KEY POINTS:
No one has more quickfire one-liners than Kathy Lette. They flood out of her, in person and in the pages of her best-selling novels. Lette has a quip for every situation. Relationships? "The perfect marriage is like an orgasm - many of them are faked."
Parenthood? "Living with a teenage daughter is like living with the Taleban." Even the inhabitants of her adopted homeland don't escape: "The first step to befriending an English person is to let them thaw out." And: "The English do nothing spontaneous without a warning."
The Aussie-raised humorist and writer, in New Zealand last week to publicise her latest novel, says there's a serious message beneath all the frivolity. At core she's a passionate feminist who hopes to empower women through her humour. "To me the quips are like little haiku," she explains. "You can say so much in a one-liner."
Growing up as a surfie girl in Sydney's Cronulla, Lette was aware she didn't fit the tall, curvy, blonde-haired ideal so she developed her quirky sense of humour as a coping mechanism. "I was a bonsai brunette with no breasts and a desperate need to be noticed," she says. "I had to learn to be funny otherwise the Pope would be ringing me for tips on celibacy."
Her first novel, Puberty Blues, was written when she was 17 and looked at Cronulla surf life from a teenager's perspective. As she turns 50, best-seller number 10 tosses its towel down on the same beach but this time the story is told from a parent's point of view.
To Love Honour and Betray (Till Divorce Us Do Part) (Random House, $36.99) is the cautionary tale of Lucy, who's moved to Australia with husband and two kids only to be dumped for another woman. Lucy is devastated, constantly subjected to her teenage daughter's derision and so helpless she's only able to hit the bottle if it comes with a screwcap.
"A lot of my girlfriends have been dumped by their husbands," says Lette, who's happily married to a human rights lawyer. "I wanted to write a book for them, to say they will get through it."
The story is self-esteem boosting stuff for the broken-hearted, awash with bitchiness, toyboy sex, female solidarity and with Lette playing it for laughs whenever she has the chance. "I care about a lot of issues but I think humour is the best way to sugarcoat your philosophies. It's a mistake to think a novel can't be pleasurable and still profound."
Lette's sugar-coated philosophy in this book is that women shouldn't make being married their whole life. "I always say to women never give up your career," she explains. "Even if you're not in paid work, have something outside the home so you have an identity and are not only defined as a wife and mother. If you've given up everything and he leaves you, then that's soul-destroying."
In her younger days Lette marched through the streets for women's rights. She worries the younger generation have had their freedoms come too easily. "They have all the benefits of feminism but not the battle scars," she says. "And they have no idea how hard won a lot of it was."
Settled in London with two children, Lette counts a lot of famous names among her close friends. Her book club, for instance, consists of top UK comediennes Ruby Wax, Jo Brand and Maureen Lipman.
They only read each other's books. "We laugh ourselves stupid and send up each other's writing styles," says Lette. "You could never get any tickets on yourself as those girls would rip them off you."
Otherwise her reading tastes run to the classics. She thinks Thackeray's Vanity Fair is the best book ever written ("Becky Sharp is the Madonna of her day, surviving on chutzpah and cheek") and that Jane Austen should only be read by the over-30s ("Otherwise you miss all the nuances. Austen was a great feminist.").
It annoys her that the literary elite derides the books she writes and she absolutely rejects the term, "chick-lit" even though she's one of the people who invented the genre.
"If Nicky Hornby writes a first-person funny book he's called Chekovian," she points out. "I write them and it's labelled chick-lit. I think the term puts off a lot more readers than it attracts."
Not that Lette's short on readers. Her novels clearly strike a chord. They've been translated into 14 languages and two of them have been turned into movies. "I write the books I wish I'd had when I was going through the same things, like childbirth, feeling isolated as a young mum and this one is when your teenager turns on you. I guess the next one is going to be menopause. Poor women. We have menstruation, childbirth, menopause and then just when we think it's all calmed down, we grow a beard."
- Detours, HoS
