’ve always chosen to be quite pragmatic, and don’t really classify myself as one thing or another. I try to write exciting and funny stories that make people think, laugh and turn the pages. What people call it is up to them. I was once in a book shop and saw the label ‘wit lit,’ and I did rather love that. I’m on a bid to push that one.
“I don’t assign a gender to my audience,” she says. “I write for people who have a sense of humour and are interested by these contemporary trends, and I don’t really think beyond that.”
With a readership that is largely female, however, Kinsella’s writing has become more satisfying rather than daunting in the current political landscape, where there is a newfound hunger for and motivation to promote nuanced female heroines who aren’t instantly likable, such as the heroine of My (not so) Perfect Life.
“I have to say, I love a flawed heroine,” she says. “What are we as humankind? We are flawed creatures, and what I try to do is to show that you can have these flaws and foibles, overcome them and still make it in the world.
“Nothing is perfect. The world changes and I reflect the world. I’m writing about issues that didn’t even exist when I started writing. My characters didn’t used to have mobile phones. But it makes life more fascinating and gives me a different outlook.”
As an author who seems to resemble the very women she writes about and for, Kinsella has been able to use social media in her favour, building a brand that has made her the most accessible of any chick-lit author on the bestseller list. Via Twitter and Instagram, Kinsella has been able to form deeper bonds with her readers, who crowd her posts.
With ideas “bubbling and overlapping ” in her head years before she actually sets pen to paper, prolific annual output and an adoring fan base of women who have graduated, found careers and built families alongside her, it seems the sprightly, gutsy heroines Kinsella has given birth to in her books will only continue to come calling.
“Actually, when I start writing I always think it’s a bit like having a baby,” Kinsella says with a laugh. “Nine months of growing a draft, oh, it’s very similar to giving birth. Believe me, I know, I’ve had five babies! You go through exactly the same process, and think, ‘Why have I done this? This is a huge mistake!’ And then it comes out, and it’s like, ‘Ohhh, this is actually quite amazing! God, you know what? I need to do it again. I want to do it again.’ ”