Let's talk about sex, baby

The posher-than-Penny-girls were ghastly to Penny Vincenzi when she worked at Vogue. Picture / Dean Purcell

On the way to see Penny Vincenzi I put my bag, with her latest book inside, on a park bench. The bench lurched under the weight. I tell her this and say: "This isn't a blockbuster, it's a bench buster. Oh, and it's wrecked my handbag carting the thing about."

She says she's very sorry about the bag - she isn't a bit - but she is very taken by the idea of her books busting benches.

The woman who writes these hefty tomes is a tiny blonde with a severe bob and a posh voice. She's wearing subdued but expensive-looking clothes in beige and black and her silver Tiffany bracelet jingles away when she gesticulates, which is often.

She looks quite a proper lady. One who is right at home in the Bellini bar at the Hilton where we are drinking - what else? - Bellinis, which are her favourite. But I am reading aloud an excerpt from the refined one's book Sheer Abandon which involves what I have prudishly decided to refer to as "the pubic hair scene". Without getting explicit, this involves Brazilians versus, well, other preferences. This was a not a wise idea because she begins talking, very loudly, and in detail, about the merits or otherwise of such grooming. She thinks her sex scenes are "very tame". I think they are very rude, but perhaps I am a prude? "Hmm," is all she says, but I must be because they are not at all gratuitous because "I can go for 200 pages, well, 100 without one".

She does go on all right. She lists talking as one of her hobbies. "Can't you tell? I talk and talk and talk," she says. She does. I wonder how she gets anything written, let alone the 632 pages of her new book. She says she talks to her king charles spaniel, Clemmie, all day so I suppose time is saved by the lack of talking back.

Although perhaps not because I didn't really have to interview her at all. She was a journalist - Vogue, Tatler, the Sun, Cosmopolitan - and she says that if I came and shook her awake at 2am and demanded to know what she did for a living, she would still say: "I'm a journalist." Goodness knows what she was like at interviewing other people but she is terrifically good at interviewing herself. This would be very annoying in almost anyone else - in Vincenzi it is just very entertaining.

She has been entertaining herself for a long time. She was an only child whose mother and bank manager father were awfully respectable, and lived in a "very quiet, empty" house. "It was a very happy childhood but it wasn't at all interesting." Her parents "weren't at all sociable" whereas she is, despite or perhaps because of the solitary hours she spends at her desk. One of her favourite things is an evening with a lot of talking and "at about half past 11, someone says: 'shall we open another bottle?' and someone says: 'Oh, yeah'." She is still making up for lost chatter.

I have bossed her into having a Bellini. It's only 3pm and she doesn't usually have a drink until 6pm. She's worried she might get "fuddled". I would have enjoyed seeing this. But I rather imagine the only effect drink has on her would be more talking. Anyway, she talks far too much to allow a be-fuddling amount of drink past her lips.

Vincenzi is in town for one of those turns where the author is dragged about meeting fans and booksellers and journalists.

These things always sound an absolute drag to me, but she loves them. What people want from her - and she finds their fascination with her fascinating - is, "I suppose, a bit of me". They want to know what sort of dog she has and about her family and how she got started. You already know about the (probably deaf) dog. Her husband is Paul who has invented a thing called "an alternative helicopter ... " which she can talk about because "it's so terribly complicated no one could rush off and do it". She has four grown-up children and lives in Wimbledon and has a cottage in Wales where she goes boogie boarding. She doesn't mind telling these things over and over because she has "a very high boredom threshold and I can even get excited about someone's aunty's holiday photographs. It's very, very hard to bore me."

She thinks this might be the result of that childhood. By a natural sort of osmosis she grew up, or so she says, to be a "terribly dull" young woman who was packed off to "a very smart secretarial college in London". It was posh and, of course, respectable, "almost a finishing school. You learned to get in and out of cars." She wasn't quite posh enough to be a deb: "I was too ordinary and dull." She envied her cousin going off to the palace to curtsy to the Queen but remains incensed that the debby girls at the college were allowed to come to class at midday if they'd been out at dances the night before. This, I think, is a glorious example of the British class system at work. "Oh, absolutely, isn't it? It was outrageously unfair," she says. She went off to work at Vogue where all the posher-than-Penny-girls were ghastly to her "because I was a little girl from the suburbs".

Life became less dull once she married - they met when she was 19, married soon after and have been married 45 years next week. I can do the sums to work out her age, she says.

She likes to play up this dullness but I think that anyone who can write those sex scenes must have been born with a very active imagination.

She was working in a glossy mag in the mad money times of the mid-80s when publishers were signing up girl journos to write "Sex and Shopping" books. "I really didn't want to because I wanted to go on being a journalist but I could see that the money would be nice." She wrote a synopsis, some sample chapters and Jilly Cooper introduced her to her agent: "Which was very generous because, you know, you don't share your agent. It's like sharing your husband." To her "amazement it was bought". For 100,000 quid.

Then she had to write the damn thing. "You've got it in one. I didn't know how to, but you know, I did, I suppose."

She has since sold around four million books so of course she knew how to write the damn things. She was, and is, adept at making "a little go a long way". She was, after all, a journalist who wrote 200-word photo captions - a long caption is 25 words - and turned in features supposed to be 2000 words at 5000. I tell her about an editor who once, the cheeky bugger, referred to my "galloping sub-clauses" and she shrieks with delight. "I like galloping sub-clauses. That's a nice phrase."

She would take such a comment as a compliment. She is certainly too well brought up to respond to anything less than a compliment with anything more than a smile. To the literary lady who said: "Oh, my husband suggested to me I write one awful book, like yours, you know, to make some money," she just smiled. To the people who say: "Oh, I've never read any of your books - and they know what they're saying and I know what they're saying," she just smiles and says "well, they are very tiring".

They are a bit. All that sex can be, you know. She could have been. All that talking, you know. When our time is up, she says, "Do I have to stop talking?" And it's a matter for mutual regret that, alas, she does.