Robyn Sisman: Queen of the rom coms

"Chick lit" can be a risky description to use in front of some authors of female commercial fiction, but not Robyn Sisman, whose fifth novel A Hollywood Ending is out in August (Orion, h/b, £9.99).

"I’m a pragmatist," she says cheerfully, "and it’s a handy shorthand. There was a time when chick lit didn’t exist, and then it did, then everything was chick lit‚but I just do what I do."

What she does, inimitably, is write very funny books. As an American based in the UK she has a knack of humorously pinpointing transatlantic cultural differences. The heroine of A Hollywood Ending is Paige Carson, daughter of a rock god and an 80s soapstar, who, tired of Hollywood, jumps at the offer of a Shakespearean role on the London stage. Much of the humour stems from Paige’s attempts to navigate life in London without her film star accoutrements.

"Women have always liked reading books that reflect their lives, whether in a realistic way or a glamorous way, or in my case I think rather an escapist way," Sisman says. "If I’m going to be escapist, why don’t I escape somewhere fun to read about?"

It was a column written by fellow author Shane Watson, following press reports that Madonna had advised Gwyneth Paltrow to move to England to find her Mr Right, that set Sisman thinking about the comic possibilities of such a move. More inspiration came from the steady stream of Hollywood A-listers coming to perform in London theatres, and Renee Zellweger’s undercover stint at Pan Macmillan in preparation for the role of Bridget Jones.

"I have a fairly long gestation period for a novel," Sisman says, "and what gets me going on a book is usually something funny. I have thought about writing something very tragic and dramatic, but I just know I’ll crack a joke by page two and ruin the whole thing."

There was a dramatic interruption to the writing of A Hollywood Ending when the building in which Sisman had an office (a nun’s cell on the top floor of an ex-convent in Wiltshire) caught fire. "I’d just gone out to get a sandwich and when I returned fire was pouring out of the first floor window. The firemen were very calm so I had no sense of anxiety, but then the fire got into the walls and 30-foot flames shot out of roof." She had been working on the novel for a year and lost everything. "I’m quite a survivor, but I did feel a bit thrown."

Sisman was born in Los Angeles but accompanied her teacher parents first to rural Illinois and then to Europe. "I went from a tiny village in Illinois to Geneva, and then a year later to Oxford and another new school and then five years later to Germany and another new school, and then to a British boarding school, and then it was ’home’ to America and another new school. I didn’t know what anyone else was talking about, they didn’t know what I was talking about. None of my jokes worked. You lie low and observe what’s going on around you until you’ve got it."

Perfect training for a writer one might think, except that Sisman had no desire to write at that stage. "It didn’t ever occur to me," she laughs. "Sometimes I feel I can’t really be a real writer because they [real writers] all wrote from the age of seven."

Instead Sisman started what was to become a glittering publishing career as a secretary at Oxford University Press, rising to copy editor ("it was incredibly rarefied, we used to laugh hysterically at the misplacing of a semicolon"). She then went to Chatto as a reader, before joining the start-up team at Simon & Schuster UK. In the late 1980s she went to run Hutchinson. In 1992 she was fired, and decided to write.

Was it a help having worked in the industry? She laughs: "When I sat down to write I realised I knew nothing, I felt really ashamed of myself having been an editor." The biggest challenge was finding the right tone. "You have to know your character really well to know exactly what she’d do, what she’d say, what she’d be wearing. Once you’ve got that it comes much more easily."

Four bestsellers later, it’s clear Sisman’s tone is spot-on. "I can remember delivering my second book by hand, in the old days before email, and Helen Fielding’s novel had just hit the shops. I walked in and said to my editor: ’I’ve got a terrible feeling that my book’s a bit like Bridget Jones’. She said: ’Robyn, that’s not going to be a bad thing’."