And they all lived happily ever after... ‘I’m not wild about too much homework for children. We had time to knock around’
She’s sold 40 million books, and had her work adapted into a hit Hollywood film. Sophie Kinsella talks to Julia Molony about her new novel and her own real-life storybook romance
WAITING for Sophie Kinsella in an attic meeting room in her agents’ office, I hear her approach before I see her; her crisp voice rising from the floor below, the steady clomp-clomp-clomp of high-heeled, over-the-knee boots on wooden stairs.
And then she rises into view. She’s strikingly tall, her long dark hair styled into ringlets, her eyelashes Disney-princess long. When she speaks, she has the same clipped vowels as Kate Middleton.
Kinsella, best-known as the creator of the Shopaholic series of romance novels and it’s heroine Rebecca Bloomwood, turns 50 later this year.
She has sold more than 40 million books worldwide, and has just published her latest one, a new standalone novel called I Owe You One.
It has all the hallmarks of Kinsella’s bestselling formula; a calamity-prone heroine with an adorable flaw, a quirky cast of friends and family, and love with a capital L.
Kinsella’s fiction is proudly popular. Like other wildly successful female authors who write humorously on the subject of romance for a largely female audience, her work has been dismissed as “chick lit”. And it’s true that the dust cover of I Owe You One could be described as a shade of pink. But Kinsella, for her part, has previously commented that she prefers the term “wit lit” to “chick lit”.
In any case she makes no apology for her genre, writing about romance because, she says simply. “I love romance.” And she certainly seems to have an instinct for a good love match when she sees one. She met her own husband, Henry when she was in her first year as a student at Oxford. They shocked everyone by getting married straight out of uni when she was just 21 and they’re still going strong. A headmaster by profession, he now collaborates with Sophie as her manager, and arrives with her today, quiet and stalwart at her side, retreating discreetly when it’s time to start the interview.
‘You know, luck!” she says lightly, tossing her hair, when I mention her long marriage, before joking. “We’ve stayed together out of sheer cussedness to prove that we were right.”
But there’s a pragmatism behind Kinsella’s own romantic choice. “I like to think that I had enough of a sense of what was good for me,” she says. “We were lucky to find each other. We were fortunate to have, almost the courage to say, right this is it. We’ve found each other and this may not be conventional — I mean I was not planning to get married at 21. I really wasn’t. I was planning to have many glamorous boyfriends and forge my career and get married at a later date. That was the game plan. But I think I realised, no. This is right. We should be together, we’ll be a great team. That was what I instinctively felt. We will be a great team. We can do life together and that will be a good solid springboard for us to go at life and so let’s do this. And let’s not just go, ‘oh well we’ll get married one day.’ We could have just been together and waited but I think we both felt ‘no, if we’re going to do this, let’s do this’.”
Her stories too, reflect her belief in the importance of good sense. The heroine of I Owe You One, 27-year-old Fixie Farr has a compulsion for fixing things and a fatal attraction to her teenage crush who has grown up to be a handsome but selfish narcissist. “You have to be clear-eyed about what you want and what is good for you,” says Kinsella. “Writing Fixie in thrall to Ryan, I’ve seen girlfriends in thrall to people who just are not good for them. And it’s incredibly hard to understand why people become fixated with someone that all their friends think, ‘really!?’ But they do. There’s a sort of chemical magnetism which overrides all rational thought. I think if you throw in the teenage hormones, that’s another turbo charge to a relationship which may not be a positive. It all gets overridden by these feelings and it’s incredibly hard as an outside agent, to say anything or do anything. You just have to bite your lip, be tactful, wait, see what happens.”
You can’t imagine Kinsella doing anything so irrational as falling for a cad. Though fun and lively company, she’s a model of composure. And like Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote in Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead that the most important career decision a woman makes is who she chooses as a partner, Kinsella is a firm believer that our romantic decisions have an enormous impact on whether or not we achieve our goals. “You need somebody who is going to support you, but also help you be the best person you can be in order to forge that career,” she says. “And being with someone who tramples you or holds you back or is even indifferent — it’s almost another career decision. In the same way that a career decision is also a personal decision. Everything is inter-related.”
All her characters are framed in the context of a wider family, vividly drawn. “I think family has always been a big part of my life,” she says “and I can’t really imagine creating a character and not setting them in their family. Because even if you’re telling the most romantic tale in the world, it strikes me that as soon as people meet a nice guy, even if they disappear off with him for a week of sex and nothing else, then they are on the phone to their mate, or they’re texting or their mother is asking, ‘Oh what are you up to? Have you met someone nice, love?’ People have a world, and they connect and it’s part of who they are.” When writing a heroine she says she’s “probably more likely to describe their friends than their hair. That’s how I see life.” In I Owe You One, she deals with vexed sibling relationships, which she describes as “quite fertile ground for conflict, which we love as novelists.” “I’ve always been interested in people’s chit-chat. Especially around Christmas, when people tend to go home to their families. What I put into my books is stuff that I’ve gathered over the years — and I’ve just noticed that people tend to revert back to their childhood selves when they are back in their family fold. Especially
with things like sibling placement and old injustices and feelings of inadequacy or superiority. Whatever it might be. They tend to stay with us when we’re back in that situation.”
