A stickler for style

Let's have a beer. Stop checking Amazon: you've done it once today already and that's quite enough. So I really did miss that, having someone to share it with." Now that's she a literary phenomenon, her publishers are re-issuing a book of collected first-person newspaper and magazine columns written in the early 1990s.

Read in one go, they make her sound much older and much dottier than she was back then ( midthirties), like an old lady with wrinkled tights and smudged lipstick. But they're masterfully comic, and like all good observational writing, strike a definite chord over and over again. Lots of women, and some men, told her she was writing about them at the time, including the film director and current National Theatre boss Nick Hytner.

Truss started to write Single Life shortly after the break-up of a serious relationship. In fact, she's that rare newspaper heroine: a woman who loves being on her own and says so with gusto.

"I was in a very good state of mind for writing that stuff," she says, "because I'd just split up with this chap and I felt rather wild. It was a wild time. I was just so relieved to be on my own, and I lost lots of weight and I went to the gym. I was phenomenal for a while."

You can only hope the ex-boyfriend regularly spied her from a distance with her slim new figure, oozing self-confidence.

"He tended to make a drama out of a crisis, and he was in the columns but only ever obliquely. No one would ever know who he was except my friends ... and him, of course." Did he mind? "I've no idea!"

Despite the new-found energy of her midthirties, Truss confesses to a lifelong struggle with her own self-image - in the sense that for years she didn't really have one. The confident voice of her newspaper columns deserted her in day-to-day life.

As the 31-year-old literary editor of The Listener she was a mousy wallflower who never accepted invitations to dinner parties because "I just wouldn't know what to say". She has three comic novels to her name - these, too, are re-issued later this month - but it took a stint in therapy before she had the confidence to write them.

"I'd been a literary editor and I was really involved in the book world, and that made me even more aware, really, of other people's right to write books and of my own inadequacy."

Eventually, Truss decided the time had come to "unblock" her ambition. "I did some cognitive analytic therapy, which is very goaloriented and short-term. One side of me was doing well at work, with a good degree and a nice job, and the other just lacked all selfesteem and sort of thought: Who do you think you are? You can't write books. I had to overcome that feeling because it was ruining my life."

The therapy worked "to a degree", she says, and the first novel she wrote, With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed, takes as its central conceit the potential for growth (and the ways in which it's stymied) in both a garden and in the personal and professional lives of its characters.

Truss gave up full-time journalism and at the same time chucked in her most recent, serious relationship four years ago - shortly after her sister died. Over the course of her career, she'd moved from the literary pages to TV reviewing to sportswriting; and was going out with a man who lived in Yorkshire ("I used to cry every time he drove off and every time I left him").

Despite the sexism of the press box at sports stadiums up and down the country, Truss loved learning about soccer and golf and boxing. But during Euro 2000, while Lynne was in France, her older sister Kay became seriously ill with lung cancer, probably contracted as a direct result of smoking. The grim downward spiral began a month or so later during the Sydney Olympics.

"I didn't go to Australia, but I was still covering it from the telly. I was staying at my mother's house and getting up early in the morning to watch it all and write about it. Then I'd go to the hospice. I was doing that right up until the day she died.

"I told my editor almost immediately that I wanted to stop working. I just couldn't cope with the stress. It wasn't that I didn't like sport any more, but that I couldn't cope with the strain of the job - the constant having to get somewhere very fast without enough time, the changed hotels, the unfriendly people in some cases. It all became too much of a burden."

She admits that she and Kay weren't especially close - there were seven years between them - but the grief was still like a sledge-hammer. "I think it took me three years to really get over it; to be able to go out again and see people normally."

The boyfriend in Yorkshire couldn't always be there for her - she says they didn't have that sort of drop-it-all relationship - and she came to the conclusion she was better off without him.

In the end, Truss was persuaded to cover one final sports event in October 2000: the very last football match at the old Wembley Stadium. It was England versus Germany and it was played on the Saturday after her sister's funeral.

"It was a grim day," she says. "It was pouring with rain and Wembley at any time was a miserable dump; I found I was sitting next to a man who'd always been incredibly unpleasant to me in the press box - and then they started playing Jerusalem, which we'd had at the funeral. I just sat there and cried and cried through the match.

"England lost and Kevin Keegan resigned. It was that kind of day. The whole thing was ghastly, and fittingly so. But of course it made me realise even more that I just couldn't do it any more. As well as being middle-aged and a woman in the press box, you really can't be crying all the time."

Instead she retreated to Brighton and her cats Buster and Paddy, now a distinguished 18 years old apiece, and started to write comedy drama for the radio. "Your brain is a strange organ," she says. "I finished writing a comedy in the throws of grief."

Eats, Shoots and Leaves came out of a quirky Radio 4 series on punctuation that Truss presented 18 months ago - and the money, or the promise of money, came just in time. "I'd gone so quiet, the phone had just stopped ringing. Radio doesn't really pay and I'd had to re-mortgage the house. I'd become a bit of a bore about money."

But now she's rich, at least a millionairess. Does she still want to find a man to share it with? "Wouldn't that be nice," she says. "That I'd find some wonderful man. But I feel like there's no potential to meet anyone at the moment because I'm too busy ... How did JK Rowling do it?" Well, she had her hair done. And of course she's worth a bit more than you, Lynne, about a billion quid ...

Truss giggles, but she's far too nice to agree with anything so cynical. And she is, after all, too sensible to be duped by a gold-digger. "Maybe I'll find someone this winter, when things calm down." All eligible young bachelors should apply in writing - making sure their apostrophes are absolutely flawless and their semicolons judiciously sprinkled.

With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed, Going Loco, Tennyson's Gift, Making the Cat Laugh and Eats, Shoots and Leaves, all by Lynne Truss, are published by Profile Books.