Any negative reactions?

I haven’t had a single negative reaction. I was braced for it. I think the reason why is that the book is really brave and honest and visceral, dealing with masturbation, having kids, abortion, imaginary relationships. Everything that happens is carefully chosen and happens to every woman. It’s the stuff we don’t talk about because we think it would be bad or dirty, but the secret is, you don’t have to keep it secret. People now tell me about their first masturbation experience at parties. I wanted it to be celebratory about womanhood: There’s still a lot of bullshit but it’s kind of funny. Do I really need to save up money to remove the hair on my vagina? Or, on Twitter, I showed the box of shoes under my bed that I’d bought and never worn....we probably all have $700 of shoes under our beds; we’re demented!



What do you see as the aim of feminism as it exists in 2012, in America and elsewhere?

I think the big battle now is the fight for what normal means. Until recently it meant white, heterosexual, male. Our definition has stretched on TV, for example, to include the token woman who’s strident, or the token black character. But until “normal” means all types of women, we're not there. In Britain, whenever Parliament is coming up with legislation, they come up with the laws, and then consult with women’s groups about them. If the idea of being a woman was "normal," we would have been there from the beginning.

Or, for instance, you’re not allowed to use the word vagina. I just wish everyone had just said, “vagina!” What are they going to do? In my dream feminism world, every single woman who’d had an abortion would say, "I had an abortion." 1 in 3 women will have had an abortion, 1 in 3 won’t tell you. If all the women who’d had them who are prominent would say it, "It hasn’t fucked me up, I’ve carried on my life happily" ... it’s when women try to keep it secret and when we lie about the normality of being a women that we hurt ourselves.



You wrote about having an abortion in your book.

It was a calculated risk, to start describing it. It's like Nora Ephron writing about abortion. It was a risk, but I wanted to do it. I knew no one else had done it, and I wanted to be honest. The amount of women hiding those secrets, it makes us go backward. If we have legal abortions, we should spread the word that we’re finding the law useful. If we all pretend we’re not using it, they can reverse it.

You said you're working on a movie based on the book?

The people at Film Four over here bought the rights. I’m writing it with my sister, we'll be casting by Christmas, and it will come out in the autumn of 2014. We intend to make the first feminist rom-com. All the films with women in them now annoy me; the female characters dream of eating or making cupcakes and sit around and talk about their problems, and there's this nice bloke, it takes them the film to realize they want to go out with the good guy and not the bastard. We did a list of everything we hate in films. In ours, she’s going out with a bastard, the worst boyfriend ever, and she dumps the asshole and is on her own. She hangs out with her sister and smokes dope; they have a little dog called Mr. Jenkins that they love. She grows her pubic hair back and gains two stone and gets really, really happy. For women it's the equivalent of men watching the Death Star explode.



What do you say to people who say women aren't funny?

[Laughs.] That's just really embarrassing. That’s like being a women who says "I don’t know any good-looking men." Log onto Twitter for 20 seconds! Google Nora Ephron, Lena Dunham, Dorothy Parker. Saying that, you just look like you don’t know what Google is, and you insult every women you know.