In conversation with Allison Pearson

the bestselling novelist lives mostly in Cambridge with her partner anthony Lane and their son tom, 18, and two poodles, Django and maisie. their daughter eve, 22, comes home regularly.

Welsh is my first language. my grandad was a coal miner so my sister and

I were brought up in a small community in Pembrokeshire until we moved to england when I was about 10. my mother was a great lover of musical theatre. so, instead of books, we had long-playing records of The King and I, Mary Poppins, Sound of Music, Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls.

those lyrics were my poetry. you can’t do better than some lorenz Hart and cole Porter. they really triggered my love of language and rhyme. When my father left us, i sought

refuge in fiction. I buried myself in reading whenever I could. I remember finding a Secret Seven and an agatha christie at a cousin’s house, and staying up all night to read them. i worked hard, got into Cambridge and then did teacher training for a year, which was a shock to the system. I thought I was going to be out there teaching the wonders of poetry but the

i didn’t think i had the necessary

authority at that point! so in my twenties I did a variety of jobs. after being a sub-editor at the Financial Times,

I joined the Independent on Sunday. the paper had hardly any staff so they’d say “who wants to be the radio critic?” and if you put up your hand you could do it. I was doing about three jobs at one point and hardly left the building. that’s where I met anthony.

“Being my age is a very powerful terrain for both comedy and tragedy”

i wrote my first novel I Don’t Know How She Does It after reading a survey asking working mothers what they

wanted for mother’s Day. about 72% said “a little bit of time to myself”. the line that jumped out at me said they thought they had tougher lives than their mothers. we were the “having it all generation” but it felt more like we were doing it all. so I wrote a column for the Evening Standard in which I expressed these thoughts. the response was so extraordinary that i felt as if i’d opened a door to a secret world where women were keeping their worry to themselves. I remember thinking that if you could capture that in a book that would be very powerful. I heard so many funny and heartbreaking stories. I wanted my novel to be honest, with lots of crazy laughter, but to capture the bleaker side. i hadn’t thought of writing a second kate reddy novel until a woman said to me, “i hate to tell you this but having small children is the easy part. Wait until kate’s got teenagers.” I didn’t know what she was talking about until I had teenagers of my own. Parenting children in the age of social media is an absolute minefield.

so kate reddy comes back in How Hard Can It Be? she’s coming up to her 50th birthday, and feeling caught between teenage children, elderly parents-in-law, a husband who’s having a midlife crisis, plus she’s riding the hormonal rapids of the menopause. she’s needing to go back into work and not feeling very confident so she reinvents herself and lies about her age. i wanted it to be a hymn to the amazing values of women who are holding the world together. basically we’re carrying it on our shoulders and not getting the credit. i find any writing hard, but when i sat down kate’s voice came to me almost immediately. I had her naked and sitting in front of the mirror, saying “I never worried about getting older and then I got older.” once I’d tapped into her voice, I used lots of the experiences of my friends and myself. i love making people laugh into recognition. If women read about kate having some sort of menopausal disaster that makes them feel understood. one of the reasons

I write is to not feel so alone but also to make other people feel not so alone. that lovely universal thread in storytelling binds us all together. being my age is a very powerful terrain for both comedy and tragedy. Women do so much in the world and their contributions have been

under-recognised. I think whoever came up with “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” got it exactly right. men go to the office to have a rest, don’t they? kate said in the first book that women make the world work so that men can run it. I strongly believe that, so hopefully we’re seeing big changes start to happen.

Allison’s novel how hard Can it Be? (Borough Press), £14.99, is out now

very first question I was asked on my first day in the classroom was, “what’s your favourite flavour condom, miss?”