Welcome to Miss Williams' Form!

it's a role of a lifetime

👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! Long story short: I’m a bestselling novelist who started investigating how to build a life in August 2024, because despite my supposed dream career I wasn’t ~vibing~ in the way I wanted to be. I felt like something was missing? Unpicking what it takes to build a life (like, a good one) led me to taking a job in a high school, just to see. Turns out books light up my brain but pastoral work with teenagers feeds my soul, so now I might be in the middle of a career change. I don’t know. I’m currently studying children and young people’s mental health, whilst also promoting my latest rom-com Love at First Sight. Apparently I contain multitudes. Don’t we all?

I’m proud to say that Grazia magazine once declared that I am a ‘general all-round-speaker of what-is-in-our-heads’, Stylist said my honesty and voice are unique, I was Marie Claire’s #BreakFree from Fear Ambassador many moons ago, and I’m a ‘Happiness Expert’ according to The Independent. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, and I truly believe on going all in on the adventure of your own life. Knowing all this means you’re all caught up. WELCOME!!

So the thing I realised almost instantly when I started working in a high school is that I could never be a teacher. I could never take on the responsibility of getting a kid to take my subject for their exams, and then passing those exams. Seeing a kid through the eyes of just one subject isn’t my bag either - when I was exclusively subbing for an absent English teacher, I was only seeing students through the prism of their ability to write an essay in good handwriting. As we all know, there’s more to kids/students/human beings than that, but in 55 minutes with a curriculum to follow often there’s not time to get into it. I love the pastoral stuff! Helping worries and anxiety and helping them be their best selves!! That’s where I thrive. Being a mum but at school, basically.

I always joke that there’s my job description on paper, and then the job I’ve decided I do. On paper I’m there to cover for absent teachers and make said cover as smooth as possible: a substitute teacher is no reason to lax off. But personally I like to get to know the students, build a relationship, set a good example of somebody comfortable in their skin so that they might be a little more comfortable in their skin too. Case in point: in year nine Geography the other day two boys I know quite well seemed to be laughing at my armpits? My arm fat? Something on my body??? So I stood there and lifted up my arms so everyone could see my armpits and said, ‘Are my armpits really that interesting? What am I missing here?’ and the boys were embarrassed but I was not. My armpits are not embarrassing! I felt good in that moment, good that everyone had seen me get bigger and not smaller in the face of silliness, and the boys took it in good humour too, like yeah miss, sorry, we were being stupid. Yeah lads, you were! Now do your mind map.