Ten things I’d like my readers to know about me by Mavis Cheek

2. We were pretty poor but I never felt deprived of material things. I did feel deprived of affection which was not something any of those women showed to me (or each other very much). Showing affection was something I had to learn. I discovered at an early age that the way to my mother's heart was to make her laugh. An ability and pleasure, which shapes my writing to this day.

3. I was a fat teenager and I'm not sure that I have ever, quite, recovered from the experience so far as my view of myself is concerned. I think of myself as a mistress of disguise in the way I dress. Being fat and being called Mavis was not a winning combination: My heroines are never thin and are never called romantic things like Artemis or Imogen or Celestine, which may be something to do with this.

4. I am allergic to mussels (which I love) and trifle makes me sick.

5. My favourite book is Jane Eyre. She's a catch-all heroine. As a child reading the book for the first time I identified with her suffering and being an outsider, as a young woman trying to find my way in the world she was part of the road and now, later, I'm aware also of how groundbreaking both the book and its self-determining heroine were.

6. My favourite comic author is Richmal Crompton - of course William would have an ASBO now - but he makes me laugh and RC had a very clever, beady eye about people and their qualities, good and bad. I used to read the William books to my daughter and my sister used to read them to her children and we couldn't understand why we still fell about laughing and the children were fairly unimpressed.

7. I have been in love, I mean that madness of love, only once in my life and it taught me many lessons, good and bad, but it also helped me understand that dimension in literature - Madame Bovary, Cleopatra, Anna Karenina, Lady Dedlock and so many others became much more understandable after my own experience.

8. I love going to The Comedy Store in London on Impro nights. You come out aching from laughter.

9. I moved back to London a few months ago after living in very rural Wiltshire for fifteen years. I'm so happy to be back where my roots grew and where I belong.

10. Of course I was lucky to have a natural talent for writing but I was also lucky to be considered very pretty when I was young and - looking back - I realise that it smoothed my path considerably; I don't think I understood quite how much at the time. The fat teenager never really saw herself that way.