ME, ME, ME, ME, ME…

Like most people who spend their lives staring at a computer and playing with their imaginary friends, I'm a fairly dull little person, really. I live my "big" life inside my head. Anyway, here are some facts for fact fans…

- I grew up on the Oxfordshire/Gloucestershire borders, went to school in Oxford, where my father, the historian Piers Mackesy, worked, and got a degree in Eng Lit from Manchester College (now Harris Manchester), Oxford. Which was part of London university. Which meant that I didn't spend an entire year of my life translating Beowulf. Which was something of a relief.

- My friend Mark once looked round my fragrant abode and said: "your house is like the battle of the Somme. If it had been fought by shoes."

- I have always believed in following advice: when I was thirteen, my headmistress gave me some careers advice. "You will never," she said, "make a living from watching television, Serena." I would remember this advice daily when I was writing the TV reviews for the Independent, and am eternally grateful for it.

- Yes, I worked as a temporary secretary on and off for a good couple of years, which is where I got most of the office-related material for my first novel, The Temp. I didn't, however, spring fully formed from the filing cabinet. I have also been an English teacher, a lexicographer, a broadsheet crossword editor, a door-to-door salesperson and, for the best part of a decade before The Temp was published, a journalist and travel writer, contributing columns and features, mainly to the Independent.

- I was shortlisted for the Travelex Travel Writer of the Year award in 2001. Didn't win, natch.

- My antecedents are largely Aberdonian Scots, London Irish and Welsh. Although my great-grandmother came from a Yorkshire family who still live in the house they were recorded as living in in the Domesday book. Like the Wattestones in Simply Heaven, they are chiefly notable for never having collected a title in all that time.

- As "research" for a feature I once trained as a hypnotist. Spooooky!

- My work has been translated into French, Italian, Dutch, German, Japanese and Thai. It has yet to be translated into American.

- I once did a book-signing at Stansted airport. Four hours sitting on the concourse at a table with a white cloth and a carnation in a vase while people with suitcases asked if the book was available in Leeds. I sold one copy, to a friend. It was fun!

- Both my grandmothers were successful novelists. My maternal grandmother was the multiple-prizewinning Margaret Kennedy; her novel, The Constant Nymph , was the biggest bestseller of the 1920s and was most recently published by Virago. Have a look at it here. My paternal grandmother wrote what was then referred to as "housemaids' novels" – I guess the equivalent of what's equally patronisingly referred to as "chick lit" these days – under the names Leonora Starr and Dorothy Rivers. I am equally proud of both of them.

- I mostly work in bed.

- I always include my mates in my books. Not as themselves: as inappropriate incidental characters with their names. The people in my books are fictional. Well, apart from one, who anyone who knows me knows was based on my old German teacher. And the cat in Virtue, whose real name was Titus Andronicpuss.

- When I said I liked airline food in the author description in The Temp, it was a feeble attempt at a joke. I have learned much since then, grasshopper.

- My favourite place is wonderful Malta, where the opening part of Simply Heaven is set. Cultural highlights over the 6,500 years of its recorded existence: a mystery race building giant Neolithic temples filled with statues of Dawn French; the discovery, over the course of a series of bloody sieges, that human heads make excellent cannonballs and Ollie Reed's celebrated death-by-drink in Valletta. Visit it here.

- As a young thing I was a devil on horseback. So if you think you might have been in the Pony Club with me, you probably were.

- I share a scruffy flat in South London with a Burmese whore-cat and a couple of thousand books. My ambitions are to get my daily commute down to leaning out of bed and pulling the laptop in with me and to stop making Mrs Slocombe jokes in inappropriate company.

Things I like:
Mountains
Snorkelling
The North sea
Red wine
Red bedrooms
Wan ton soup
Malta
Cranial massage
My friends. Most of the time.
Koh Chang , Thailand
A most excellent Spanish Liquor called Pacharan. It produces a marvellous allergic high, a bit like laughing gas.
My godchildren
My nephews and nieces
Anecdotalising
Ruins. That Ozymandias feeling is the biggest turn-on
Horoscopes (yeah, yeah, I know)
Fart jokes
Companion animals
Flippancy
My favourite books/writers:
Kurt Vonnegut, especially The Sirens of Titan, Player Piano, Breakfast of Champions.
CS Lewis's Narnia books. No amount of "it's Catholic apologia" arguments will sway me.
Stephen King, especially Misery, The Shining, Pet Semetary
George Eliot, especially Adam Bede
Charles Dickens: Hard Times was written after he made a trip in a time machine and ended up in the 1980s
John Donne: eroticism and rampant depression all in one package. What's not to like?
Elizabeth Taylor: Angel made me bust a gut
Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier begins "this is the saddest story ever told". And it is.
The Turn of the Screw , Henry James. If I ever write something as frightening as this, I will die proud
The Monk , Matthew Lewis: the quintessential Gothic novel. Contains one of the most gruesome images ever committed to paper
Chuck Palahniuk: the king of thorough research, lightly-worn. Fight Club is so good it makes me want to punch him.
Christopher Brookmyre: Sardonic Scots black comedy.
Margaret Kennedy: ok, so she's my granny, but The Constant Nymph is a blinder and The Feast one of the cleverest bits of metaphor-working ever
Dorothy Parker: people who don't write always lament that she "didn't have the application" to write a novel. That's because they don't write. The great American short story writer.
The other great short story writers, btw, are Saki, MR James and PG Wodehouse.
Films/ TV:
Coronation Street
My Brilliant Career
Buffy and Angel
South Park (particularly the movie)
Pitch Black
Field of Dreams
Blade Runner
Heavenly Creatures
It's a Wonderful Life
Bringing up Baby
Wife Swap
The Simpsons
Cabaret
Big Brother
Mad Max 2 (sequels CAN be better!)
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
The Night of the Hunter (LEANing, leaning…)
Oliver!
Little Shop of Horrors
The Ring (the Japanese version, silly)

Things I don't like
Ideologies. Pah.
Academic snobbery (the enemy of invention)
The strange human urge to overcomplicate
Self-satisfaction
People who don't understand that flippancy is an art form
Mornings
Loo rolls hanging with the tongue hanging on the wall side. I only realised recently that this is something of a obsessive-compulsive thing, when I caught myself in the act of turning one round in someone else's house, at a party. Oops.

Um…

Favourite joke:
Q: Why can't men just fuck off and die?
A: They're men. They can't multi-task