The one lesson I’ve learned from life

Author Lynne Truss

Best-selling author Lynne Truss, 66, found fame in 2003 with eats, Shoots & Leaves, which has sold more than three million copies worldwide. She lives near Brighton, east Sussex.

AVOID FAME — IT’S A TERRIBLE TRAP

Two years before I wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves, my sister Kay died of lung cancer at 52. Her death threw me off track. I ditched my newspaper contract as a sports writer and spent most of my time at home bursting into tears.

Kay was seven years older and had never set out to be a writer herself, but I was for ever playing down what I’d done so she wouldn’t feel jealous. She used to tell me off for being on the radio. ‘You’ve ruined Radio 4 for me,’ she’d say.

After I emerged from grief, I was asked to present a programme on punctuation and then to write a book about it. It felt reckless. I wasn’t an expert on grammar!

Yet people embraced it, and very quickly we were selling tens of thousands of copies every week.

I think if my sister had been alive, all of this would have been difficult to negotiate. She wouldn’t have been happy for me. I feel glad we didn’t have to go through that.

It became a bestseller in the U.S. and in the UK, and I wasn’t ready for that level of exposure. I went on America’s Today Show watched by 50 million people. Looking back, I think I still wasn’t in the best of shape, and my publishers expected a lot from me.

The money was weird. one day in New York, I went mad in a jeweller’s buying five necklaces costing about £7,000 just because I could. The success changed the speed of my life. But all through it I was thinking ‘when will it end?’, as it was so weird and scary.

I went to see a therapist to talk about developing a thicker skin to cope. But I realised there was nothing I could do. So I thought: ‘Just do things that don’t draw much attention to yourself.’

Today I’m writing my Constable Twitten novels, which have been a joy. I can report that penning comic crime novels set in Brighton in the 1950s is not a way to make a living. But it was totally the right decision for me. I didn’t like being famous. It felt like a terrible trap.

Murder By Milk Bottle by Lynne Truss is shortlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Prize (comedywomeninprint.co.uk)