Here's Rachel Johnson! And me! She's talking at Cybermummy now about the highlights and lowlights of her published career. Specifically, how many people she has pissed off in the process. She started writing The Mummy Diaries with three small children under 5 (her kids are now teenagers) before the world of mummy blogging even existed. She 's written when living abroad in Washington, US and alienated people. She moved to Brussels, wrote a column in the Sunday Times about life there instead and managed to alienate even more people. She says she has crossed that fine line between writing life and real life on many occasions, including writing about her husband's liver transplant. Written for a particular magazine, she then found it was sold by that publication and her husband read it in the Evening Standard (someone else's). Cross words, apparently. No speaking for two days. Ouch.
Rachel wrote a piece for Vogue on erm, female grooming down there. She wrote candidly about her own daughter's grooming habits. The story went ballistic and Rachel was lambasted in the Daily Mail by Liz Jones. Liz Jones! That obviously hurt. Not as much as the waxing, no doubt.
However, she says that honest writing about yourself is what people want to read. Andrea Levy was on Desert Island Discs recently and did exactly that, going on to win a major writing award for 'Small Island'. The great thing about blogging is that it has given us mere mortals a voice and a platform. She is a self-confessed technophobe and doesn't blog (but she's got 6,000 Twitter followers - @rachelsjohnson - so she can't be that bad).
Her parting shot: just remember, friends are friends, family is family and they will love you no matter what. You just might have to grovel. Of course, this is not going to work for everyone, but it seems to work for her brilliantly.
Rachel is the editor of The Lady (www.thelady.co.uk) and has written a book, Diary of The Lady. Her brother is quite famous too, apparently.
Labels: brit mums, cybermummy
