British chick-lit novelist Sophie Kinsella (who sometimes published as Madeleine Wickham), 55, died of cancer on Dec. 10. The Oxford grad started her career as a financial journalist, then published her first novel, The Tennis Party, in 1995. Kinsella’s books were similar to Elinor Lipman’s and Helen Fielding’s: well-crafted comfort-food novels about women finding love and careers. Her Shopaholic books were made into the film Confessions of a Shopaholic, as was Can You Keep a Secret?. Besides her ten Shopaholic books (following the adventures of Becky Bloomwood), Kinsella wrote such reliably enjoyable books as The Undomestic Goddess, Remember Me?, Twenties Girl, I've Got Your Number, and My Not So Perfect Life. “I do write quite fast,” Kinsella told interviewer Sheryl Garratt. “Once I get an idea, I find it really difficult to put it down, or treat it in a reasonable way. It slightly consumes me. So I tend to work in great fits and starts, and I make family life work around that. And I have a hero of a husband who picks up family life and runs with it, makes it happen while I’m lost in my world.”
