Kathy Lette is having the time of her life: At 63, with a boyfriend seven years her junior, an A-list-heavy social calendar and a new novel on the shelves, she's become the poster-woman for post-menopausal fulfilment.
"I think for women, life is in two acts," says the successful ex-pat writer. "The trick is surviving the interval. The menopause is the interval. The menopause is awful but, once you get through that, it's the best time of a woman's life. No one talks about this."
While happy to correct this omission, she does so broadly, shying away from introspection or significant disclosure.
For someone who has made a career out of lightly fictionalising every stage of her life, from puberty to menopause, Kathy Lette is surprisingly uncomfortable talking about herself.
"I came here today as if going to my execution," she says during her interview for Australian Story.
"I'd rather you read my books and glimpse me through the narrative than actually lay myself out bare."
Kathy is adept at deflecting unwanted scrutiny, cloaking personal disclosure in generalities and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of puns and well-worn one-liners.
It is this tendency that has led some to underestimate her; to see her as frivolous and maybe a little superficial.
But pry a little and a more complicated version of Kathy Lette eventually emerges from behind the "court jester and party animal" persona she so enthusiastically cultivates.
Puberty Blues causes a splash
Kathy's career started early and with a bang. At 16 she left school and moved out of home, much to the horror of her school principal mother. And at 17, she co-wrote the seminal coming-of-age novel Puberty Blues with her best friend, Gabrielle Carey.
Based on her and Carey's efforts in their early teens to fit in to the surf culture at Sydney's Cronulla Beach, it was a raw examination of the brutally sexist rites of passage girls then endured and it has gone on to become a feminist classic.
Anticipating a hostile reaction to the book, Kathy tried to warn her mother, Val Lette.
"She said to me, 'Mum, I'm having a book published and it could be controversial, would you like me to use a nom de plume?'," Val recalls. "I looked at her and thought the girl's deluded; girls of 17 don't get books published. So I said, 'No, put it under your own name,' thinking it would never see the light of day. And then when it did, there was controversy."
That's something of an understatement. When the book was eventually published in 1979, it caused shock waves around the country. Val recalls anonymous phone calls at night accusing her of being unable to control her daughter.
"It was pretty horrific, and my father was traumatised too," Kathy says. "So I didn't go home for quite a while; maybe a year."
Bruce Beresford's movie adaptation of Puberty Blues followed in 1981, ensuring even more outrage and attention. It was a lot for two young women to handle and their friendship didn't survive.
"It was a very intense time and there was suddenly a lot of pressure on us," Kathy explains. "The fun evaporated and the serious side of life overwhelmed us. We just grew apart, and I haven't seen Gabs once since then, which is quite extraordinary that our paths haven't crossed."
Putting aside rationality for love
Now writing alone, Kathy struggled both to follow up Puberty Blues and outgrow its legacy. In the eyes of the media, she remained the voice of youth, handy for a cheeky quote or pithy one-liner, and she was happy to oblige.
In her early 20s she married future News Limited CEO Kim Williams, who was then involved in various arts institutions and was six years her senior.
"Kathy was completely enraptured with being a writer and she went about it with the most single-minded conviction," Williams recalls.
She wrote plays, short stories, articles for magazines and newspapers and spent a year in the US writing for sitcoms. But as her 30th birthday approached, she had yet to live up to the early promise of Puberty Blues.
Then, in 1988, fate intervened. Kathy was called in as a last-minute replacement for Kylie Minogue on the panel for one of Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals, an occasional program in which the London-based Australian human rights lawyer examined an issue of the day by asking guests to respond to hypothetical scenarios.
"I got a telegram saying Kylie can't make it; you'll have to make do with Kathy Lette. Little did I think I'd be making do with her for the next 25 years," quips Robertson.
"It was just that bolt of lightning where we just couldn't stop talking," Kathy says. "I just had to be with that person, and he felt the same way."
They immediately embarked upon an affair, despite Lette being married and Robertson being in a relationship back in London with Nigella Lawson, then best known as the daughter of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher's government.
