The World is Full of Married Men by Jackie Collins, book of a lifetime

Collins's first novel was published in 1968, and is set in the height of Swinging London

The moral of Collins's novel is: it's good to be a grown-ass lady (Getty Images)

My name is Helen Ellis and I am a member of a Classic Trashy Book Club.

Our Classic Trashy Book Club is made up of three prosecutors, a therapist, an interior designer, a famous Instagram cat lady, a P.I.-turned-housewife and a housewife-turned-writer: me. For a book to qualify as a Classic Trashy Book Club book, it must be at least 20 years old and– at one point– banned, made into a TV miniseries, have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, or classified as erotica, romance, chick lit or trash. Our last pick, Jackie Collins's The World Is Full of Married Men, fits all of these categories.

The World Is Full of Married Men is Collins's first novel. It was published in 1968, and is set in the height of Swinging London. The characters' clothes are mod and their marriages in ruin. Men gallivant with model/actresses, burn through money, and don't come home to their wives who wait up alone all night, like dogs; if dogs listened to Sinatra and got drunk in the tub.

But the housewife at the centre of the book recovers. And discovers: free love and real love, power and politics. She protests. Ban the Bomb! She has an affair. She has two! She divorces. She remarries. She starts over. She's reborn.

The moral of Collins's novel (like many Classic Trashy Book Club novels) is: it's good to be a grown-ass lady. Young women who try to sleep their way to the top wind up drug addicted at fat camps. Unfaithful men wind up in the beds of their secretaries and there, they find out who's really the boss.

When happily ever after doesn't work out like they planned, grown-ass ladies appreciate a second chance. They take it. And they run with it like it's the last chocolate bar in a zombie apocalypse.

Me included. I'm 45. American Housewife is my second book to be published in 16 years. Would I like to come to England to promote it? Yes! Would I like to write an essay for The Independent? Yes! Would I like to read at your bookstore, be on your podcast, answer questions for your blog? Yes! Yes! Yes! Like a Jackie Collins heroine, I am grateful to be asked.

Helen Ellis's new novel is 'American Housewife' (Scribner)