‘OK. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. It’s only a VISA bill.’
I read these words on my sixteenth birthday, and I felt my heart leap in anticipation. This was going to be delicious. I’d been given a book so enticing that I wanted to start reading it before I’d finished tearing the wrapping paper off. I didn’t have a VISA card, yet. But I didn’t need one. I could immediately see Becky, sitting in her office, gazing down at Oxford Street while trying to summon the courage to deal with the results of her last trip to Oxford Street. It took less than 30 seconds for The Secret Dreamworld Of A Shopaholic to captivate me, completely. My heart belonged to Becky Bloomwood, Sophie Kinsella’s most famous heroine. Becky – and Kinsella’s other characters – would be with me for the rest of my reading life.
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Kinsella sold over 50 million books – writing for adults and children, about serious and silly subjects. She wasn’t scared of big themes, like grief, perfectionism, burn out and complicated families. But every single one of her books led with pure joy. She wrote stories that were laugh-out-loud funny. The novels didn’t just induce wry smiles, or nods of recognition, but proper hooting, shrieking, reading-through-tears, banging-your-fist-on-your-knees hysterics. Picking up any book with Sophie Kinsella’s name on it was a guarantee of reading pleasure and delight.
When I was a student, my relationship with reading was complicated. I was studying English literature, and suddenly books started letting me down. Nothing that I read spoke to me. Everything felt dry and dusty, impenetrable and confusing. It was as though reading had abandoned me. But then, one summer holiday, I found The Undomestic Goddess, Kinsella’s novel about Samantha Sweeting, a corporate lawyer who finds herself in crisis, on the run, and forced to reckon with her ambition. The Undomestic Goddess made me howl with laughter – but it also forced me to think about who I was, and what I was doing. I’d been feeling lost. I was stuck, and struggling to understand what I wanted, and who I needed to become. Kinsella’s novel showed me that there might be other paths to adulthood, and that it was possible to choose ambition, joy and freedom.
Kinsella’s heroines are all very different, but they all have some key qualities in common. They’re kind. They’re creative. They’re courageous – they’ll do the right thing, even when it’s frightening, and even when it makes them feel vulnerable. Sometimes that means that they must choose themselves, after a lifetime of being expected to put everyone else first. Fixie, the heroine of I Owe You One struck a huge chord with me, and every recovering people pleaser I know. The Burnout was the book I was passing to all my friends, during lockdown, as Sasha’s struggles made our own much easier to bear. Kinsella wrote about love and romance, in a way that felt deliciously heightened and yet recognisably real. Her romantic heroes are hot, but human – and they fall hard for her heroines for all the reasons we do. Flaky, shallow men don’t fare well in Kinsella’s world. And underestimate a main character at your peril. You’ll be punished for it.
In fact, underestimate Kinsella’s novels at your peril. When I started reading her books, I was aware that some snobbery surrounded romantic comedies. I used to passionately defend my favourite authors against sneery readers. But Kinsella doesn’t need defending. Her fan army – and we are legion – know that these novels are happy, hilarious, fun to read, and quietly profound. She wrote about humanity with wit, generosity, intelligence and perceptiveness. For my money, her novels have more depth than Dickens. They’re just as socially astute, compelling and complex.
When I interviewed Kinsella for the You’re Booked podcast in 2019, she said ‘I love an author who can make me laugh…I love it if I can lose myself in a funny book.’
Millions of us lost ourselves in the worlds that she built, and she made our lives happier, easier and brighter. Every Kinsella novel I’ve ever picked up has left me feeling better than it found me. I’m devastated that we’ve lost her, but her characters will live in my heart for the rest of my life.
