Kathy Lette's novels have made the Australian writer a queen of chick lit. but her new book has an exit strategy, she tells Bernice Harrison.
Kathy Lette wears a slick of bright-red lipstick and a skirt so short that she cheerfully refers to it as a "pussy pelmet". "After two kids," she says, "my legs are all I have left." The chick-lit novelist talks as she writes, and that means vulgarity of hen-party proportions (but far smarter), laugh-out-loud jokes and a pun for every occasion. "We love a bit of punnilingus, we girls," she says, which probably gives readers who haven't come across the Australian writer fair warning about what goes on between the covers of her comic novels. We're not talking Maeve Binchy.
Her latest book, How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints), is the story of three fortysomething Londoners: Jazz, a trophy wife married to a top medic; Hannah, a gorgeous high-flying art dealer; and Cassie, a put-upon working mother who has finally decided to do something about her hopeless sex life. All the men in these women's lives are unfaithful, self-obsessed and - here's the cruncher - useless around the house. The book opens with Jazz in custody, charged with her husband's murder.
"I do all my research over cappuccinos," says Lette. "Everything in this book has happened to my girlfriends - a friend whose husband remortgaged the house, another who had another family at the other end of town." And then there's all the bitching about husbands who do nothing around the house, about how women thought they were going to have it all but ended up doing it all. "Women nowadays are getting less sex than all those supposedly repressed 1950s housewives. It's no wonder. Women are too exhausted."
Her own husband is Geoffrey Robertson, a fellow Australian, and they're very much the London power couple. At 47 Lette has lived there for nearly half her life, despite being rather disparaging about the British. "The English think optimism is an eye disease," she says. He's a civil-rights lawyer, currently working on a United Nations war-crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone.
"I can't get the high moral ground. I used to say to Geoff when we first had children, 'Come here and change this nappy,' and he'd say, 'I have 250 people on death row.' After a while I started saying, 'Oh, let them die.' After the second baby I was like, 'I'm going to go there and kill them myself. Human rights begin at home; help me!' "
She's sounds far too smart to really believe the faux-feminist guff that all men are hopeless and all women fabulous, but she talks the talk. "Men are cunning," she says. "They have a psychological safety net. They know there's no way a mother is going to let the baby cry at night, so if they just wait one more minute, mom's going to get out of bed. They get away with as much as they can."
Lette has been writing since she was a teenager. She dropped out of school at 15 - "The only exam I ever passed was a breast exam" - to hang out and surf. Puberty Blues, in which she and her friend Gabrielle Carey wrote about their wild-child experiences, became a bestseller and launched Lette's career. She went to Hollywood to write sitcoms but turned full-time to novels.
How to Kill Your Husband began during a stint as writer-inresidence at the Savoy Hotel, in London. "They gave me a £3,000-a-night suite; my kids had a room down the hall, and room service? I dialled my finger to the bone." All she had to do in return was host a few swanky literary dinners, so she called her friends Stephen Fry, Salman Rushdie and Richard E Grant to come round.
"Don't forget chick lit is a genre I invented," she says, and she's so downright likable that it seems churlish to contradict her. Whatever the truth, she has made a high-profile career from her 10 risque comic books, from Girls' Night Out to Foetal Attraction and Mad Cows.
Not that she'd be happy to categorise her new novel as chick lit - when her 13-year-old daughter, Georgie, moans that all she does is write about sex, Lette tells her they're "feminist satires on the plight of the working mother; I'm putting into words what women are thinking". "Chick lit is now like Mills and Boon with Wonderbras. The women are waiting for knights in shining Armani. In my books women stand on their own stilettos."
Eventually, and no matter how entertaining it is, all that punning gets a bit exhausting. Reviewers haven't always been kind, and, as for the US, well, "they just don't get it", she says. "They're very straight, very puritan."
With publishers starting to cool on chick lit, Lette knows the days of the pink-covered books are numbered. "Thrillers are overtaking," she says, adding that, with this new book, which includes a murder, she has moved instinctively in that direction. Reading it, it's clear that's not really true, but it's typical of her optimism that she should say so.
"Isn't it interesting that women have stopped trying to puzzle out men? Now they're trying to puzzle out who did it."
How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints), by Kathy Lette, is published by Simon & Schuster, £12.99 in UK