At an event in London in June, Sophie Kinsella said, “I’m so overwhelmed, yet again, by my lovely readers and by the lovely response that I get to what I do. It surprises me every time.” Photo / Sandra Mickiewicz, The New York Times
Sophie Kinsella, the author of Confessions of a Shopaholic, packs love, laughter and a harrowing real-life health ordeal into a 133-page novella.
Sitting beneath a skylight on a brilliant Sunday morning, Sophie Kinsella called to mind a posh, slightly weary matriarch who might appear in one of her novels. Flowing leopard skirt, check. Devoted husband who looks like Harrison Ford, check. Town house near the Thames with chocolate bars on a silver platter in the living room, check and check plus.
Then Kinsella lifted her chestnut hair to show a bald patch left by treatment for a brain tumour. It was a glioblastoma, the most aggressive kind.
“I couldn’t say the word ‘cancer’ for a long time,” she said “There’s still a residual cringing, fearful disbelief.”
Kinsella, 54, is the author of 33 novels, many of them No 1 bestsellers, including Confessions of a Shopaholic, which led to eight spinoffs and a movie. Her novels have been translated into 40 languages in more than 60 countries. They’ve sold approximately 48 million copies worldwide, including seven books that Kinsella wrote under her given name, Madeleine Wickham.
But, over the course of an interview that ran the gamut from gutting to upbeat, it was clear that the only numbers that matter now are closer to home. Kinsella and her husband, Henry Wickham, have been married for 33 years. They have four sons and a daughter, ranging in age from 28 to 12.
Kinsella’s symptoms started in 2022, with a series of falls. “My legs stopped working,” she said. “I started lurching around. I couldn’t walk up stairs properly.”
She’d had emergency gallbladder surgery – “At the time, that was big news. Little did we know.” – and recovery was slow. She had headaches. She was breathless and confused. She was behaving “slightly strangely,” Wickham said. For instance, Kinsella gave him a pair of scissors and asked him to cut all her hair off. He declined.
Kinsella had been “scanned everywhere because of this and because of that,” Wickham said, but answers were elusive.
That November, he was in a cafe, waiting out a son’s choir practice, when it occurred to him that there was only one part of Kinsella’s body that had yet to be examined. Wickham went home, called her doctor and said, “Maybe I’m just being an overprotective husband, but we’ve got to have a brain scan”.
The scan showed the tumour. Initially Kinsella and Wickham only shared the news with a small circle of adult family members and confidants, wanting their youngest children’s lives to remain normal for as long possible.
“I cringed when I walked up to the building and saw the words ‘Cancer Center,’” Kinsella said. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to be here! No! Please let’s turn around and go someplace else.’”
On November 25, 2022, she had an eight-hour surgery. “When I woke up, I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t write my name. I couldn’t balance. I couldn’t turn my head,” Kinsella said. She worried she’d never write again. “For a while, it was this crashing blow every morning. You feel OK, then you remember.”
Kinsella tried to maintain a semblance of normality for her children. When her youngest wanted to make a TikTok video, she joined in from her hospital bed. The effort was unsuccessful, Kinsella said, but “I was determined: I’m going to dance with my daughter even if my legs don’t work”.
Next came radiation. “Tired doesn’t begin to describe it; I felt like concrete.” And chemotherapy: “surreal”. And learning to live with memory loss: “Luckily Henry’s a very trustworthy person”.
Kinsella understands that her illness is terminal, pending recurrence, and that glioblastoma always recurs.
“When people ask how I am, I don’t take it on an existential, global level,” she said. “Because that’s too big, too complex, too changeable. Ask me one day and I’m one thing. Ask me the next day and I’m sobbing. Sometimes – I’m like this today – I’m laughing. Then some aspect that I hadn’t considered will hit me, and I’ll be an absolute wreck. But I can always talk about how I am today.”
She continued, swallowing tears, “Even just saying ‘10 years in the future,’ I start to slightly lose it. Because we just don’t know.”
Wickham reached for her hand.
In July 2023, the couple gathered their children for a conversation about Kinsella’s prognosis. The oldest three were aware of the bigger picture, but the youngest two didn’t know much beyond “Mummy’s ill,” Wickham said. “We were determined that they knew what, probably, the ultimate outcome is.”
Kinsella said, “There were tissues. But there was also resilience.”
Through it all, Kinsella kept a notebook near her bed, knowing “even as I was going through this ghastly situation, that I might want to write about it”.
For three decades, Kinsella sat at her desk and wrote 1000 words a day. She had already written six books when she sent Confessions of a Shopaholic, the semi-autobiographical tale of a profligate financial journalist, to her agent, Araminta Whitley.
