Death didn’t suit her. Not her type at all. This is how the British author Sophie Kinsella saw it. She has written more than 30 books and they have sold more than 48 million copies in more than 60 countries. She became famous with her “Shopaholic” novels about the financial journalist and bargain hunter Becky Bloomwood, whose life revolves around fashion, men and her lousy bank balance, and which have become global bestsellers since the turn of the millennium and became the stuff of Hollywood in 2009. And then came the diagnosis: glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor.
When we met her in London just over a year ago in her terraced house in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, Sophie Kinsella seemed as if she was still barely able to believe her illness, even though she had already had two years of operations, chemotherapy and radiation treatments. So she got it. She, the queen of happy endings, who stood for the lightness of being. She also had a solid degree in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and, after working as a financial journalist, wrote her first novel “The Tennis Party” in 1995, which was an immediate success. She wrote it under her real name, Madeleine Sophie Wickham. The British woman, who was born in London in 1969, shook her head in disbelief in her living room. She received the diagnosis at the end of 2022 and only made it public a year and a half later. Cancer. Incurable. She needed the time for herself and her family. And hope.
Humor: her coping strategy when the truth was too sad
She laughed a lot on this November day in 2024, not loudly, not that. It was more of a knowing smile that spoke of a fine sense of humor and wordplay that speaks in all her novels. From the nine novels in the Bargain Hunter series as well as her other books, including a young adult novel and four children’s books. She said she reinterpreted her time with the illness, for example in the clinic. “When the nurses in radiology talked over my head in medical terms, I said to myself: They are Spanish beauty specialists talking about my skin type.” When a device was placed on her head, she acted as if it was a new type of facial treatment and said to herself: “Gwyneth Paltrow uses the same model!” Humor as a coping strategy when the truth is too sad? “It’s a conscious decision that my situation can also be funny,” said Sophie Kinsella.
Her husband Henry sat next to her during the interview, as he sat next to her at every interview, holding her hand. The two met on their first day at Oxford University. She was 21 when they married. Henry was her “Google filter,” as she said: Every morning he searched the Internet for good news, for positive outcomes of people with brain tumors, for new developments in research, and read it all to her over tea in bed. Sophie Kinsella called her new life “Normal Plus”. She doesn’t want to work off a bucket list. She doesn’t have to go to the Galapagos Islands, she’s already swum with dolphins. It’s about appreciating life and living in today. Special encounters, kind words, a nice walk. Fall asleep with good thoughts. Don’t think about what tomorrow will bring.
At the end of 2024, she published her last novel, “How Does It Feel?”, about a romantic comedy writer who is discovered to have an aggressive brain tumor. She needed this distance, but of course this was her life, said Kinsella. One passage in it reads: “I like happy endings. That’s why I made up so many of them. But here’s where the irony of fate comes into play: I can’t think of a happy ending for myself in real life.” Sophie Kinsella died on Wednesday two days before her 56th birthday; she leaves behind her husband Henry and their five children.