When Sue Margolis, who has died of cancer aged 62, was at junior school, she would reliably come second from bottom in her class of 43. From there, she failed her 11-plus and was shunted off to a secondary modern. It was an inauspicious start to a career that would bring her a national, then a global, following as the writer of more than a dozen novels, starting in 1998 with Neurotica.
Sue always objected to her work being categorised as “chick lit” and her writing was unusually sharp and precise for the genre. Her jokes and situations were often very funny, her dialogue believable, and her references would range far off-piste from standard chick lit territory; a Margolis novel would typically include references to leftwing politics, literature and psychotherapy. A long-term depressive, Sue would joke that her therapists needed a therapist after sessions with her.
That the anxious, underachieving child went on to a grammar school after passing the 13-plus exam, then to Nottingham University to study politics, to become a reporter on BBC Woman’s Hour, and eventually a half-million-selling women’s romantic comedy writer is a tribute to her parents, Donald Wener, a dapper, moustachioed RAF man turned civil servant, and Audrey (nee Dixon), a nurse turned bank clerk – but also to the aspirational ethos of the lower-middle-class, largely Jewish-influenced, culture of Gants Hill, east London, where Sue grew up.
Her younger sister, Louise, became the singer in the 1990s Britpop band Sleeper, then a successful novelist herself. Her brother Geoff, a Cambridge graduate, managed Sleeper. There were countless other success stories in surrounding streets, including that of the England football captain Bobby Moore, the actor and author Sarah Winman and the human rights lawyer David Pannick.
Sue married Jonathan Margolis, a fellow student (and Gants Hill neighbour), in 1976, while both were still at Nottingham. Her early nervousness had long since given way to a ballsy, outspoken iconoclasm. She led a student rebellion against an unpopular statistics course, which boosted her self-assurance notably, even if a gnawing inner lack of confidence still troubled her.
Sue began her BBC career in Leeds, where Jonathan was a Yorkshire Post graduate trainee (he is now a Financial Times journalist and author). She had trained as a junior school teacher, but there was a hiring freeze in Leeds, so in 1978, she got pregnant “to get kids out of the way”. While pregnant, she began playing with a Uher tape recorder she had been given by her mother-in-law, Sylvia Margolis, who had been a BBC reporter.
Sue made a sample radio feature about a child living with kidney dialysis, cut it at the kitchen table on an editing deck found at Leeds market and sent the tape on spec to Woman’s Hour. The result was that she became the programme’s Yorkshire reporter, specialising in lighter stories, much prized by successive editors of the programme. She presented packages on such topics as Yorkshire English for the perplexed, and the Barnsley chop. While Sue was finishing the latter, her daughter Ruth, then a toddler, made off with a vital six-inch length of tape containing a key phrase. Once retrieved from Ruth’s porridge bowl, it was washed, spliced in and broadcast on Radio 4 without anyone hearing the slight dip in sound.
The family moved back to London in 1981, just after Sue’s son, David, was born. She continued with Woman’s Hour into the mid-90s, alongside having a third child, Eleanor. A recent piece by Eleanor for the Guardian, on photos that never quite make the official family album, included a photo of Sue reading the newspaper on the loo during a camper bus holiday in Mississippi. The photo oddly captured Sue’s funny, rude, transgressive – but faultlessly kind-hearted – personality. She was endlessly amused by how easily she could shock people.
The arrival of David’s first home computer in 1995 prompted Sue to find a new outlet for her comedic bent. One day, while David was at school, she went into his bedroom and started typing manically. By the time he came home, the first chapter of Neurotica was written. On the strength of the chapter, the agent Vivienne Schuster sold it to Headline Publishing. The book’s reactive core was the angst and obsessions of British Jewishness, fused with the status anxiety of suburbia.
Neurotica sold well and made her name, but a second novel, Sisteria (1999), flopped, and Sue’s writing career almost ended there – until Schuster made a sale to the US, where Neurotica and 12 more titles became bookstore staples. Bette Midler bought the rights to Neurotica, and got it to within weeks of production when 9/11 happened and, along with a raft of American comedies, the project was canned, never to be revived. Another novel, Apocalipstick, came close to becoming a TV series, but again missed out. Neurotica did, however, make an unexpected comeback in 2012 when an audiobook version, read by Sue, spent several weeks in the iTunes fiction Top 10.
After 14 comic novels, Sue was raring to let loose her serious side. Shortly before she became ill in January, she had started work on a novel set in Berlin around and after Kristallnacht in 1938. She returned to it many times during her illness, but became too tired to complete it.
Sue is survived by Jonathan and their children and two grandchildren, and by her mother and siblings.
• Susan Linda Margolis, novelist and broadcaster, born 5 January 1955; died 1 November 2017
