There really should be an RSPCW - a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Writers - which would begin by banning book tours, for ever. I know the general perception is that writers only tour because it's illegal to masturbate in public but, believe me, there is no pleasure involved. In Philadelphia, I once performed to an audience of about 700 men in suits and ties, with the pinstriped underpants to match. One stiff upper labia joke into my spiel, they started to boo and hiss and finally hunted me off stage. "What the hell happened?" I asked the events organiser. "Oh well, we got your book-signing date mixed up with Senator John McCain." (The only consolation was that, the next night, the senator was going to get my audience - breast-squirting mothers, transvestites, front-row forward feminists and general jock strap twangers.)
Last week I began my latest book tour, an event I'd been looking forward to only slightly more than I would look forward to being imprisoned for drug smuggling in the men's section of a Turkish prison. As if haemorrhaging charisma coast to coast wasn't bad enough (by the end of the tour, paramedics will have to tourniquet my tongue), it also coincided with half-term. Books and babies do not go together. Jane Austen, the Brontes, Simone de Beauvoir, Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Germaine Greer - not one of our female literary canon had children.
There is a reason for this. After you give birth, the only thing you write are cheques, because the tooth fairy takes American Express these days. And your reading material is limited to the instructions on the Valium bottle, only you can never get that child-proof lid off the jar.
As I jockeyed for position in the gridlock of designer Jeeps crammed with horn-happy mothers late for Little Un's feng shui or anatomically correct gingerbread-men cooking class, or some other particularly Hampsteady half-term activity - steering with one hand because I was leafing through an architecture book with the other, trying to find the correct structure for the Greek temple the kids were supposed to have constructed from paddle pop sticks but which I'm going to have to make at the next traffic light, pausing only to change gear with my teeth, while simultaneously fielding questions such as "Where did I come from, Mummy? - my mobile phone shrieked. It was a live interview with a Sheffield radio station I'd forgotten about.
"So," the interviewer asked me, "do you think women can have it all?" I readjusted the Corinthian column between my legs and the ice lolly I was melting under my armpit, sedated the kids and was about to answer, when I rear-ended the car in front of me. This, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a police car.
It was then that I found myself pondering a profound question. How the hell did motherhood ever catch on? Kids are like Ikea appliances - you have no idea how much assembly is required until it's way too late. By the time I located the craft workshop about one decade and two traffic fines later, I was tempted to start looking for loopholes in my children's birth certificates. Ricocheting home, hours late, for an interview with a women's mag, the first question was a sickly sweet one on the rewarding and fulfilling joys of being a mother. "Well, I love my progeny with a primal passion, but I'm so paranoid about getting pregnant again I've put a condom on my vibrator." Strangely, the interview was terminated with alarming alacrity. I'm Australian. I can't help it. I was born with a silver foot in my mouth.
Children keep such stupid hours, don't they? I've had no sleep since November 1990. Which explains my coffee addiction. I drink so much espresso, the last time I gave a urine sample, it had a coffee spoon standing in it. Hence my initiation into London's illiterati. This sad fact was brought home to me this week when I kept finding myself on BBC chat shows, seated between literary men, sombre as book-ends, who turned out to be either on a university syllabus or the answer to a question in the Times crossword puzzle.
"What do you think of the Booker Prize runners-up?" one asked me. Now, the only thing I've read lately, cover to cover, is a Nintendo instruction book.
"Um, you'll have to excuse me. I've been a bit scatty since the baby was born. Of course, he's ten now, but . . ."
Talk then turned to the arms control initiative, which the Republicans refused to ratify last year. Arms control? What is that? Some new biceps-toning device? The reason I'm ignorant of the latest political developments is that my kids always use the morning paper before I've read it - to line the hamster cage. I have the best-informed rodents in the western world. If only they were on the book tour.
By Friday, I was feeling about as limp as an Eighties perm in a sauna. As for selling books, I doubt I could sell a breast implant to Dolly Parton. With Mirror and Express journos descending and two literary festivals - Guildford and Sheffield - to get to in the same day, I tried to have some quality time with the kids. But I could manage only remedial Scrabble. Then halfway through "join the dots", my publishers rang to see if I'd had a fun week. Oh yes! About as much fun as amateur ovarian cyst removal. I never did get to answer the question from the radio DJ. Can women have it all? Well, yes, only not all at once.
And as for the Booker Prize? In my view, any mother who finishes a novel should get the Booker automatically.
