Sophie Kinsella, author of Confessions Of A Shopaholic, dies at 55

LONDON – Madeleine Wickham, the British author who wrote the Confessions Of A Shopaholic novel series (2000 to 2019) under the pen name Sophie Kinsella, becoming an international sensation, died on Dec 10 at her home in Dorset, England. She was 55.

Her family announced her death in a post on her Instagram page.

Wickham had been diagnosed with a glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer, in 2022. She announced the diagnosis in a social media post in April 2024.

Wickham became a force in commercial fiction upon the release of The Secret Dreamworld Of A Shopaholic (released as Confessions Of A Shopaholic in the United States) in 2000. The book introduced audiences to the series hero, Rebecca Bloomwood, a financial journalist with an uncontrollable and comedic weakness for retail consumption.

The idea for the first Shopaholic novel came in 1999, when Wickham was stunned by a credit card bill she received in the mail.

“My first thought was, ‘I don’t remember buying this or that, therefore I must have been defrauded,’” Wickham told The Times Colonist, a news outlet in Canada, in 2007. “I suddenly saw the potential of shopping as a story to write about.”

She adopted the pen name Sophie Kinsella, a combination of her middle name and her mother’s maiden name, for what she believed would be a one-off project.

“I thought, if it’s a complete flop, then it will have nothing whatsoever to do with me,” she told The Toronto Star in 2014.

Far from flopping, the works under her pen name came to define Wickham’s career. She wrote nine Shopaholic novels, which sold tens of millions of copies and were translated into dozens of languages.

The first two novels in the series were adapted into Confessions Of A Shopaholic, a 2009 film starring Australian actress Isla Fisher. A 2003 book penned under the Sophie Kinsella moniker – Can You Keep A Secret? – was turned into a 2019 feature film of the same name, starring American actress Alexandra Daddario.

“My first aim is to make people laugh,” Wickham told The Boston Herald in 2004. “People always come up to me with a huge beam on their face. They feel like they know me and that they’re my best friend, and I feel like I know them, too. It’s like we share a common friend: my characters.”

The Shopaholic books were more than just breezy reads. They examined contemporary consumerism through the lives of young women. In early depictions, Rebecca is carefree with her finances, able to obtain easy credit to feed her lifestyle. In 2010’s Mini Shopaholic, she must deal with the Great Recession and throw a party for her husband, Luke, on a budget.

Wickham’s last work, a novel titled What Does It Feel Like? that mirrors her own experiences with brain cancer, was published in October 2024. The protagonist, Eve, a novelist and mother of five children, wakes up in a hospital after having a brain tumour removed and tries to rediscover what matters in her life.

“The title guided me,” she told The New York Times in an interview shortly before the book published. “The irony is that I’ve had this incredibly fortunate life. I’ve had an ability to write, I’ve been able to have children and I met the love of my life at college. And it’s all fallen into place so brilliantly until, boom, the hammer blow of fate. I could see that would be the narrative.”

For much of her career, Wickham was at the forefront of what is often referred to as “chick lit” – a literary genre centring female protagonists and marketed to women, but ignored or sneered at by high-minded critics. Over time, her relationship with the term evolved.

“Saying that I’m writing for women is wrong. I’m writing for anybody with a sense of humour,” Wickham said in an interview with The Straits Times published in November 2023. “The term I’ve always preferred is ‘romantic comedy’. I once saw my books labelled ‘wit lit’ in a bookstore and thought that was brilliant.”

Like the protagonist of her Shopaholic novels, Wickham was once a financial journalist. After graduating from the University of Oxford, where she studied philosophy, politics, economics and, briefly, music, she wrote for a trade magazine about pensions.

In her free time, Wickham began her career as a novelist. Her early writing was slightly darker than what she would come to be known for and mostly featured characters in their 30s and 40s. Her literary debut, The Tennis Party, in 1995, was published under her own name. It was released in the US under the title 40 Love.

Several other novels would follow in the 1990s, including A Desirable Residence, Swimming Pool Sunday and The Gatecrasher. All told, Wickham wrote seven novels under her own name, the last titled Sleeping Arrangements (2001).

For the rest of her life, she embraced the Sophie Kinsella pseudonym, which she said walled off her private life from her professional one.

In 2015, she wrote her first young adult book, Finding Audrey. In 2023, she published The Burnout, a romantic comedy about two exhausted office workers who meet at a British resort. In the social media post announcing her cancer diagnosis, Wickham said that the response to the book had “really buoyed me up during a difficult time”.

Wickham is survived by her husband, Henry Wickham, and their five children: Freddy, Hugo, Oscar, Rex and Sybella. NYTIMES