The novel was a departure from Madeleine Wickham’s third-person social comedies – “I just cracked up with laughter from the very start,” Whitley said – so the pair dispatched it to Kinsella’s UK publisher anonymously, then to international publishers under a nom de plume.
Linda Evans, Kinsella’s longtime editor, knew immediately that she would be “mad” not to snap up the book. “I could see what the cover was going to be,” Evans said. “I could see what the jacket copy was going to be. It worked brilliantly, not only in the UK and the US, but all over the world.”
Along with novels by Helen Fielding and Marian Keyes, Confessions and its successors ushered in a heyday of what was known, sometimes disparagingly, as “chick lit,” characterised by pink covers, witty banter and stiletto-forward fashion. As the genre morphed into “women’s fiction” (more babies, fewer martinis), then “rom-com” (less commitment, more tattoos), Kinsella rode the wave. As she aged, her protagonists remained in their 20s and 30s, leaving readers with a sense that, while they navigated careers, midlife, motherhood and health struggles, they were still in touch with younger versions of themselves.
Now, from a prone position, Kinsella wrote what she could. She knew she didn’t want to attempt a memoir; her memory wasn’t up to the task. One day she typed up a short story about spouses taking a walk and singing Christmas carols while the wife recovers from brain surgery. It became a chapter in What Does it Feel Like?.
The novella unfolds in vignettes, following Eve Monroe, a successful novelist and mother of five who has cancer. While searching “Grade 4 glioblastoma” from her hospital bed, she learns that the average survival time is 12 to 18 months. There is no cure. The book is markedly less cheerful than the breezy page-turners that are her standard fare, but it’s still a love story. It’s funny, too, strange as this sounds.
Kinsella said, “The title guided me. The irony is that I’ve had this incredibly fortunate life. I’ve had an ability to write, and I’ve been able to have children, and I met the love of my life at college, and it’s all fallen into place so brilliantly until, boom, the hammer blow of fate. I could see that would be the narrative.”
Eve and her husband, Nick, break the news to their children over a game of Scrabble. Their youngest son wants to know how his mother got sick when all she eats is bean salad. Their daughter asks, “Can you still come and see my play?”
Sentence by sentence, Kinsella distanced herself from fear. It never retreated, not entirely, although language was a trusty shield. She said, “It took me a while to figure out how I was going to have a happy ending, but I was absolutely determined.”
On April 17, almost a year and a half after surgery, Kinsella was ready to share news of her diagnosis with her fans. “I’ve been waiting for the strength to do so,” she wrote in an Instagram post. Readers’ responses were so supportive that she posted a video, thanking them for their kindness.
“I was like, ‘OK, at last, I can just be me now,’” Kinsella said. “There comes a tipping point, I think, when being private can feel like you’re hiding.”
In June, she attended her first and only in-person event for The Burnout (2023), which came out while she was recuperating. Tickets to the celebration at the Piccadilly branch of Waterstones sold out in a day, and there were hundreds of people on the livestream. Jenny Colgan, a fellow novelist and friend, politely asked the audience not to ask questions about Kinsella’s health. They obliged.
Readers of all ages, from many corners of the world – Pakistan, Lithuania, the US, Scotland – raised their hands and spoke about what Kinsella’s work meant to them. A woman who grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, said that Kinsella’s novels were the first ones she read in English. Another talked about how the books connected her to a much older sister. Yet another revealed that her father was a die-hard fan. A woman in the back row asked how to incorporate joy in her own writing.
Kinsella, fragile but radiant in a festive frock, said, “If you tell a true story, people will be interested.”
When a reader wondered about her favourite male lead, Kinsella gave Luke from Shopaholic an honourable mention. But she identified Nick, whom the public will soon meet, as her true love. “If you read the book, you will understand what a hero he is,” Kinsella said. “My husband has been a hero these last 20 months.”
Colgan asked Kinsella the question that perplexes so many readers: what does she think of the siloing of fiction for women?
Kinsella said, “I think it’s a shame, really, because comedy is unisex, and story is unisex, and I don’t really understand why it has to be so polarised”.
Colgan and Kinsella laughed about the letters that arrive every September, on the heels of summer vacations, from men who write something to the effect of, “‘I found your book in a villa. And I read it. And it was good,’” Kinsella said. “They sound vaguely affronted. It’s like the cover directed them to find it trivial, but guess what? There was a story worth reading.”
Kinsella remains focused on the day to day – and each one begins with the same routine: “Henry gets up very early. He reads the whole internet and brings me a cup of tea and a hopeful story. He’ll say, ‘I read about someone who lasted this long after diagnosis.’”
She said, “I really want to be someone else’s story of hope.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Elisabeth Egan
Photographs by: Sandra Mickiewicz
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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