Jane Green: 'I was once the queen of chick lit - but I was quietly dying in a life I no longer recognised'

When her debut novel, Straight Talking, exploring the hectic life of a single career girl looking for love, became an instant bestseller in 1997 following a bidding war, she enjoyed great commercial success, selling millions of copies.

Other bestsellers followed, including Jemima J and Babyville, yet around a decade ago, some years after moving to America, she simply faded from the UK publishing scene.

“I hear people say, ‘Oh my God, I used to love Jane Green’, and I’m still writing novels in America but, yeah, in the UK everything sort of died about 10 years ago,” she says from her rented base in Marrakech, where she now runs writing retreats.

So, what happened, and why has she decided to write Rewilding, part memoir part rallying cry for women, her first book from a UK publisher in nearly a decade?

“It’s not a midlife crisis. It’s a midlife awakening,” she writes in the book, charting the painful end of her second marriage, her children leaving home, loneliness and confessing that when she looked in the mirror at 50, she no longer recognised herself.

She was grey, looked old and felt invisible, she recalls. Her career in the UK had lost its momentum, which she partly blames on ditching her UK agent.

“Suddenly, it felt like everything had just been taken away. I felt like an abject failure and was plunged into a terrible depression.

“It made me less confident about everything because the only area in which I felt truly confident was writing. It allowed me to create this persona of bestselling author, and that was where I felt comfortable.

“That overweight little girl who didn’t feel good enough, the real me, was able to hide behind this persona of a glamorous bestselling author, and suddenly I wasn’t a bestselling author anymore. I had no idea who I was.”

Her seemingly perfect life eventually fell apart. She had lived in Connecticut for 24 years, initially with her first husband, American investment banker David Burke, with whom she had four children.

The marriage didn’t last and she found herself in a blended family with her second husband, Ian Warburg, her four children and his two (her stepchildren) in an affluent suburb where she spent decades thinking she had to be as thin, perfect and successful as the women around her.

The author of 21 global bestselling novels including Jemima J, about an overweight journalist who moves to America, and Life Swap, following a London journalist who swaps lives with a suburban Connecticut mother, there’s more to her subjects than coincidence.

In Rewilding, she reveals that she was always a people pleaser and emphasises that she was the sole breadwinner in her marriages, which laid a heavy financial burden on her.

“I thought America was this big, shiny glittery placed that I always loved and yearned for, so I can’t blame anyone but myself,” she says now.

But by the age of 55, she was done.

“I was quietly dying in a life I no longer recognised,” she writes.

Today, Green, now 58, reflects: “There’s a confluence of things that often happens to a woman in her 50s. You’ve got your children often leaving home and your role as a mother suddenly is gone and you have menopause.

“I think there’s an awful lot written about the hot flushes and night sweats and the irritability, but what we really don’t understand is how losing the oestrogen – all of our nurturing hormones are contained within that oestrogen – and all of the things that we put up with, and the small indignities and the pushing other people before ourselves, that willingness to do that just leaves once we go through menopause. I wasn’t prepared for that at all.”

She felt lonely in her second marriage and was carrying huge amounts of resentment over her financial burdens.

“I felt like I was swimming underwater and I couldn’t reach the air,” she remembers.

Green had been diagnosed with clinical depression her early 20s and had been on antidepressants for years throughout her marriage, finally coming off them five years ago. She has also had a lot of therapy.

When she finally broke free, she assumed a nomadic lifestyle, living variously in New York, England and Marrakech, wore brighter clothes, experimented with drugs, tried alternative therapies and dabbled in online dating.

“I had to go through all that wild stuff to reach a place of peace. Whether it’s dating, having flings, partying, drinking too much, it was all part of numbing the pain that helped distract from actually having to face all of the really hard stuff.”

She describes her epiphany as “rewilding”, casting aside her habits of people-pleasing, giving herself space to allow her natural state to re-emerge.

She dyed her hair pink for a couple of years after turning 50 – “I didn’t want to look like everyone else” – but has since dyed it back to its original brunette and immediately felt younger, recognising her former self once more.

She changed her clothes, moving from trying to look like everyone else to fit in, to wearing the clothes she felt her true self in, bell-bottom jeans, furry Afghan coats, rings on every finger, bracelets up both arms.

“I had to find that little girl who didn’t feel good enough again, embrace her fully and learn to value her myself.

“I’m absolutely in my prime right now. I’ve got more energy, I feel really good about myself. I’m no longer living to please other people.”

Rewilding: Freedom, Friendship, And Finding Our Way Home by Jane Green is published by HarperCollins, priced £16.99. Available now