“Do you feel happy?” Rebecca Lucy Taylor looks at me over her beer, leaning back in her chair. I pause for a moment, unused to the inversion. Plus, she has just told me, rather insouciantly, that she is not.

“I don’t feel sad, though,” she adds with a shrug. “I feel alright, and I think that’s a good go at it for now. There are definitely moments of joy where there never were before. But they only happen when I’m being truthful with myself. Usually like, picking the dog’s shit up. That’s heaven.”

It’s the kind of throwaway remark that sums Rebecca up perfectly – a trademark blend of blunt honesty and black humour that has made her one of the music industry’s most compelling voices. Better known by her stage name Self Esteem, the singer has built a cult following by doing what a lot of pop stars don’t: telling the truth, unvarnished.

I meet her in the back room of a north London pub, the day before her 39th birthday. She sips her drink, half-laughing about the “existential dread” that comes with ageing in pop. “I think I’m just experiencing a normal weird reaction to leaving your 30s,” she says. “Plus, trying to be a pop star at 39 is kind of hard.”

We have met to discuss her debut book, A Complicated Woman. Earlier this year, she released her third studio album of the same name, and the book feels like a continuation of the candour found in the record – an equal parts self-lacerating, tender and witty account of sex, feminism and mental health.

Like the woman herself, A Complicated Woman refuses categorisation. Neither a memoir nor a novel, it is a fragmentary collage of dated diary entries, essays, anecdotes and industry autopsies that feels both mimetic of modern womanhood and singular to her. Stream-of-consciousness aphorisms like “Shaved my pussy and I still weigh the same,” “Be a very nice girl and shut up and act like you were born lovely,” and “I wish I understood anything,” thread throughout.

Before she was an author, though, Rebecca was one of British pop’s most hard-won success stories. A Rotherham native, she spent over a decade slogging it out in indie band Slow Club before reinventing herself as Self Esteem – a project that fused thunderous, choir-backed pop with confession and feminist rage. Her propulsive 2021 sophomore album Prioritise Pleasure earned effusive praise, was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, and gave her the kind of cultural moment most artists only dream of.