If you know your Elvis Costello, then you also know that the title of my forthcoming book Take Off Your Party Dress, with all its wistful longing, comes from his song Alison.

Costello wasn't, needless to say, talking about dealing with breast cancer, even when he sings, "I know this world is killing you..." But his gravelly lyrics, so filled with self-deception and pain, are the default whenever my iPod nano starts shuffling tunes. Wrestling with the title for my book on the way to collect the kids from school one day, Alison playing in my ears, I knew Costello had just handed me the perfect post-mastectomy sentiment, while expressing his own poorly disguised anger at an ex-girlfriend's faithlessness.

The phrase says it all. The wretchedness of never wearing a really great party dress again; the peremptoriness couched in a parental admonition but handed out by doctors (in effect, it's what they're saying as they slice off the bit that's killing us); and all the layers of memory the words have. Did any rock star ever bequeath a kinder gift to any first-time writer?

Of course I nearly lost all the beauty of Costello's phrasing in an early tussle with my publishers. They wanted to change the title to, Don't Take Off Your Party Dress. My screams of pain were those of a woman undergoing surgery without anaesthesia.

"No," I managed to say, teeth so gritted the words were barely distinct. "No, no, no." I couldn't explain it any better than that; they either understood or they didn't. Later, I managed, "I don't care what the marketing team has to say about explaining the content with the cover, my title stays. I am the woman who shops in Tesco's." (That's the target audience for this book, which has to reach the widest audience possible, because that's how widespread this plague of cancer is these days). I said: "I am the woman whose life is 'What are we having for supper tonight?' and I get it, I completely get the title. It stays."

Then the copy editor asked, quite rightly, where was the acknowledgement of Costello? Nowhere in the book, said the editor's notes, is Costello mentioned or explained. Eurgh, I thought again; I prefer to underwrite than overwrite. But then I thought, no, it's right, acknowledge Costello. So, in the too-long list of acknowledgments, customary of first-time authors, I added the sentence "And to Elvis Costello, thanks for the music."

I thought that was OK, just the right tone of understatement - genuinely appreciative but not gushing - for this singer who is, above all, subtle. But with the final proofs came another publisher's note. On balance, it said, they'd decided to take out the reference to Costello, in case the music company noticed and realised that we, ahem, knew where the phrase came from.

Simon and Schuster have given me many really good laughs over the last few months (most of which I've recorded here and, can I just say, it is a telling of tales that S&S are taking in very good part) but this one had three of us doubled over my kitchen table the other night. "In your dreams," said writer Simon Garfield, "in your dreams you get a lawsuit from Elvis Costello. Can you imagine what that would do to sales? And they've asked you to take it out...?"