Why do you think so many people – young and old(ish), male or female, Australian or German, relate to your books so well?
I think it’s because they’re about people – people who lead lives they can relate to, and that have regular amounts of the regular crap that life can have. Sometimes it’s general, sometimes it’s very specific. Sometimes – wherever they’re from – it’s the first time they’ve read about someone who feels just the way they do. People tell me different things. Sometimes they just pass the books on because they’ve found them funny, other times they give people Zigzag Street as a kind of therapy if they’ve just been dumped. It varies, and I like that. Your range of media is widening – CDs and live television appearances being two examples – so with your increasing influence, are you going to use that to push political and social consciousness or is that just not your arena? A really interesting question. And one that I’m suddenly starting to have to think about myself. I don’t think social issues will necessarily make a dramatic appearance in the fiction I write, but maybe they’re starting to
