The narrator of Everything You Know is an unexpected one. For a start, it's a hero and not a heroine; he's 50-odd, not 30-something, and he lives in LA, not London. Nothing so odd in that except that Everything You Know is the first novel by Heller, the 30-something, London gal best known for her weekly newspaper columns about life, love and lipstick. It would not have been unreasonable to suppose that her first attempt at fiction writing would be in the Bridget Jones mould. "I knew what I didn't want to write," Heller says firmly, "and that was the novel of the column - some rites of passage thing about a young person who was strangely like myself."
Showing her journalistic roots, she quickly follows that statement with a qualifying, "I often say that and a gleam comes into the journalist's eye and they think `Aha, she doesn't hold with Bridget Jones', but it's not that at all. That was an exceptionally good book that did very well and earned lots of money; there was no need for more of that and it wasn't what I wanted to write. I knew I wanted to write about this mean but loveable bloke and I wanted to make it funny and sad at the same time. Quite a lot of people seem to have missed the funny bit though," she muses with a grin.
Given the circumstances of her "mean but loveable bloke", Willy Muller, it's understandable. Willy has just had a heart attack which was brought on by the delivery of his dead daughter's diaries, detailing the aftermath of her mother's death and Willy's prison sentence for her manslaughter. Not exactly laugh-a-minute material, but in Heller's hands there are indeed a lot of very funny touches. "I don't want to go: `No, no it's meant to be funny' all the time, so I find myself agreeing that, yes, it's terribly bleak and lonely," she says in a mock-serious intellectual tone.
Satisfyingly, Zoe Heller is very good company. Six months pregnant, she is rather endearingly ravenous, and much of the first section of the interview tape is muffled as she polishes off her lunch. She uses different voices to illustrate other people's opinions or to send herself up in some way, and explains things in a rather conspiratorial fashion. It's all peculiarly familiar for someone you have met just 10 minutes previously, but this is because you know rather a lot more about Zoe Heller than you do about most strangers. Or you think you do. Her column ran every week in the early 1990s, in first the Independent on Sunday and then the Sunday Times. In what was a much imitated but rarely bettered "girl about town" style, Heller described setting up home in LA and New York, and brought us through the highs and lows of her love life, social life and encounters with the local wildlife.
Now, her feelings about the column are more than ambiguous - while she realises the doors it has opened, she is a little wistful about the five years as a staff features writer that get forgotten in the rush to describe her as a "girly columnist". "Mostly when I look back on what I wrote, which I don't do very often, I'm not so much embarrassed by the things that I revealed, which is always the great focus - `weren't you embarrassed you talked about your knickers?' - as the fact that the nature of the column was not a great encouragement to write very well. I'd bang it out on a Thursday night in an hour and when I look back on it, I just think, well I wasn't exactly honing my prose."
She is wary of making pronouncements about columns such as hers, as it all too easily sounds as though she is being disparaging of other women columnists, but she has very clear ideas about the trajectory they tend to trace and about their role within journalism itself, none the less.
`All of those woman's columns - when I say all of them I mean Bridget Jones, even though she was a fictional character, and India Knight and various others - are at their best when they really have a feeling of honesty about them. But partly because one doesn't have searingly honest things to 'fess up to every week and partly because the mere act of replicating this thing every week tends to make things very stylised, that honesty gets lost. "I look back and think that's not me at all, that's a peppy, wacky version of me that I personally don't find that engaging or amusing.
"Women journalists tend to get asked to write in the first person about themselves more frequently than men do. Partly because they're probably better at it and partly because they're more prepared to. That's fine but it tends to be a bit of a dead end for women. "It leads them into the realms of the `women's corner', writing about women's issues, and it's the latest modern way of finding a little fringe niche for women. The traditional role of women on papers was to soften the edges of the hard news male agenda, but in my experience, after a while writing as a woman, having to interpret everything through the prism of your gender becomes very tiresome."
Born in north London, Heller was raised there and - "for a small but significant portion of my life" - in Hollywood and Mexico, as the family followed her screenwriter father. The A-Levels garnered at her local comprehensive - "my mother had these very strong socialist principles" - wouldn't have allowed her into Oxford University but a teacher offered to coach her for the entrance exam. She succeeded but didn't enjoy it at all.
"It wasn't just Oxford, I don't think I would have particularly liked being at any college . . . I never really liked large groups of people of my own age. I was very swotty, but I found it all rather oppressive."
After a year of publishing under Carmen Calill at Chatto & Windus, she realised it was not for her and began freelance journalism. A precious contract came after a "year of near-starvation. It was my lucky break". Still, writing a novel has always been an aspiration and she originally moved to America with that aim - and with the aim of escaping London, which she always found "rather paranoia-inducing. I always felt very oppressed by the gossipiness of it - the culture in British media is quite snotty and snide. It's not that people in America aren't snide too, but the levels of what it is publicly acceptable to say in a mean way are set much higher in England. It's always a bit of a shock to the system when you come back and read the off-the-cuff nastiness written about people who just don't deserve it."
She ended up writing the column instead, but as its fans will know, the single gal of the column eventually found love and a type of stability which she readily admits altered her writing career. "At a certain point in my life I became quite happy and settled. It's interesting because that's probably not good for that type of column-writing but it's very good for the business of sitting down and writing in a disciplined way on something like a novel. It makes you realise why all those junior executives get wives early so they can set up a happy home and concentrate on their work."
Interestingly, she has never shown her partner, an American screenwriter with whom she is now settled in New York, the columns in which he featured as a main player. "Partly because I knew that he would object to some of the things I was revealing about us and partly because I wasn't very proud of them. He's largely protected from it because he lives in America but when he comes over people say `oh you're the one, I've heard all about you'. I think he feels a bit like, `well, what did you write?"'