"What is it about love?" Robertson says. "It makes you put aside all rationality and leap into it."
Unsure how to break the news to her husband, Kathy decided to wait until her 30th birthday had passed. But when Williams threw a surprise party for her, things came to a head.
"When we got home, Kathy was very distressed," Williams recalls. "And you have that light-bulb moment when suddenly you realise something and I said, 'Who is it?' And all was revealed — that she and Geoffrey had been conducting a relationship for some time and she was going to relocate to the UK."
"My guilt gland still throbs," Kathy says, "but I just, I couldn't help running away with Geoff. It just was too big, and Geoff felt the same."
"I was devastated," Williams admits. "Kathy is not someone who indulges in a lot of sadness or negative personal reflection, and that's a good thing. She's a very positive spirit.
"I imagine she has spent very little time ever reflecting on our life together because that was then, now is now. You know, you move on."
'The motormouth who got goddess Nigella's man'
In a new country with a new husband, Kathy found the space to re-invent herself and get her writing career back on track.
Initially, she had to navigate a sceptical British media that couldn't understand why Robertson would leave Nigella Lawson for this seemingly gauche Australian. One prominent headline, "The motormouth who got goddess Nigella's man", summed up the mood.
But she quickly learned that attack was the best mode of defence, gently mocking the British establishment in such best-selling novels as Foetal Attraction and Mad Cows.
Robertson believes leaving Australia for London was vital for her success.
"She was locked into a very enjoyable but nonetheless a very small pond in which she was a major frog," he says. "But in going to Britain, in dealing with the criticism that she faced, in facing it down and succeeding, that taught her a lot of lessons and I think deepened and broadened her perspective as a writer."
What also deepened and broadened her perspective was motherhood, and specifically raising a son on the autism spectrum.
The long and anxious autism diagnosis
For many years, Kathy didn't speak publicly about the fact that her son Jules, now 31, has Aspergers. But when she came to do publicity for her 2012 novel The Boy Who Fell to Earth, about a woman raising an autistic child, she sought Jules's permission to talk openly about his condition.
"I was quite relaxed about the whole thing," says Jules, a delightful young man with a mischievous sense of humour and an entertainingly unfiltered manner.
"A lot of people believe that everyone with autism acts the same or has the same form of autism, when everyone's autism is different. I thought it was important for people to know more about it, so I think it was really good that she wrote that book.
"It's probably my favourite book she's written," he adds, "even though I haven't read any."
"I should have talked about it much earlier," Kathy says, "because it's always better to shine a light into a dark corner. Always. And, of course, everybody is dealing with something."
As is often the case with autism, the condition was not apparent when Jules was a baby.
"He talked early, he walked early — Geoff and I kept looking at each other thinking we had this little genius on our hands," Kathy recalls. "And then at about 13 months, it was as though his computer crashed. He lost his language. He retreated into himself."
It took several years before Kathy was able to get a diagnosis of autism and many difficult years after that as she tried to find him the help he needed. "It was a very expensive, long, drawn-out, incredibly anxious time of my life," Kathy admits.
"One day when he was nine, he came home with a sign sticky taped to his back saying, 'Kick me, I'm a retard,'" she recalls. "He's saying to me, 'The kids are calling me a retard. What is a retard, mummy? Am I a retard?' You might as well just rip your heart out of your chest and stomp on it but how do you protect them all the time? You can't."
Channelling obsessions the secret to success
Like many people with Aspergers, Jules has particular obsessions and a savant-like ability to recall details about them. His are acting and tennis and he can recite the entire filmography of favourite actors and the scores of matches in countless tennis tournaments going back decades.
But few could have imagined how far he would take his interest in acting.
"When people ask me what advice I could give them for their autistic child," Kathy says, "I would just say indulge their obsessions because you never know where it will take them."