Kinsella appears to lived an unusually charmed life. Born in London, she moved to Dorset with her two sisters and parents when they took over a prep school there. Her mother is of Irish extraction — indeed Kinsella, her pen name, is actually her mother’s maiden name. And it’s through the Irish side that she believes she inherited the storytelling gene. “She grew up in England, so it’s a bit removed,” she says. “But I do like to feel that that’s the storytelling side of me. It comes from that Irish side. And she used to invent stories every night to tell us at bedtime. Used to invent characters and there would be ongoing series of these characters who got into scrapes and who did silly things and made us laugh. I thought this was normal growing up.”
When she was a child, her home life was “very bookish, lots of books everywhere, lots of music. Lots of hobbies. Very busy. Piano, violin, ballet, gym. But funnily enough not in a scary way. I went to a school that didn’t do any homework until you were 11. Didn’t even exist. I’m not wild about too much homework for children. We had a lot of time to knock around, invent stuff, play games. We had an old attic that we used to go and play in, we used to play in the garden. Not any structure, just off you go. We did a lot of that. And I like to feel that that’s when we might have been doing homework. I think it feeds the imagination. Hardly any telly and no phones and nothing any good to watch.”
She went to Oxford to study music but then switched after the first year to Politics, Philosophy and Economics. After graduating, she started a career in financial journalism. Her first book, The Tennis Party, was published when she was just 24 and was well received. At that time, she published under her real name, Madeleine Wickman. Her first book writing as Sophie Kinsella, The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic, came out in 2000. It was an instant bestseller and sparked the Becky Bloomwood series of which there are now nine novels. In 2009, the first and second books in the series were adapted into a Hollywood film starring Isla Fisher and Hugh Dancy, turning Kinsella into an international sensation.
She’s currently collaborating on a second foray into the world of film. Can You Keep a Secret?, based on her standalone novel of the same name, is currently in post-production. “I like to sort of think it’s going to be a really fun version of what I do and we can all enjoy it for that. But it’s not my creation. It’s a filmmakers’ creation,” she says, of the complex experience of handing over her stories to be re-told by someone else. “You have to slightly let go and think that this is them telling this story in a different way. I was very involved in the Shopaholic film on set. And with this film I’ve read every single draft or the script and given comments. What I do guard fiercely is the characters, the feel of it, the integrity, the warmth and the sweetness and the innocence and the humour,” she says.
Over a career spanning 25 years she’s been remarkably prolific. She’s now published more than 25 books, including a series for young adults. And if “chick lit” is dead, as the pundits insist, the fact doesn’t seem to be damaging her sales. She doesn’t pay too much heed to commentary or reviews, “What I don’t do is trawl through every single thing that I might find if I went on Google. Because I think that is not very productive. I’m like every other single creative person I’m sure in that the negative stuff is the stuff that sticks. Having said that, you can always learn, so I’m more likely to ask people around me, what’s the general vibe, is there anything that is interesting for me to know? But maybe not go online myself and read unvarnished endless reviews.”
Besides all of this, she’s also somehow found time to have five children, four boys and a girl. The eldest is at university and the youngest is just six. “They are spread out over many years. I don’t literally have five toddlers. I couldn’t cope with that,” she says. “We took our time.”
She and Henry started having kids relatively young compared to their peers. But “for us, you see, we’d been married five years, so it felt like we’d got married, taken our time. But because we were so ridiculously young, I was very much the youngest mum at the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) groups. But again that sort of felt right. And obviously I’ve gone on and also been oldest mum at the NCT groups.”
As for how they make it work, “the trick is not to think about things. Just keep doing what you are doing,” she says lightly. We are busy,” she admits. “My mother was once staying at our house and was watching us in action and kind of with the work and the children, she said, ‘I’m exhausted. You’re like CEOs of a company managing this whole thing’.”
She’s not naturally a CEO-type. “I’ve got more organised over the years but naturally I am disorganised. This is why it’s very useful having an organised person like Henry at my side. The double act is essential, I couldn’t do it unless I had a wonderful partner in crime. Which he is.”
She goes on: “What’s interesting is that when you have small children you think, oh they’ll get to 18 and then we can relax and it’s not like that. You’re still as involved, it’s just different types of issues. But it’s a really nice vibe between the older ones and the younger ones. And you know, like every working mother, it’s a work in progress. It shifts. You can’t generalise about balance or this and that, because every day is different. Every year is different, children grow up and start doing different things. I think you have to just live in the moment slightly and not remind yourself of quite what you are doing. Denial. Denial is very, very handy.” ‘I Owe You One’ by Sophie Kinsella is in all good bookshops now. (Dial Press, €15.99)