Author Sophie Kinsella was diagnosed with brain cancer, then wrote a book about it

LONDON – Sitting beneath a skylight on a brilliant Sunday morning, Sophie Kinsella called to mind a posh, slightly weary matriarch who might appear in one of her novels.

Flowing leopard skirt – check. Devoted husband who looks like American actor Harrison Ford – check. Town house near the Thames with chocolate bars on a silver platter in the living room – check and check.

Then Kinsella lifted her chestnut hair to show a bald patch left by treatment for a brain tumour. It was a glioblastoma, the most aggressive kind.

“I couldn’t say the word ‘cancer’ for a long time,” she said. “There’s still a residual cringing, fearful disbelief.”

Kinsella, 54, is the English author of 33 novels, many of them No. 1 bestsellers, including Confessions Of A Shopaholic (2001), which led to eight spin-offs and a 2009 movie.

Her novels have been translated into 40 languages in more than 60 countries. They have sold around 48 million copies worldwide, including seven books that Kinsella wrote under her given name, Madeleine Wickham.

But, over the course of an interview that ran the gamut from gutting to upbeat, it was clear that the only numbers that matter now are closer to home. Kinsella and her husband, Mr Henry Wickham, have been married for 33 years. They have four sons and a daughter, ranging in age from 12 to 28.

Kinsella’s symptoms started in 2022, with a series of falls. “My legs stopped working,” she said. “I started lurching around. I couldn’t walk up stairs properly.”

She had had emergency gallbladder surgery – “At the time, that was big news. Little did we know” – and recovery was slow. She had headaches. She was breathless and confused.

She was behaving “slightly strangely”, Mr Wickham said. For instance, Kinsella gave him a pair of scissors and asked him to cut all her hair off. He declined.

Kinsella had been “scanned everywhere because of this and because of that”, he said, but answers were elusive.

That November, he was in a cafe, waiting out a son’s choir practice, when it occurred to him that there was only one part of Kinsella’s body that had yet to be examined. He went home, called her doctor and said: “Maybe I’m just being an overprotective husband, but we’ve got to have a brain scan.”

The scan showed the tumour. Initially, Kinsella and Mr Wickham shared the news with only a small circle of adult family members and confidants, wanting their youngest children’s lives to remain normal for as long possible.

“I cringed when I walked up to the building and saw the words ‘Cancer Centre’,” Kinsella said. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to be here. No. Please let’s turn around and go someplace else.’”

On Nov 25, 2022, she had an eight-hour surgery. “When I woke up, I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t write my name. I couldn’t balance. I couldn’t turn my head,” Kinsella said.

She worried she would never write again. “For a while, it was this crashing blow every morning. You feel okay, then you remember.”

Kinsella understands that her illness is terminal, pending recurrence, and that glioblastoma always recurs.

“When people ask how I am, I don’t take it on an existential, global level,” she said. “Because that’s too big, too complex, too changeable. Ask me one day and I’m one thing. Ask me the next day and I’m sobbing. Sometimes – I’m like this today – I’m laughing. Then some aspect that I hadn’t considered will hit me, and I’ll be an absolute wreck. But I can always talk about how I am today.”

She continued, swallowing tears: “Even just saying ‘10 years in the future’, I start to slightly lose it. Because we just don’t know.”

For three decades, Kinsella sat at her desk and wrote 1,000 words a day. She had already written six books when she sent Confessions Of A Shopaholic, the semi-autobiographical tale of a profligate financial journalist, to her agent, Araminta Whitley.

Now, from a prone position, Kinsella wrote what she could.

She knew she did not want to attempt a memoir; her memory was not up to the task. One day, she typed up a short story about spouses taking a walk and singing Christmas carols while the wife recovers from brain surgery. It became a chapter in What Does It Feel Like?, released on Oct 8.

The 133-page novella unfolds in vignettes, following Eve Monroe, a successful novelist and mother of five who has cancer. While searching “Grade 4 glioblastoma” from her hospital bed, she learns that the average survival time is 12 to 18 months. There is no cure.

The book is markedly less cheerful than the breezy page-turners that are her standard fare, but it is still a love story. It is funny, too, strange as this sounds.

Sentence by sentence, Kinsella distanced herself from fear. It never retreated, not entirely, although language was a trusty shield. She said: “It took me a while to figure out how I was going to have a happy ending, but I was absolutely determined.”

On April 17, almost 1½ years after surgery, she was ready to share news of her diagnosis with her fans. “I’ve been waiting for the strength to do so,” she wrote in an Instagram post.

Readers’ responses were so supportive that she posted a video, thanking them for their kindness.

“I was like, ‘Okay, at last, I can just be me now,’” Kinsella said. “There comes a tipping point, when being private can feel like you’re hiding.”

In June, she attended her first and only in-person event for The Burnout (2023), which came out while she was recuperating.

Tickets to the celebration at the Piccadilly branch of book retailer Waterstones sold out in a day, and there were hundreds of people on the live stream.

Jenny Colgan, a fellow novelist and friend, politely asked audience members not to ask questions about Kinsella’s health. They obliged.

Readers of all ages, from many corners of the world – Pakistan, Lithuania, the United States, Scotland – raised their hands and spoke about what Kinsella’s work meant to them.

A woman who grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, said that Kinsella’s novels were the first ones she read in English. Another talked about how the books connected her to a much older sister.

Yet another revealed that her father was a diehard fan. A woman in the back row asked how to incorporate joy in her own writing.

Kinsella, fragile but radiant in a festive frock, said: “If you tell a true story, people will be interested.”

She remains focused on the day to day – and each one begins with the same routine: “Henry gets up very early. He reads the whole internet and brings me a cup of tea and a hopeful story. He’ll say, ‘I read about someone who lasted this long after diagnosis.’”

She said: “I really want to be someone else’s story of hope.” NYTIMES