Before Sara Pascoe wrote her debut novel, she knew two things. “I knew I wanted my main character to have haemorrhoids. And I knew I wanted her to have a period. A realistic one,” the stand-up tells me, matter-of-fact. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure if editors would be on board with this. “I thought, if I say that in a pitch meeting, they’d be like...” – her voice switches to a tone of anxious confusion – “‘OK... haemorrhoids...’”
Her confidence was hardly bolstered by the fact that her previous plan, to write a non-fiction book about murder, had been met with frowns. “They were all like, ‘People are gonna know you from Sewing Bee. They won’t be like, ‘Oh, I’d love to know what she thinks about murder!’”
