Dubbed "deliciously rude and darkly funny", Kathy Lette’s new book The Revenge Club is the story four best friends approaching their 60s, feeling invisible and bent on vengeance.
She was burning to write a book about revenge after a career set-back she experienced, Lette tells Susie Ferguson.
Photo: Supplied by Bloomsbury
“I’ve written 19 books, published in 18 languages around the world, I've had a big career. And when I told my agent my idea for my new book, he’s like, nobody wants to publish books about middle-aged women. They're just not that sexy.
“And then my publisher dropped me. And I thought, God, maybe I have passed my use by date.”
Backing her instincts about what her readers enjoyed, she connected with a new publisher.
“I got a gay agent who sold the book, got a two book-deal that day. He totally got it. And so, then I could have my revenge by writing this novel and sending it straight up the bestseller charts with a character based on me and what happened to me.
“So, listen, revenge is not only sweet, it's totally non-fattening. I think that's why we women are drawn to it - it's delicious.”
The message of her book is that post menopause is a time for women to flourish, she says.
“Post-menopause is actually the best time of your life, go forth and be fabulous and have a sensational second act, because you bloody well deserve it.”
She admits to a slight crisis of confidence after being dropped by her publisher.
"A lot of books, if there's a female protagonist my age, she's lonely and miserable, and she sort of moves into her flat and wilts away and dies of despair and then gets eaten by her cats.”
This does not reflect the reality of the women she knows, she says.
“All my female friends are swinging off a chandelier with a toy boy between their teeth. They're traveling the world with their girlfriends, they are having this sensational second act.”
She fully intends to keep writing books abut women of her age.
“Women my age are so interesting, they've got such a great hinterland. We've had the heartbreaks and the love affairs and the promotions and the breakdowns, and we've raised the teenagers and we've just got so much to say and talk about.
“I'm going to continue writing novels that star funny feisty, fabulous females having this brilliant second act.”
The trick, she says, is to survive the “interval”.
“Which is the menopause, which is awful. You know, you sweat more than Donald Trump doing a Sudoko. But after that, it is so liberating.”
Her semi-autobiographical breakthrough novel Puberty Blues is a cult classic.
“It's about the surfy guys we grew up with, you know, and they really disprove the theory of evolution. They were evolving into apes.
“And I wrote this book about that surfy culture to say to other surfy girls, you're more than just a life support system to a pair of breasts.”
The surfy girls she grew up were “beautiful, blonde, slim, tall blue-eyed", she says.
“I'm a bonsai brunette whose bra cup did not runneth over. So I had to develop some other way of getting noticed.”
Hence, she developed a waspish wit.
“I think I got good at giving quiplash, I call it the black belt in tongue fu. Just so the boys would notice me. I mean, otherwise, the Pope would be ringing me up for tips on celibacy.”
She’s no fan of the chick lit label given to her style of fiction.
“Men who write first person funny fiction like Nick Hornby get compared to Chekov we get chickov, we get a pink cover with a cupcake on it.”
At this stage in her life, she’s settled on a new, more fitting, label, she says.
“I want to have a new job that's called I don't give a shit lit because that's how women my age feel. We're like, if not now, when?
"And it is truly liberating. So that's going to be my new genre.”
Kathy Lette has written fifteen bestselling novels, and has been recognised for her advocacy of equality, human rights, physical and mental health.
