I'm studying young people's mental health!

the plot twists just keep on coming

👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! If you’re new to these parts, the short version is this: I’ve worked for myself for a long time, writing 15 (!) books, largely done from home. It sent me a bit doolally, being alone that much and also working within an industry that hasn’t always treated me kindly. That’s why I started writing How to Build a Life, now delivered to thousands of readers in over 80 countries. I’d been desperate to unpick why I seemingly had a dream career but life in general felt so underwhelming. I figured out that my brain likes writing but my soul needs something else, so at the start of this year - in addition to still writing my novels - I took a job in a high school mixing teaching and pastoral work. In one million ways this makes no sense at all, apart from the fact that working out of the house with teenagers is making me really very happy. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, and knowing all this means you’re all caught up. WELCOME.

I’ve said all along that to people who don’t truly know me, going from being a full-time novelist to working in a school for £23,000 a year must seem really - really - random. Like, mid-life-about-to-be-40-is-this-a-crisis random? But the clues that this is where I might end up are scattered throughout my twenties: the Sri Lankan orphanage, the nannying, the English as a Foreign Language summer camps, running a children’s language school in Rome, disappearing off to Russia to guest teach in high schools near Siberia (yup, that really happened 🥶) …if anything, it was a weird flex to decide none of that was “proper” enough, that despite teaching and being around children and young people being an evident zone of genius it wasn’t anything I would do full-time, as a grown-up job. I was never going to be a teacher! How pedestrian! By thirty I was going to be special, a bit famous, a certainly very, very rich.

I didn’t realise how much I knew myself before I persuaded myself something different.