I started writing Any Way You Want Me in 2002. We’d just moved to Brighton and I had a one-year-old and a new-born baby to look after, having resigned from my job at the BBC. My life no longer revolved around working and socialising and shopping as it had done in the London girl-about-town days, but was now completely taken over by domestic chores, breast-feeding, nappy-changing and Tumble Tots. I felt swamped by motherhood, and applied for a place on a Novel Writing evening class at the University of Sussex , in the hope that it would kick-start my brain out of its numbness.

The course was brilliant, and I found it really cathartic to write about all the intense feelings I was experiencing. The first page of Any Way You Want Me comes straight from one of the early dialogue exercises we were set, and I enjoyed writing the scene so much, it inspired me to carry on. The main character, Sadie, is similar to me in many ways (although I must quickly say that the novel is NOT autobiographical!) and I was intrigued by the idea of her setting up a parallel life for herself, in order to escape the drudgery of her day-to-day domestic life. I also wanted to refute the so-called ‘yummy mummy’ myth, especially as I was feeling particularly un-yummy myself!