{"id":297116,"date":"2026-02-22T20:53:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T20:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/297116\/"},"modified":"2026-02-22T20:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T20:53:09","slug":"im-never-going-to-find-a-reason-why-im-an-alcoholic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/297116\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019m never going to find a reason why I\u2019m an alcoholic\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI didn\u2019t know what I was doing, but I knew I wanted to write about the disappointments of post-feminism,\u201d she says. \u201cBack then, we were told, \u2018Well, you\u2019re grand now, there\u2019s no need for feminism. You\u2019re equal now, you can have anything you want, you can have sex like a man, you\u2019re paid the same, you\u2019ll probably soon get promoted.\u2019 And yet none of those things were happening. I was living in a flat with two other women, and we were thinking, \u2018Why is our life not like the way it\u2019s meant to be?\u2019 So I started writing about that because nobody else was, and I wanted to write about it in an accessible way, because I didn\u2019t know any other way to tell a story.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Inevitably, she soon became packaged as a comic-lite female writer, her novels given pink covers featuring giggly girls and bottles of Prosecco. It was the early years of chick lit and she found herself lumped alongside talented novelists such as <a class=\"ck-custom-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/books\/news\/sophie-kinsella-tribute-shopaholic-chick-lit\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Sophie Kinsella<\/a>, who, thanks to their amusing honesty about the foibles of the female psyche and their heroines\u2019 many comic misadventures in the bedroom, were never taken remotely seriously by the literary establishment.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cActually, Sophie\u2019s Shopaholic books were tapping into something really important, that relationship between self-medication and spending,\u201d says Keyes. \u201cBut, you know, when a man writes a love story, it\u2019s treated as remarkable. When a woman does, it\u2019s dismissed as, \u2018Oh, women and their feelings again\u2019. Men have so much more power and money than women do, and they don\u2019t want to give it away. So one way to undercut women is to make fun of their silly little books about relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI didn\u2019t know what I was doing, but I knew I wanted to write about the disappointments of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297117,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2974,163744,2396,156,163742,111,139,69,1177,417,163743,25212,162728],"class_list":{"0":"post-297116","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-bbc","9":"tag-claire-allfree","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-fiction-books","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-standard","17":"tag-television","18":"tag-television-editors-choice","19":"tag-top-story","20":"tag-us-content"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297116\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}