Mum Interrupted: Postcards from a Perfect Life follows a life across countries and social circles, where the rules change and fitting in becomes a habit.
Paperback and ebook published May 2026 · Audiobook August 2026
Read the prologue and hear a sample →
Unabridged audiobook, narrated by Harriet Talbot.
While filling in my youngest daughter’s yearbook before she changed schools, I paused at a new field on the form.
Nationality.
I stared at the blank line longer than necessary.
Technically she has three. In practice, perhaps five.
I wondered whether I should list them all.
I also wondered why her classmates, after seven years together, would suddenly need to know. The question looked harmless enough. For most people, it probably is.
Forms have a way of doing that, asking simple questions that become surprisingly complicated the moment you try to answer them honestly. It reminded me of the two other questions that always make me hesitate.
Knowing how to fit in is no guarantee of feeling at home.
Living in different countries, I began to notice how much my behaviour depended on the company I was in. What seemed ordinary in one place could be embarrassing in another. I could recognise these differences and still find myself taking them seriously.
Mum Interrupted: Postcards from a Perfect Life is my thoughts about expatriate life, belonging, wealth and status. I write about environments I was part of, including things I wanted and later found difficult to explain to myself. Being aware of social pressure did not stop me responding to it.
Work, marriage and motherhood changed how I understood independence and my own usefulness. They also left me wondering how much of my ambition was mine, and what I wanted from work and life once being needed no longer answered that question.
01What passed for lunch in a modelling agency in the late nineties?
02You can afford help. Are you still allowed to say you’re struggling?
03What do you do? Where are you from?
04How much of your personality survives in a language you barely speak?
05When does looking after yourself become another way of being hard on yourself?
06After thirty years abroad, what exactly are you going home to?
On Substack, I write about living abroad, marriage, work and the peculiar things we do to feel accepted. Sometimes a conversation starts an essay. Other times it takes years to notice what was going on. I include myself in the questioning.
Money does not behave the same way everywhere. This series looks at wealth across Finland, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, the United Kingdom, Monaco and Estonia: how it is displayed, what it permits, and what people learn to leave unspoken.
For interviews, commissioned essays, book clubs and events, please get in touch. My subjects include expatriate life, the social habits of wealth, and what happens to identity when work, family or location changes.
I’m interested in the detail: why we speak differently in certain company, why success can make it difficult to admit unhappiness, and why returning to work can involve more than finding a job.
Insightful, highly readable book. Asks uncomfortable questions about what we sacrifice in pursuit of having it all.
Has helped me realise I can write my own life script without looking outside of myself for approval.
Beautifully written and profoundly human.
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