‘OK. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. It’s only a VISA bill.’
I read these words on my sixteenth birthday, and I felt my heart leap in anticipation. This was going to be delicious. I’d been given a book so enticing that I wanted to start reading it before I’d finished tearing the wrapping paper off. I didn’t have a VISA card, yet. But I didn’t need one. I could immediately see Becky, sitting in her office, gazing down at Oxford Street while trying to summon the courage to deal with the results of her last trip to Oxford Street. It took less than 30 seconds for The Secret Dreamworld Of A Shopaholic to captivate me, completely. My heart belonged to Becky Bloomwood, Sophie Kinsella’s most famous heroine. Becky – and Kinsella’s other characters – would be with me for the rest of my reading life.
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Kinsella sold over 50 million books – writing for adults and children, about serious and silly subjects. She wasn’t scared of big themes, like grief, perfectionism, burn out and complicated families. But every single one of her books led with pure joy. She wrote stories that were laugh-out-loud funny. The novels didn’t just induce wry smiles, or nods of recognition, but proper hooting, shrieking, reading-through-tears, banging-your-fist-on-your-knees hysterics. Picking up any book with Sophie Kinsella’s name on it was a guarantee of reading pleasure and delight.
When I was a student, my relationship with reading was complicated. I was studying English literature, and suddenly books started letting me down. Nothing that I read spoke to me. Everything felt dry and dusty, impenetrable and confusing. It was as though reading had abandoned me. But then, one summer holiday, I found The Undomestic Goddess, Kinsella’s novel about Samantha Sweeting, a corporate lawyer who finds herself in crisis, on the run, and forced to reckon with her ambition. The Undomestic Goddess made me howl with laughter – but it also forced me to think about who I was, and what I was doing. I’d been feeling lost. I was stuck, and struggling to understand what I wanted, and who I needed to become. Kinsella’s novel showed me that there might be other paths to adulthood, and that it was possible to choose ambition, joy and freedom.
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