You wouldn't think that Maggie Alderson could be envious of anyone. The author, Fairfax columnist, blogger, former magazine editor and style maven probably has a contact book, and a wardrobe, to die for. She lives in Hastings,on the south coast of England, with her husband and daughter, turning out best-selling novels and non-fiction with regularity, travelling the world to promote her books and catch up with old friends.
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But she is, or was, in a way, and these feelings were the inspiration for her latest book Secret Keeping for Beginners.
"I have several girlfriends who are divorced, single mothers and looking at their lifestyle where they would have one weekend of lovely family time and then the following weekend they were groovy young single chicks, going out on the town, going away on fabulous weekends with their girlfriends to Bruges or a boutique bed and breakfast in Cornwall," says Alderson.
"You think they have the dream life.
"But talking to them, they're constantly financially worried, there's so much on if one of the kids gets sick during the working week … it got me thinking that it's so easy to envy someone's situation without knowing the reality of it.
"And so I thought it would be interesting to look at three women who were in the archetypal current woman's life set ups and see them all envying each other and then seeing the reality of each one and I thought if I made them sisters it would add another level of interesting tension to any kind of envy or resentment."
And so, meet Rachel, Tessa and Natasha, and their mother Joy. They're leading enviable lives, on the surface at least. Rachel's the divorced single mother, with a dream job in interior design; Tessa is an artist, with a husband who's found celebrity via a renovation reality show; Natasha is a jet-setting make-up artist; Joy a hippy vegetarian caterer. Alderson exposes their lives, secret by secret, until everything comes undone.
"I'm very interested in secrets and how they affect our behaviour and relationships," says Alderson.
"Sometimes you do keep the biggest secrets from your family, the people you love the most, and then there are all the things which might not be official secrets but things we don't talk about, the elephant in the room, the idea of the unsaid, the thing you all know about but is never discussed.
"All these things add to the strain of keeping a secret, it's a strain on the individual, a strain on relationships."
Alderson says she's a very nosey person and this has helped her both as an author and a journalist during the years.
"I do ask people an awful lot of questions … but I also listen, that's the key.
"I'm always interested in what's made people the way they are … I think as a novelist, and I don't know if it's a quality that makes you a novelist or whether you develop it as a novelist, it's probably a bit of both, but you listen in a more active way … I'm always subconsciously analysing people's behaviour."
With almost three decades of writing experience behind her, Alderson's advice to young women wanting to enter the field is to start a blog.
"I don't think there's any point doing anything else these days, is there? Obviously you have to be able to write ... there has been a lowering of standards somewhat, there are some very successful bloggers who struggle to put two words together … but what they can put together is a package of material which is interesting."
Secret Keeping For Beginners, Maggie Alderson, HarperCollins, $29.99. Alderson will appear in Canberra on Tuesday, May 5, at Harry Hartog Bookshop, Woden, from 6.30pm.
