My First Time...with Gabrielle Fernie

Gabrielle Fernie trained as an actress, gaining a BA (Hons) Acting for Film and Television at Arts Educational Schools London. Her hobbies include embarrassing her parents, putting her foot in it, repulsing the entire male population and forgetting to shave her legs.

Having spent 23 years entertaining her friends with her toe-curling stories, she decided to start writing them into a blog, loveisa4letterturd.com, which Caitlin Moran called 'filthy, immoral, incredibly funny'. Her memoir, LUSH: A TRUE STORY, SOAKED IN GIN, was published by Sphere (Little, Brown) in August this year.

Lucky for us, Gabrielle will also be reading her book at The Riff Raff on Thursday 11 October and we honestly can't wait.

Get your tickets here >>

Describe the exact moment you decided to write your book?

I was always that one friend who people would ring up ‘the morning after the night before’, when they’d done something truly embarrassing. Mainly, because I could be relied upon to have done something ten times worse myself.

I thought, ‘If I can make my friends laugh this much with these stories, then maybe they’ll cheer other people up too’. I think girls these days feel so much pressure to be these clean eating, gym-loving, planet-saving perfectionists, and it’s healthy sometimes for someone to hold their hands up and say, ‘Look. I drank two bottles of merlot last night, smoked a packet of fags and tried to invite my Uber driver indoors. And I feel very little remorse’.

Read more My First Time interviews >>

What’s the one thing you wish you’d known before starting to write it?

That I do NOT have all the time in the world to write this book and those eight months are going to go pretty bloody quickly. I came up with all these elaborate plans for how I would write the book, rather than just sitting down and actually writing it.

One of these plans was to rent myself a cottage for a week in Cornwall, which I did. I