Confessions of a Shopaholic Author Dies at 55

Madeleine Wickham, the British author who found global fame under the pen name Sophie Kinsella with Confessions of a Shopaholic, has died at 55, per the Guardian. The writer had disclosed in April of last year that she was being treated for glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer diagnosed at the end of 2022. Per the AP, a post on Wickham's Instagram page noted that she "died peacefully, with her final days filled with her true loves: family and music and warmth and Christmas and joy."

Born in London in 1969, Wickham studied first music, then philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford, where she met her future husband on her first night at the school, per the Guardian. She started out as a financial journalist, a job she found uninspiring. During long commutes she devoured paperbacks by writers like Mary Wesley and Joanna Trollope and began to imagine her own. At 24, she wrote her debut novel, The Tennis Party, the first of seven books published under her real name from 1995 to 2001. Those early Wickham novels, which she described as "more serious" and "a bit darker" than her Kinsella books, were ensemble stories without a central heroine; one, Sleeping Arrangements, was adapted into a musical.

Wickham's career shifted gears with a manuscript she quietly submitted under a new name: Sophie Kinsella, which the New York Times notes is a combo of her middle name and mom's maiden name. That book, The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic—released in some markets as Confessions of a Shopaholic—introduced Becky Bloomwood, a financial journalist with a spending problem, and launched a 10-book series that helped define modern romantic-comedy fiction. "Shopping has become the national pastime, and nobody has written about it," she once said of the idea, calling it an "experimental project," per the Guardian. The first two Shopaholic novels were adapted for film; the 2009 Confessions of a Shopaholic movie starred Isla Fisher and Hugh Dancy.

From 2003 on, Wickham also produced a steady run of stand-alone novels as Sophie Kinsella, including Can You Keep a Secret?, The Undomestic Goddess, Remember Me?, and, most recently, 2023's The Burnout, inspired by her own experience of exhaustion. She resisted narrow labels like "chick lit," saying the term, to her, simply meant "third-person contemporary funny." Wickham argued that women could be "highly intelligent, and also ditzy and klutzy." Beyond adult fiction, she wrote the children's Mummy Fairy and Me series and a young adult novel, Finding Audrey, about a teen with social anxiety. Wickham, whose books have sold more than 45 million copies worldwide, is survived by her husband, Henry, and their five children.