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Need some holiday reading ideas...?
Posted on 08 Jul 2011
...then look no further than Red's Top Ten Beach Reads . Pick your favourites from a stellar list including Siri Hustvedt's deceptively slim The Summer Without Men and Anne Patchett's latest,...
Posted on 25 Jun 2011
Last week I was on the Vanessa Show on Channel 5 with the lovely Adele Parks . We were meant to be debating the concept of Fr-amily ie whether friends are the new family. I was saying we create...
Posted on 22 Jun 2011
That was the question we set out to answer last night at the Red Network event on Finding Your Passion (and making it pay) at London's Hospital Club. For the first time, instead of asking the...
Fancy a snoop around my house? PLUS Event...
Posted on 07 Jun 2011
Well, here's your chance - in the new issue of Red (july), on sale now, I subject myself to the This Life slot. And, honestly, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I am full of...
Welcome to the new look website!
Posted on 13 Jul 2009
Welcome to my website!
If you’ve visited my website before, you might have noticed it’s had a makeover. If you haven’t – good job too, it wasn’t very good and I, lazily, hadn’t updated it for ages. But all that’s going to change from now. My new novel, The Stepmothers’ Support Group is published in the UK next month (August 20th) by Harpercollins.
The Stepmothers’ Support Group came about when I wrote an editor’s letter for the magazine I edit, Red, about being a stepmother. I was inundated by reader emails, deluged even. And it made me think there was something going on there. So I started to ask around and every time I turned around I bumped into someone who turned out to be a stepmum or who was going out with someone who already had kids or they knew someone who was in that situation. Take last night. I went to a party and every single person I told what my new book was about had a stepmum story.
And you know what, they can’t wait to talk about it, because it’s not like you go up to someone at a party and say, ‘Hi, my name’s Sam and I’m a stepmum,’ is it? That’s where your friends come in. They might not always say the things you want to hear, or do the things you think they should do (and vice versa), but nine times out of ten, they get you through... And so, The Stepmothers’ Support Group was born.
But SSG is not just for stepmums, it’s for anyone who ever had a relationship – what modern relationship isn’t one minefield after another? -, and anyone who ever had a great group of girlfriends (love ‘em or hate ‘em, you can’t live without them.) Anyway, thanks Red readers, and everyone else who emailed me to tip me off. Fingers crossed, I haven’t let you down.
Publication is still a couple of months off, so it’s not <too> manic yet. I’ve just started work on my next novel (of which, more to follow), plus there’s the small matter of the day job to concentrate on. But come August there’ll be lots of things happening: several mags have confirmed reviews and there are lots of features in the pipeline. Also we have an exciting link up with Mumsnet coming very soon. Watch this space for more info.
Sam x