Kathy Lette's talk about husbands

Kathy Lette became a publishing sensation and spawned a generation of chick-lit writers. Picture / Martin Sykes

A 47-year-old woman is reclining on a sofa in a hotel room in Auckland, stretching her legs to their full slender brown length, green spangles twinkling on her shoes. She is beaming for the camera, crossing one leg over the other, smoothing her skirt. "You can't see my fallopian tubes, can you?" Kathy Lette asks. "After two kids, my legs are all I've got left, darling."

This is the outcome of a compromise between Lette and photographer Martin Sykes. She wants a posed shot, big smile, even suggests she could wear an apron and brandish a whisk to illustrate the disgruntled-wife tone of the book she is here to promote.

He wants a less stagey, more candid shot, to be taken while the interview is under way. "But I'm such a motormouth I always look awful with my mouth open, grimacing, dreadful," Lette pleads. Eventually they strike a deal; a few talking shots in return for a few posing shots.

In the end, she is right. The talking shots are nice, but they don't compare to the cheesecake glam of this Australian feminist reclining like a goddess in her minuscule suit and white singlet, sequinned with a pink crown, like a pocket Dame Edna.

Lette knows how to give the best impression of herself, just as she knows how to write best-selling novels, how to be cruel and funny at once, how to twist her sequinned skewer into any passing masculine foible, how to fire quips and puns so fast I have to rewind the tape three times to transcribe each one.

She calls herself a "bonsai brunette whose cups definitely do not runneth over", but in truth, Lette is a tanned, lithe knockout, sharply intelligent, with arm-touching charm and an effusive patter which manages to be genuine, even when you know she has used these jokes a million times before.

By the end of the interview, she is kissing Sykes on the cheek. She calls him "the artistic love god", teases him for listening to her denouncing the "giant toddlers in pinstriped suits" that she says husbands become.

Her new book, How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints), is about three girlfriends struggling through the everyday disappointment of marriage to husbands who are either adulterers, slobs, dilettantes or all three at once.

"Martin, you're hearing all this, you're going to hate me, you'll think, 'Let's put a picture of her in the paper looking as dog-like as humanly possible'."

Lette has been finessing her style since the age of 19 on Sydney's Cronulla beach, when she and friend Gabrielle Carey decided to put their surfie-chick experiences into print.

Puberty Blues, released in 1979, became a publishing sensation with its sparse, brutal portrayal of underage sex, alcohol, Vaseline and feminine self-abasement, of how nice, smart 13-year-old girls spent their days minding towels for waxhead yobbos named Bruce, all in the hope of a loveless shag in the back of a panel-van.

"After Puberty Blues, I ran away. It was so daunting to go from overnight nonentity to major celebrity and I was only 18 or something. It was so controversial my dad didn't speak to me for about four or five years," Lette says. "Mum sort of did, but she was the local headmistress so it was very uncomfortable for them, terrible."

She worked in bookshops and other casual jobs, refused interviews and avoided the publicity machine as the book became a bestseller, then a major motion picture. Eventually, she returned to print, writing plays, newspaper columns, sitcoms and ultimately blockbusting novels, the first of which was Girls' Night Out in 1988.

Her style of funny, feminine vulgarity was startlingly new, and she believes it accidentally introduced the entire genre of pink-covered books we call chick lit - although Lette feels most of today's versions are "Mills and Boon with wonderbras. It's all about ending up with a knight in shining Armani."

In 1990, she married Australian-born London silk Geoffrey Robertson, whom she met when he was hosting the debate programme Hypotheticals and she was a last-minute guest replacement for the indisposed Kylie Minogue.

They have two children - Julius, 15 and Georgie, 12 - and motherhood brought Lette a new education, reading Dickens, Thackeray and Austen as she breastfed.

Described in one British paper as a "leftie power couple", they share an intimidating work-rate. Between serving as a judge in the United Nations war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone and a human rights advocate, Robertson found time to write a critically acclaimed book on the prosecutor who sent King Charles I to the block, The Tyrannicide Brief.

"Because I'm married to a human rights lawyer, I can never get the high moral ground. I used to say to Geoff when we first had babies, 'Come here and change this nappy', and he'd say [adopting a deep, important tone] 'I have 350 people on death row'.

"What could I say? Although after about a year I started saying 'Oh, let them die'. And after the second baby I was like 'I'm going to go there and kill them myself, human rights begin at home, wash up!"'

Lette has always mined her pals' lives for subject matter (love, childbirth, plastic surgery) and began noticing her married girlfriends were exhausted, sexually frustrated and resentful.

"Husbands are lazy. They have a psychological safety net, they know there's no way a mother is going to let the baby cry in the night, they know we're there, catching the pieces all the time, so they get away with as much as they can.

"Now that women are economically independent and we can impregnate ourselves, honestly, if our vibrators could kill spiders in the bathtub, light the barbie, kiss our upper eyelids and tell us we don't look fat in stretch Lycra, would we need men at all?"

The author freely admits that's a line from the book. She doesn't mind repeating herself - she used the fallopian tubes line, for example, when being photographed for the Scotsman - but Britain's Daily Telegraph reviewer Helen Brown savaged her previous novel, Dead Sexy, for allegedly nicking gags from sources as diverse as Henry Kissinger and the 1970s TV serial Laverne & Shirley, an accusation which drives Lette wild.

"I've never even heard of Laverne and Shirley," she says, high-pitched. "I see my jokes being reused by other people all the time, all the time, on websites or email lists of funny one-liners about women.

"I don't mind. As long as they've got a political, feminist point, I don't care. Reviewers should sign their reviews 'Angry, unpublished and just down from Oxbridge'. Anyway, who has that name, Helen Brown? That's not her real name. It's probably Nigella Lawson."

Lawson, the sultry TV chef whose spoon-licking domestic goddess routine introduced a whole new demographic to cooking shows, was romantically linked with Robertson when Lette arrived on the scene. Tiaras at dawn, as Lette might say.

Lette says women of her generation are no longer afraid of divorce. "They don't fear it at all, they see it as a liberation. And when they divorce, of course, they get every second weekend off, the father is more guilt-ridden and tries to do more with his children, becomes a better father often."

That is a dark message, one Lette knows will not resonate with younger women like me. "See, you're still madly in love, so you couldn't relate to my book at all," she says when I venture the book's message is a little depressing. "Divorce does disrupt the family, and it's so expensive for society to run two households instead of one, so it's not something we want to aim towards.

"But men need to lift their game because women aren't putting up with it any more. I do think we need to love more realistically. It's not sickness and health that breaks marriages up, it's snoring and boring and anecdote-interruption."

Her message to women, however, is don't be afraid to demand men's domestic help and "don't think of feminism as the ultimate f-word. I think a lot of younger women have all the benefits of feminism and none of the battle-scars. A lot of the freedoms we have won could easily be lost - look at the abortion debate in America."

She is a long way now from the Cronulla she made infamous, but the suburb is enjoying its second bout of notoriety, as a result of riots between white and Muslim youths in October. "I kept thinking that's not the country I know at all," says Lette. "My sisters still live in Cronulla and I knew there had been tension for some time.

"You know, those Muslim guys are fantastically misogynistic, they really are, but the irony was to have these surfie guys, who are so neanderthal in their attitude to women, saying 'We're going to protect our women'. I didn't really see it as a religious or cultural clash, it was testosterone. It's a design fault. If only men had antlers, they could lock antlers and it would all be done."

And when the blokes finish the turf war, Lette would appreciate it if they did the dishes.

* How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints), published by Simon and Schuster, $34.99