Your new book, Tumbling Dice, is an intimate, frank and hilarious memoir. Was it fun to write?

It was the book that had been begging to be written for years. The blighter nagged and nagged, and in the end I had to give in to it. Some of it was fun. Trolling back down Memory Lane, poking in and out of the pubs, getting back into all those scrapes and reliving my misspent youth was some jaunt. A lot of it was incredibly painful. But those experiences had to be there too. I decided at the outset that I couldn’t simply be some disembodied voice in the process, telling all these crazy stories but never revealing my true self. I had to be a real, living, bleeding person, with a plausible personal life and all the usual ups and downs. Juxtaposing that mad hack and glam alter ego with the ordinary girl from nowhere – the girl I really was – became the challenge. The things we got up to in the name of a splash headline became all the more extraordinary because I was just me. The point is that absolutely anyone could have fallen into the life that I had.

Read the full intimate interview here