WAITING TO BE EDNA....

When I got my first book published, I thought that I would now be be living The Writing Life. This had something to do with being languid and bourgeois, I felt, ascending to a higher plane than that which I had previously occupied. (And which involved scraping yogurt off small children, watching X factor, wearing dodgy leggings etc.) I'd be the parallel version of myself that had never seen the light of day before, the one that didn't get The Worst Perm in the School in 1977, the one that went to Cambridge, not Goldsmiths, the one that dated Hugh Grant, not some bloke from Halifax who ended up being a racing tipster. And so on.

This proved not to be the case. My life as a reasonably crap person carried on, reasonably uninterrupted. I still wadged about in a horrible dressing gown, read Hallo magazine in the queue at Sainsbury's, still knew far too much about celebrity cellulite. And my eyes still glazed over when I tried to read the works of Proust, Dostoevsky or Paul Auster.

This seemed wrong at first. When was I going to turn into Edna O'Brien? But of course this was extremely naive. Ms O'Brien would have been beautiful and fragrant whatever career path she had chosen, and it is my fate to a lower middle class person from the middle of England with appalling eyesight and fairly average levels of charisma.

And that is fine - as long as someone publishes my goddam novels...