Sophie Kinsella

Sophie Kinsella is a British author whose Confessions of a Shopaholic launched a beloved comic fiction series and established her as one of the leading voices in chick lit and women's comedy fiction.

Sophie Kinsella is the pen name of Madeleine Wickham, a British author who had already published several novels under her own name when she launched the Shopaholic series with Confessions of a Shopaholic in 2000. The novel follows Becky Bloomwood, a personal finance journalist with a catastrophic inability to manage her own money, as she digs deeper into debt while pursuing a chaotic romantic life. The premise is irresistible, and Kinsella executes it with genuine comic skill: Becky’s elaborate self-justifications for her spending, her schemes to escape consequences, and her charm as a narrator make the book more than the premise suggests.

The Shopaholic series ran to eight volumes, following Becky through marriage, motherhood, and various international adventures, with diminishing returns as the series progresses — the earlier books are tighter and funnier. But Kinsella also proved herself capable of extending beyond the Shopaholic world with standalone novels including I’ve Got Your Number, Remember Me?, and Can You Keep a Secret?, each of which demonstrates her facility with comic misunderstanding, romantic complication, and the particular pleasures of protagonists who are self-aware enough to be charming even when they are behaving badly.

Kinsella is writing in a genre — chick lit, or contemporary women’s comic fiction — that has been condescended to by literary critics in ways that do not serve readers well. She is a skilled comedic writer who understands plot structure and character voice. The comparison to Wodehouse, made by various reviewers, is not absurd: both share a fondness for escalating complications and protagonists who are simultaneously unreliable and loveable. Her books are not deep, but depth is not what they are attempting.