In July 2012, I lost my job on a magazine and struggled to find another in the economic downturn. For months I wrote letters and filled in applications and went along to interviews, but nothing came up. I made extra money babysitting and teaching English as a private tutor, and I rented out the third bedroom in my flat in Peckham in South London by advertising in a local paper. I learnt pretty quickly how to be frugal, cooking meals that would last, and cutting out the extras — anything we liked but didn’t actually need — like the takeaway coffee I’d hugged to my chest on the underground on the way to work (last time I checked the cafe I bought it from at London Bridge station was selling a paper cup of frothy warm coffee-milk for £3.10) to feel better, warmer, higher, brighter, quicker, or just plain soothed in the rush-hour stampede. I started using my local library rather than buying books. I didn’t have family around to help with childcare so I didn’t go out. Mostly, I hid my worries about finding work from the children, but it was a lonely and difficult time, a really lonely and difficult time.

Having written short stories and novels since I was a teenager I knew that I could write, but I was losing confidence and wondered whether someone in need of a job to put food on the table should be spending their time making up stories. I knew — I’d been receiving rejection letters since I was twenty-one — how hard it was to make money from writing. I had a first novel out in the world, but sales were slow, and a voice in my head kept telling me there wasn’t any point in going through the process of all over again. Find a day job first, I thought. And be a good Mum. Then get back to it.

During that time I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Eat, Pray, Love. I understood that while it involved leaving the careworn self behind and going in search of appetite, faith and vitality, Gilbert’s novel wasn’t so much about dropping out with a backpack as it was about turning in, shedding some skin, and working through the myths she’d developed about herself. I was also concerned about a loss of appetite, both for food and, after a while, for life in general. As a family we did, of course, eat, and I often thought, like Gilbert, about relationships and what it was to be married and in love. It’s just that for me, at that time, it was more Eat, Shit, Sleep.

Extending the Bridget Jones it’s-ok-to-be-normal idea into the 21st century, Gilbert found a woman imperfect, vulnerable, hungry and worthy of love. I interpreted the hunger as a lack of connection. She’d lost her sense of self in one relationship after another—throwing everything in with each new arrival and changing herself to make a perfect fit. Women are good at adapting. We can blend, adjust and then completely over-reach and adapt right out of ourselves. ‘Will x want to come all this way to mine for lunch in the pouring rain etc’ before ‘will I enjoy having x round to mine?’ Pleasing others, it turns out, is self-destruction in disguise, and it can take a long time for some of us to figure that one out. But I seemed to be stuck right there: pleasing others—friends, family, schoolteachers, even the ex-husband, while going slowly nowhere. I could neither get myself on a plant to India nor get down on my knees and pray. But there was one thing that kept coming back to me, which was a woman I’d dreamed up in a house by herself in the woods. I’d thought of her in the months before my marriage broke down. I’d written a few notes. Now she was coming back to me; at my kitchen table one afternoon, I wrote on a piece of paper: ‘I have seen a woman in the woods. She has killed her husband. Now she is going to eat him.’

Pleasing others, it turns out, is self-destruction in disguise, and it can take a long time for some of us to figure that one out.

I gave myself a year to get it out and I knew I couldn’t afford to let it go beyond that. Within three months I had a first chapter, and the lodger was in the spare room reading it and howling with laughter.

So the hunger in Eat, Pray, Love was about being starved of an inner life, a place of wisdom to which Gilbert could go to make her own choices. Which is what my protagonist, Lizzie Prain— eating her husband in a leafy glade in England — is partly about. Lizzie has understood that she doesn’t need or want to be married to a man who can’t and doesn’t love her and, while she is consuming rather than actually shedding some skin, she is going through a metamorphosis of her own. Like Gilbert she is trying to come to terms with who she is.

There’s an inner voice, the soothing, practical one; and it pushes Lizzie along, meting out tips and helpful bits of advice about housekeeping and protein consumption. Yet the ‘voice of reason’ is advising Lizzie on how to eat a human. There’s an exploration of the point at which the stiff upper lip becomes not so much a ‘pressing on regardless’ as a ‘bashing through with a ruddy great stick’ and there are moments when Lizzie and her inner voice fall out because of a lack of sympathy or empathy or any attempt from the latter at imaginative reach.

What it does do is lead her through trying circumstances, which is our exceptionally British mantra to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. Being a writer and also inclined to introspection, worry, doubt and brooding, I have always admired those who have this ability to be calmly resolute and ‘press on’. But i also worried about where, as I say, press on, becomes ‘step on, regardless’, and so I wanted to explore the border between resolute and calmly deranged, surrender and madness. Who, really, is madder? How soothing was it to think that everything would be all right when, quite clearly, for me and my tender home-counties cannibal, it really bloody wasn’t.

What Lizzie was going through became a metaphor for my own creative process: Tuesday, take the thigh out of the freezer, let it defrost on the sideboard and eat it; Tuesday, go for a run on the way back from school, try not to worry about money, sit and breathe for ten minutes, look at the trees in the park, try not to panic about losing your mind and write the bit about Lizzie eating a mountain of male thigh. Collect children from school. Eat a carefully cooked, nice-as-you-can-manage-it-with-yet-more-potatoes-and-carrots-meal. Go to bed. Repeat.

I’m not sure I really found myself; that’s very much a w-i-p, but I did manage to write the book in a year and unwittingly tapped into a zeitgeist from my little flat in Peckham. When I emerged — blinking, dazed, and a vegetarian — and handed it over, it was snapped up faster than you can say free-market, and suddenly my book about a slightly depressed and lonely woman from Surrey was the talk of divorced women, feminists, gay men, the Irish, and just about anyone who’d experienced recession and was ready for fantasies of overthrow and subversion. ‘To be fair,’ a reader said on Twitter, ‘it’s just about the best idea for overthrowing the patriarchy we’ve ever had.’ To be fair, I wasn’t trying to overthrow anything. I was an unemployed single mother going through a divorce, and I was pleasantly surprised by the response to my dark and drab and funny novel. Its future remains to be seen, but writing and reading it has certainly been an adventure. It’s got many people talking — about men and women, marriage, bodies, madness, meat, lentils — and it turned its author into a caffeine-free vegetarian who’ll never again pay close to a fiver for a paper cup of warm frothy latte.