MUM ON EMISSION
Author, beauty entrepreneur and mum of two Zoe Foster Blake says she’s too busy to fart around with boring projects – so she wrote a children’s book
It’s not in many interviews you get to legitimately ask: “Who farts the most at your place?” Zoe Foster Blake blames the baby first, then the child, then the husband. “I’m a lady and ladies don’t do that,” she says. “It’s funny, for someone who doesn’t like farts, I’ve now got myself into a place where I’m talking about them constantly.”
Flatulence is the funny fodder for Foster Blake’s first children’s book No One Likes
a Fart, a sentence she often finds herself saying to her radio funnyman and Gold Logie-winning hubby Hamish Blake, their son Sonny, 3, and baby daughter Rudy.
Aimed at children aged three to six, it’s her debut into the throng of kids’ books by celebrity authors, names that include A-listers Madonna and Julianne Moore, English comedian David Walliams, as well as homegrown stars Isla Fisher, Peter Helliar, Shaun Micallef, Blake’s radio partner-in-crime Andy Lee, and Dave Hughes, whose recently released Excuse Me! – written with wife Holly Ife – is also about bottom burps. In this crowded market, what cuts the mustard?
“I wanted the book to be fun for adults, too, because they’re the ones who end up reading it 40 times,” Foster Blake, 37, says. “Also, when you’re doing a fart book, people immediately think it’s going to be crass and vulgar, so we deliberately wanted the pictures to be lush and beautiful. The story’s very sweet, too.”
And don’t be surprised if this fart story with heart is the first of several kids’ books by Foster Blake. She has a lot more yarns in her, as well as a bevy of other projects – on top of running To-Go skincare, which employs 20 people, and raising Sonny and Rudy.
“I get bored quickly,” she says. “There’s a deep-seated creative ADD in me that has to be satisfied with new projects all the time. But now I have children, I’m much more efficient and specific and intolerant of ideas that take away my time with them.”
Known for her warm and witty writing, Foster Blake has penned four chick-lit novels, including 2010’s Playing the Field, centred on a long-suffering WAG (drawn from her decade dating former rugby pin-up Craig Wing), and
The Wrong Girl, which was turned into a TV series on Channel 10 starring Jessica Marais.
Building on her decade working for women’s magazines, she’s also written a beauty guide named Amazing Face (and its sequel Amazinger Face), and co-authored dating guide Textbook Romance in 2009 with Blake. The pair began dating the following year and wed in 2012 in the Blue Mountains.
Foster Blake grew up in Bundanoon, a small town in the NSW Southern Highlands, the youngest of a blended family of eight children. She moved to Sydney at 18 and worked as a telemarketer, a supermarket night packer and a promo girl selling cigarettes in nightclubs before starting a beauty blog and working in magazines.
Today, she and Blake live in a $4.5 million house in Melbourne’s Richmond that was featured on Grand Designs Australia. Her Instagram feed is filled with their seemingly charmed life, although she admits to pulling back on the posts of late. She cites laziness and being conscious of “baby-spamming” her 620,000-strong following.
Perhaps it’s also because just about every post from her social media accounts ends up repackaged as news.
She uses the platform to recommend products, but unlike influencers paid to spruik wares, she shuns the post-for-pay model.
“If I was ever to do a paid partnership, I’d make it very explicit,” she says.
“I take my followers’ trust very seriously. It’s important to have integrity. You only get so much goodwill.”
Like most people on social media, Foster Blake puts her best face forward, but she admits having a second child has been tough.
“You can’t prepare for it,” she says. “I feel that in my life I’m pretty autonomous and OK at what I do, but I felt so deeply unqualified and out of my depth because they both need you at the same time.
“Those first 12 weeks were brutal. Every day that goes by I have so much more respect for mothers. I sent Mum a bunch of flowers the other day, saying, ‘Mum, you did a big, hard thing’. She had five kids and we had no TV. How did she do it?”
Having her own business, Foster Blake returned to work soon after Rudy’s birth in July. She has a nanny three days a week and employed a night nanny in those early days.
“It sounds lavish but it’s probably the best money spent because we were both working,” she says. “There were some dark days there and I make no apologies for getting someone in to help me get a three-hour block of sleep.”
Happily, Blake will be at home more as his weekday radio drive show winds up this year, though Foster Blake is not sure how long that will last. “He’s so good at radio and they enjoy it so much, [so] to my mind I think they’re just taking a break.”