I like nice bedlinen as much as the next forty-something, middle-class mother-of-two, and it was a couple of years ago that I discovered the wonders of thread count. The higher you go, the silkier the sheet.
So when it came to writing my second novel, I stuck in a minor character so enamoured of his 800 thread count Egyptian cotton that he refused to have sex on it unless a bath towel had been put down.
The book has just been published in paperback and within a day or so of it hitting the shelves, I had a friend on the phone.
"I don't know if I can look at you in quite the same way," she squealed. "That bit about the sheets. That's you isn't it?"
My protestations that it was fiction fell on deaf ears. How would I know to write that, she argued, if I hadn't thought to do it? Good question, and not one, I imagine, that troubles the likes of Denise Mina or Stephen King. But when you make a living crafting domestic drama, and live one yourself every day, isn't it only natural that people are going to confuse the two?
Apparently so. It has been one of the biggest surprises of becoming a mum-lit author: the extent to which some people assume that you are writing what you know, that the characters are you and yours only with much more interesting names and postcodes.
Of course, your own experiences will always inform your writing. It was motherhood that pushed me into fiction, while my daughter's starting at school was the inspiration for my first novel.
She sailed in and settled well. I was the one in the playground hanging around with my toes scrunched up in my shoes wondering would I fit in, who would I get to know? So I came up with a tale of three very different women thrown together when their daughters become friends.
When it was published in 2006, the school run became a little fraught, with everyone trying to figure out who had been the inspiration for the class bitch, Lisa, an acid-tongued harpy and an insufferable snob.
Everyone had their own opinion as to who it might be and all of them were wrong. She was an amalgam of every needy, brittle, alpha mummy that I've ever met or heard about, and there have been a few. But no matter. When they weren't being extra nice to me, the little knots of women who gathered in the playground come bell-time would sometimes fall silent as I approached, worried that an anecdote or throwaway remark might make it into print. Occasionally they would ask me expressly not to use a story they were about to tell. People took to sympathetically patting my husband on the back when they saw him. One of the husbands in the book was a serial adulterer, the other jobless, the third much put upon by his spiky, driven wife.
No wonder then that he was nervous when I told him a character in second book was dealing with impotence.
"Wonderful," he said. "Here we go again."
I researched extensively online and in print. I had done the same with my first book for a character who had bulimia. That didn't stop one London agent, her gaze sweeping over me as I sat in her office with a bourbon biscuit in one hand and the first three chapters of the book in another, announcing: "You've been through it, haven't you?"
In fact I didn't binge and purge, I Googled. I spent hours trawling forums and message boards to get a sense of what the experience was like for those who have been struggling with eating disorders. I watched documentaries and I read any article I could get my hands on.
I do like to think I know where to draw the line in using my own life and the lives of those close to me as a template for a novel. There have been situations that I have been in or close to which would have made for a jaw-dropping chapter or two, but which were way too personal or painful to be offered up as entertainment. But I think it is fair to reflect back in your work all the warmth, frustration, pain, humour, anger, love and alienation that come from parenthood, marriage and being part of a family.
"I don't know if you realise how much of yourself you are giving away," my mother told me recently after finishing the latest book, Between You and Me.
Maybe not, but to my mind, I have only once knowingly based a character almost entirely on a real person. That was in my first book, and the person was me. I loved this woman, a news reporter struggling with career and motherhood. I thought she was witty, ballsy, warm and wonderfully flawed.
I sent off the first draft to the publisher only to have it returned with a list of suggested tweaks and changes, prime among them, my alter ego.
"You'll need to do something about this one," said the editor. "She really is a bit of a horror."
