Are the men doing this?

Cankles, my deeply personal trauma, and why I only really want to talk about my new book. Please.

(my actual ankles, as pictured on Wikifeet ahahahaha oh god)

Some years back I was walking to a meeting in London when I got a call from a well-known women’s section of a national newspaper. This was back when I did journalism, occasionally even for this publication.

“Hello,” said a cheery woman’s voice. “We wondered if you might like to write a piece for today’s paper.”

“What’s it about?” I asked, hurrying across the road.

“We wanted to know – have you got cankles?”

“I’m sorry what?” I stopped dead.

“Cankles. Oversized ankles. Have you got them and would you be prepared to write about how much you hate them?”

I thought about this call yesterday after a meeting with my publicist Clare, who is preparing for the release of my new book in a few months’ time. These meetings are really to work out any good feature ideas we might have, whether I’m happy to be interviewed, or events I might travel to. We discuss which news or entertainment organizations, or podcasts might be happy to have me on. It was a good chat, and we had some productive ideas, although this won’t be the easiest of books to publicise, with no obvious controversies or news hooks. And then she said, almost as an aside:

“Of course I’ve been batting them away already.”

“Batting who away?”

“Newspapers and magazines asking if you will write about your divorce and finding love after 50.”

I stared at her.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know you don’t talk about this stuff.”

This isn’t a critique of confessional writing. God knows I love a well-done piece that illuminates some aspect of the human condition. I’ve re-stacked pieces like that here. But that offhand comment really made me think about how much a woman writer is expected to turn her most personal life into content if she wants to promote a book, in a way that male writers just aren’t.

I had been divorced two years before anyone outside our close circle knew about it. It’s not that I’m particularly well known or even that interesting, but it was raw and painful and not just for me. So we felt it was in our whole family’s interests (including those of my ex) for us to get through this period as privately as possible. I didn’t even change my Facebook status to ‘single’. When my last book came out, I had to give promotional interviews and although I referred to the divorce – and my mother’s death - as obliquely as possible, I tried to strike a balance between being honest but also trying to keep the emphasis on the book I had written. (It’s not easy, unless you become one of those terrible media-coached interviewees who carefully doesn’t says anything much at all.)

Still, it didn’t stop one national newspaper leading their piece about my new novel with the headline: “I DIDN’T SEE THE CRACKS IN MY MARRIAGE UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE”, a phrase I still don’t remember even uttering, let alone to a journalist. I wept when I saw it.

My new novel is about a broken family. It’s a comedy. I know that when this book comes out I’ll inevitably be asked how much of it is based on my own family (answer: none. Yes there is a divorce in it and no it was nothing like mine. Yes I have a dad and a stepdad, but no neither of them are a failed Hollywood actor, neither resemble my characters in any way and no they have never lived in the same postcode let alone the same house). I will strive to make the point that it is entirely fiction, and I came up with it all in my head, the way fiction writers do, while trying not to sound po-faced and humourless in saying that (yes I’m even anxious about that coming across in this piece).

But, honestly, men never get asked this. Equally men do not get asked to write first person pieces about some highly personal aspect of their lives, or how much they hate some aspect of their physique.  The writer Caitlin Moran has a phrase that she uses to check her reaction to things: Are the men doing this? I read my way around this website, at national newspaper feature pages, at magazines, at almost every interview with a successful woman who feels obliged to fret publicly about her relationship with her body, her age, her work-life balance, her partner, her past, and I ask myself this question: Are the men doing this?

Have you ever seen Lee Child or Ian McEwan write an essay about some highly personal emotional trauma? Have you ever seen Robert Harris discuss his relationship with his ankles, or Nick Hornby asked how he feels to have reached some milestone birthday? No. They are asked about their craft, about the writing, their research, about professional developments in their lives. But we have come to expect our pound of flesh from women writers, and – trained to be accommodating from childhood – we so often, despite our best instincts, give it.

During my last promotional hoo-ha, I found myself in long telephone conversations with a handful of successful women writers who, like me, felt psychologically unbalanced after answering deeply personal questions while on the promotional trail. One said: “I find myself packaging up some personal trauma into a palatable anecdote and making people laugh with it. And if you do that enough, I think that does something very weird to your psyche.”

It's possible that if you’re a writer you spend your life trying to be honest about things. So then it’s very hard not to be honest about yourself, even if asked questions that in normal life would seem incredibly intrusive. I remember years ago being asked by a German interviewer how much I earned. I looked at him aghast. “Um, in England that’s worse than asking someone what colour knickers they have on.” I tried to make it jokey.

“Well in Germany it’s normal to know what public figures earn.”

“Well,” I responded. “I’m not German. Or a public figure.” Humourless woman writer strikes again!

I guess this is my rather elongated explanation for why I won’t be discussing anything personal when I come to promote this book, or at least not beyond the most abbreviated or general sense. Or at least trying to. I love talking about writing. I’d talk about it until you were all absolutely rigid with boredom. But I’m going to try not to people-please by serving up my life on a plate, as content, just to get you to consider reading my book. I really hope that the book – which contains quite enough trauma, comedy, and enormous emotional life events for anyone - is enough.

Please can you think of me as an honorary man during the month of February 2025 and just ask me writing-related questions?

And as for the cankles conversation, I crossed the road, took a breath, and told the journalist no, I wouldn’t be writing it, that I didn’t like the idea of writing a piece that actively encouraged women to hate yet another part of themselves, and that thank you very much for asking but actually I have the ankles of a young gazelle.

But I’ll bet someone wrote it.