Just for laughs

Jenny Colgan's latest novel was inspired by the WAG culture in Britain. Photo / Supplied

Jenny Colgan failed at quite a few things before she succeeded at being a novelist. In her quest to find a career that suited her she was an unenthusiastic office worker, a cartoonist who couldn't draw and a really bad comedian.

"People always say I couldn't have been that bad as a comedian," laughs the Scottish-born Colgan. "But truly I was. I used to get heckled off all the time."

She hadn't considered writing until someone suggested she give it a go. "I had a friend who was very ill in hospital and I used to send her these long gossipy emails about people at work. Often I'd take her in books I'd finished with and eventually she said she didn't know why I wasn't writing because I was just as funny as them."

So Colgan produced three chapters of a novel and sent them off to some agents to see if she was on the right track.

"I figured if it was no good then I'd do something else but a couple of them came back and said they thought there was something in it."

Taking voluntary redundancy from her office job, Colgan wrote her first book, Amanda's Wedding. It was published in 2000 just in time to catch the crest of the chick-lit wave although that wasn't what she'd intended.

"Because I was so involved with comedy I wanted to be a comic novelist and that's what I thought I was doing," she explains. "In a sense I benefited from the chick-lit boom even though I didn't set out to do that. "Romantic comedy is a genre I'm happy writing. I think often things are marketed as comedy that aren't even slightly funny - they might be a little wry or occasionally witty, but they're not funny. I'd like to think that I'm genuinely quite funny."

Since Amanda's Wedding Colgan has written a book a year. The latest one, Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend, is the amusing story of a spoilt little rich girl, Sophie Chesterton, who gets her comeuppance when she's left destitute and forced to survive on her own.

In creating Sophie's character Colgan was inspired by Britain's rampant WAG (wives and girlfriends) culture. "It's completely out of control," she says. "There's this sense that hanging around and waiting to get noticed with a million other identical blonde girls is some kind of job aspiration. Perhaps it's because I went to college when we all wore dungarees and marched about stuff but it makes me so sad. I remember during the last Soccer World Cup I just wanted one of those footballers' wives or girlfriends to say, `I'll be making as many games as I can in between my medical studies'. But they were all talking about their shoes and handbags."

When her father dies, Sophie is stripped of her designer labels and forced to live in a dirty London flat with four uncouth boys. "Everybody who has flatted will know what places like that are like," Colgan says. "I remember my own first home-away-from-home, sleeping on a mouldy mattress on the floor for two years. I wanted to bring that back to life and see how Sophie would get on. I hope readers start off thinking she's a little madam and then end up liking her."

Next up is a novel about a woman who tracks down all her ex-boyfriends on Facebook. That comes out next year and Colgan has already started work on another - this one about a woman who chucks in her job to open a cupcake cafe.

"I think I'm growing up with my characters," says Colgan, 38. "I started writing professionally when I was 26 and what seems terribly important then becomes less important as you get older."

Her own life has changed a great deal since she became a writer. The year she turned 30 Colgan went on holiday to Florida and met a Kiwi guy who was working on a superyacht. "I came home and announced to my family and friends that I'd fallen in love with a sailor and was off to roam the high seas. It seems funny now as I don't think of myself as the kind of person who would do that, but obviously I did."

Colgan is now married to her Kiwi, a marine engineer and they live in Antibes, France and have three children under 5.

"We settled there because Andrew can work without having to leave home very often," says Colgan. "We're near lots of fancy places like Cannes, Nice and Monaco. And although we're not very fancy people ourselves I do get a fascinating glimpse into the world of multi-billionaires."

Often Colgan takes herself to the bakery at the end of the street and works while she nibbles on pastries. After all that time spent swapping careers and being heckled off stage, she seems to have found her niche.

"I remember once being asked by a career counsellor how I envisaged myself at work and I said, in my pyjamas," recalls Colgan. "So the fact that novel-writing is the career that worked out for me is brilliant."