Kathy enrolled Jules in acting classes from an early age even though she didn't believe acting was a viable profession for him. But he surprised everyone with his aptitude and determination and for the past six years he has had a recurring role on the long-running BBC medical drama Holby City, playing a porter with Aspergers called Jason.
That show was recently axed after 23 seasons, but last month Jules won Best Actor at the Rome Outcast Independent Film Awards for his role in the short film Love, and he recently filmed an episode for the British crime drama Midsomer Murders.
"Being an actor is very exciting," Jules says. "It's very interesting playing someone who isn't you. It wasn't easy, but I always thought I was quite a convincing actor."
"He gets more recognition than either of us," Geoffrey Robertson says with a proud chuckle. "We walk down the street, people ran up to him and see him as Jason from Holby."
Kathy says women should 'carpe the hell out of diem'
As Robertson became increasingly absorbed in his successful career as an international human rights lawyer, the heavy lifting of raising Jules and his younger sister Georgie fell to Kathy.
She cut back on her TV work and movie adaptations of her books and focused on writing, as this was something she could fit around helping Jules.
Typically, she makes light of this in her public performances, joking about how hard it is to take the moral high ground when your partner is saving people on death row. But it did put strain on the marriage.
"Geoff will be the first one to say that he's a workaholic and he worked really full-on right through our marriage," Kathy says. "So the burden did fall on me. And it just got a bit too exhausting."
"Looking back, I'm sorry that I didn't spend more time with family at particular times because I had other calls on my time," Robertson says. "But it's something that you realise afterwards."
In 2017, after 27 years of marriage, the couple divorced. While acknowledging that it was not easy for either of them, Kathy emerged with a renewed sense of purpose and a conviction that women her age need to embrace what she calls their "second act".
"Once you're through the menopause, your oestrogen levels drop, which is your caring, sharing hormone, and your testosterone comes up. So for the first time ever, you get a little bit more bolshie, a little bit more selfish – a little bit more like a bloke, actually – and you put yourself first.
"I would say to women: 'You've put yourself second your whole life; this is the time for you. So carpe the hell out of diem.'"
And she's leading by example. She's fanatical about her fitness and leads a social life that would exhaust someone half her age.
And she has a younger partner, Irish guitarist and composer Brian O'Doherty, who she swapped phone numbers with after hearing him practising a piece by Bach under a tree.
"I didn't ring," he says sheepishly. "I literally knew nothing about Kathy."
Kathy was not so reticent and before long they were a couple.
"How many men would take on a middle-aged woman with a grown-up autistic son?" Kathy says. "He's very generous and kind in that way. So it was a lovely thing that happened to me in my second act."
As Kathy likes to say, she's "putting the sex into sexagenarian" and her message of post-menopausal empowerment is one that resonates with her predominantly female audience.
But her new-found sense of freedom is tempered by reality. While Kathy is justifiably proud of what her son has achieved, she is fiercely protective of him and knows that her work is not done.
"While I'm saying 'carpe the hell out of diem, have fun', I will never actually be able to cut the psychological umbilical cord that keeps me tethered to Jules, because he needs me," she says.
"The big worry, too, when you have a child with special needs is what are they going to do when you're no longer around, so not too much of the burden falls on your other children? My big aim now is to just get Jules completely independent. Self-sufficient with support."
'The ultimate literary trick'
When Kathy talks about the challenges of raising Jules or her fears for his future, you can sense her discomfort as she strains against her naturally upbeat disposition. While she can be serious and has strong opinions about politics and feminism, she seems genuinely predisposed to look on the bright side of life.
"She's just born with this innate positivity," O'Doherty says. "In my entire life, I have never witnessed anything like it."
Her natural inclination is to try to lighten the mood with a quip or a pun, to strike a pose and flash that mega-watt grin. And if that's led some to underestimate her, you sense that's a price she's willing to pay.
"It's much harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry," she says. "So I think if you can entertain and enlighten and uplift then that's the ultimate literary trick.
"When women write to me and say that I got them through a particularly dark period of their life, that to me is better than winning the Pulitzer Prize."
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