One minute with...Kathy Lette

Where are you now and what can you see?

I'm looking out at Cronulla Beach, in Sydney, watching the body surfers hurtling shoreward like human hydrofoils. I'm on a book tour and dreading having to drop my own name. What if I drop it and nobody picks it up?

What are you reading?

I'd like to say the complete works of Proust and The Kama Sutra (Advanced). But it's Ruby Wax's memoir. It's hilarious, but also raw and painfully honest. Ruby's family put the fun into dysfunctional.

What distracts you from work?

As a mum, my guilt gland throbs if I ignore my kids, so they breeze in and out – although having left school at 16, I can't help them with their homework. My daughter was looking for the square root of the hypotenuse and I was like, "Oh no! It's lost?"

Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/ him.

Jane Austen. Her prose is more controlled than Elizabeth Taylor's pantyhose. When women were little more than a life support system to an ovary, her novels were subtle, feminist satires.

What are your readers like when you meet them?

It's a nightmare of every author that readers will turn out to be mouth-breathing knuckle draggers with the brain frequency of a house plant. But my readers, all women and gay boys, are warm, witty and down to earth.

Describe the room where you normally write.

As a working mum (there's a tautology) I write wherever I can. I do have a chaotic office sandwiched between my kids' bedrooms, crammed with books I haven't had time to read and am hoping to absorb osmotically.

Who is your hero/ heroine from outside literature?

Emmeline Pankhurst – for tying herself to the railings so that I wouldn't be tied by my apron strings. If it weren't for her, women would be treated as sequels instead of equals.

'To Love, Honour and Betray', by Kathy Lette, is published by Bantam