'I am a brand,' she says. 'Of course I am. If you're going to be in the media, you have to exaggerate certain aspects of your personality because you've to keep some stuff for yourself. That's just showbiz. I met Bette Midler when I was really young, and I was kind of amazed at how quiet and gentle she was, and then she was this dynamo on stage. And that's what you have to do. If you're in the public eye, you have to put your bulletproof bra on because a lot of people are going to attack you and you've got to give it back. ... It's a big, tough world out there, especially for women.'

The attacks mostly originate from her native country. One female literary editor routinely assigns 'terrible' people to review her books, and certain men revile her.

'Imagine waking up one morning ... to find you are married to the most tedious Australian 'personality' ever created,' one columnist wrote. 'Such is the grim reality for Geoffrey 'Hypothetical' Robertson.' For her part, Lette has remarked: 'Australian men disprove the theory of evolution. They're evolving into apes. I always say the Australian version of foreplay is shearing.' Mostly, though, she ignores them. 'You have to,' she sighs. 'It's like being annoyed by a gnat - you just have to remember to swat them occasionally. My readers [are] ... getting what they want, whereas these guys have no talent. What do they do? Nothing!'

It's true that, in thematic terms, Lette is shackled. She will never write literary non-fiction about the impact of the landscape on art or an alexandrine about melancholy. Her thing is women: women and love and marriage and divorce. The men are incidental. Despite this, her most recent novel, To Love, Honour and Betray (Till Divorce Us Do Part), was well received; even the most jaded reviewers acknowledged the strong political bones beneath the puns. And while her contribution to the erotic anthology In Bed With ... remains anonymous (all the female contributors used a pseudonym), Lette's reputation as a wickedly funny and salacious woman of letters remains untarnished.

Lette established herself in this vein at 21 when her first novel, Puberty Blues, was published to national acclaim. An honest account of life in the working-class beachside suburb of Cronulla, Sydney, the book recorded Lette's reality: pubic hairs in jars of Vaseline in the backs of pickup trucks, deliberately roasted flesh (Lette still bewails the impact of the sun on her hands and d?colletage) and waxheads (surfers) who regard their girlfriends as little more than towel-weights.

The 1981 film of the book, directed by Driving Miss Daisy's Bruce Beresford, was an unhappy experience for Lette. 'I got ripped off,' she has said. 'My agent sold the film rights before the book came out for A$500 with no escalation clause. It became the biggest box-office grosser in Australian film history. That taught me a lesson.' Her husband now proofs every contract.

One of four sisters, Lette left home and school at 15 to move in with her best friend, Gabrielle Carey, who co-wrote Puberty Blues. 'Although my father would have preferred me to stay on at school,' Carey has said, 'he helped us with the rent, whereas Kathy was basically outcast from her family, and that must have been very hard.' Lette made her own way, living in a commune with an outdoor toilet, working in a bath-plug factory, cleaning bedpans and writing for television in LA. Now regarded as one of the queens of popular fiction, she lives in a grand house and earns an impressive income.

'Nick Hornby, he writes first-person, contemporary funny fiction,' Lette says. 'He writes chick-lit. But because he's a boy he gets compared to Chekhov. For women to be foisted into the limited, derogatory category of chick-lit is profoundly annoying.'

Like all her novels, To Love, Honour and Betray deals with the disappointments of love and the restorative power of female friendship. Its bad girl, Renee, like many of Lette's characters, is based on a real person. Lette will tell me, but only off the record, and she does, complete with details of sexual subterfuge, filial fallout and all the detritus of high-profile adultery in the international world of publishing.

Lette's equation of romance with disillusionment has caused many to wonder at her marriage to Robertson, who left Nigella Lawson for her in 1988 (and for whom Lette left her first husband, Kim Williams, now CEO of Foxtel Australia). Robertson, also Australian-born, is 12 years her senior and the father of her two children, Julius, 18, and Georgina, 16. The two met on Hypotheticals, the long-running Australian television programme he hosted, when Lette stood in for her friend Kylie Minogue.

Lette believes that any mother who finishes a novel should be awarded the Man Booker Prize simply for completing the thing. 'It's so much harder for us,' she says, suddenly intense. 'All the men I know, like Sebastian Faulks and Martin Amis, go to their attics, their wives bring them sandwiches and the men work. The minutiae of daily domesticity is taken care of. Whereas I get half an hour between the dental appointment and the school appointment to write.'

Troubled by what she calls the 'loneliness' of the writing life, Lette agrees to as many media engagements as possible. 'I like my own company up to a point,' she clarifies. 'I like to amuse myself and dream up things, but I also love being out and about and showing off. As the deadline approaches, I panic. And then I don't do anything but write - I don't go out, I don't answer the phone, I don't talk.'

She is on first name terms with princes Charles, Harry and William, the last and current prime ministers, and no stranger to the polo field and the higher literary spheres. John Mortimer was a friend and her daughter's godfather, as is Salman Rushdie, whom her husband represented during his fatwa. (Famously, Lette hosted Rushdie's stag night. Her daughter, then 11, made her way past the penis-shaped balloons to greet the lesbian magician-stripper at the door.)

'There's nothing in life I regret doing, but there's a lot of stuff I regret not doing. The one thing I have learned ... is to never turn down an adventure. Try it all, girls!'

Writer's notes

Name: Kathy Lette Age: 50

Born: Sydney

Lives: Hampstead, London

Family: husband Geoffrey Robertson; children Julius, 18, and Georgina, 16

Genre: fiction

Latest book: To Love, Honour and Betray (Till Divorce Us Do Part)

Other books include: How to Kill Your Husband (and Other Handy Household Hints); Nip 'n' Tuck

Next project: 'I've just written a waterproof book for women to read in the bath when they're escaping from the kids and work, stress, life in general. So, yes, I'll be in hot water again, literally. It's a funny tale called All Steamed Up.'

Other jobs: 'You name it, I've done it ... yes, I've scraped the bottom of the job barrel.'

What the papers said about To Love, Honour and Betray: 'The frenetic wordplay often misses the mark, yet the manic flow of quippery and sheer loudness of the writing cloaks the seriousness of the basic premise: love is possible, but the world is a perilous place to be female, even if you are white, Western and middle-class.' The Age 'Lette is witty and ... her famous punning is much in evidence.' The Daily Mail