‘I could never have married a stranger’

THE story is depressingly familiar: a working mum, juggling two small children with a demanding career who’s finding life an uphill struggle. The children suffer – she barely sees them so it’s the nanny who brings them up – and as for her marriage, well, that is quickly going down the pan.

In the Wedding Party, Sophie King’s new novel about a second marriage, the woman in question is Becky Hastings, a hotshot journalist on a top-selling magazine. Yet the fictional tale of her overwork could just as well apply to Sophie.

Now in her 50s, and just remarried, the author finally seems content. Her children William, who’s 26, Lucy, 23, and 18-year-old Giles are all grown up and she can at last begin to slow down.

“I’ve been a journalist for 30 years and I’ve worked for Parents’ Magazine, where I was features editor, and Woman’s Own, where I was a features writer,” says Sophie, whose real name is Jane Bidder. “I wrote for all the national newspapers and magazines. I went freelance because I had a miscarriage – it was very sad – so when I got pregnant with my eldest son I wanted to make sure everything was all right. I worked incredibly hard – extremely hard – and it did affect my marriage.”

JUST like the fictional Becky Hastings, Sophie found herself being pulled in too many directions.

On the surface, she had the dream life – the Georgian farmhouse complete with chickens and a pony, a great career and a loving family – but after a while it fell apart.

“The pressure on both of us was too much and the marriage broke up,”

says Sophie. “We both tried to keep it together for another six years, but it didn’t work.

“The scariest thing that I ever did was to leave. I put the dog in the car and my youngest, who was then 14, and I left this beautiful house that we owned.”

This presented Sophie with a problem: she could no longer afford to support herself on her freelance journalist’s income, but she hadn’t had a job interview in 27 years. In terms of employment, her options were limited.

“I’m a writer – I couldn’t just go and work at Abbey National,” she says ruefully. “I got The Guardian and there was this job advert for a writer in residence for a prison and I thought I’d never been in a prison before and didn’t think I wanted to go in one, but to my horror I got an interview.”

Sophie thought she hadn’t done too well, but to her surprise, the governor took her on.

It’s hard to imagine the well-spoken, ladylike Sophie in the midst of a group of lifers – the inmates she is charged with teaching – but she seems to love it. She says wryly that they treat her better than her teenage son.

A novelist at heart, Sophie says it was her desire to write a book that first attracted her to journalism. She feels that writing is in her blood. “Literally from the age of three it was all I could do.

“I escaped through writing stories from about the age of three or four. I didn’t start writing a novel until my early 30s and then I wrote 11 – nearly one a year – and three nearly made it and then The School Run became a best-seller. I’ve also had hundreds of short stories published in magazines.”

Her fifth published novel, The Wedding Party is funny and lighthearted but with a serious undertone.

Sophie is not afraid of difficult subjects – one of the characters, for example, has a daughter in a coma – yet she avoids becoming maudlin. Her attitude to life, it seems, is just as laidback.

She is an easy person to chat to, asking if it’s ever warm up north, and is open about herself. This extends to her second marriage.

“I got married again in October and Shaun was the best man at my first wedding,” says Sophie. “He’s Newcastle born and bred and proud of it.

He and my first husband were both lawyers and knew each other at law school. Shaun and I were literally just good friends for 30-odd years and then when I was on my own he started to help with things that needed doing.

He’s a very practical northerner.”

According to Sophie, she could “never have married a stranger”, but Shaun was the opposite, to the point of being godfather to two of her three children. Didn’t this make things slightly awkward? “It was a bit weird for them, but also easier,” she insists.

“The older two found it more awkward but the youngest is fine about it.”

After quite an eventful wedding – the weather was so bad, Sophie says she doubted getting to the end of the ceremony – she and Shaun are now living “apart-together”, with Sophie remaining at her home in Hertfordshire and Shaun still living at his in Newcastle. She says the arrangement suits them fine – although it won’t continue forever.

“We both felt it would be wrong for me to sell up and not have a base, but within a year-and-a-half I shall be moving up here, which is quite a big thing for me because I’ve only ever lived in the South.

“One of the first questions Shaun asked me was ‘would you live in the North?’ and I said ‘yes’. I suppose, in a way, we’re used to being apart and because we know each other so well, we are able to adapt. I think what will be interesting is when we are together all the time.”

As for her writing, Sophie plans to keep on going. Her move to the North, she muses, may prove a source of inspiration, but either way, she won’t give up. “I’ll just carry on writing until I die,” she says with a smile.

■ The Wedding Party by Sophie King (Hodder, £6.99)