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30 | www.westendermagazine.com Writer’s Reveal meets Gill Sims WORDS LORAINE PATRICK Glasgow based writer Gill Sims is the best-selling author of Why Mummy Drinks and Why Mummy Swears, both Sunday Times bestsellers. The books are based on her hilarious (if rather sweary) parenting blog Peter and Jane. The mum of two was an engineerining consultant before being approached by HarperCollins to publish her musings on family life. She now writes full-time. Gill thanks for taking time out to catch up with Westender magazine. I have to put in a bit of a disclaimer here – I am a mum of three and your descriptions of family life have me in stitches. Take us back to why you started up the Facebook blog – was it a way of sharing your experiences with friends or did you think at the time it could be something much bigger?
www.westendermagazine.com | 31 It just really started as a joke with a friend. I was a chronic oversharer on Facebook anyway and friends kept telling me I should start a blog. Maybe they were just bored with my long rambling status updates and thought I should take it somewhere else! I was always quite sweary and one day a friend sent me an article, I think it was about why wome n shouldn’t swear, and she said ‘You really should do that blog!’ I had a bit of spare time so I threw something together, mainly to make her laugh. I started the public Facebook page because friends wanted to share it, and posting in there saved me having to change my privacy settings all the time. Do you remember your first post? What was it about? I think it was about a Mummy who tries very hard to make everything #soblessed but who is constantly thwarted by her children – by their inability to find their shoes, by their illicit consumption of Haribo leading to them bouncing off the walls, by the eleventy billion letters from the school that she can’t keep track of, or she is only handed twenty minutes before leaving the house that tell her that her precious moppets are to go into school today dressed as French mimes, or spacemen, or trees… I think I am that mum! But you have clearly struck a chord with several thousand of us. There are around 400,000 followers on your Facebook page. When did you realise the enormity of what you were doing? I don’t think it really has sunk in yet. It’s a bit mind boggling really! I’m always amazed and so grateful that so many people do take the time to read my ramblings. The most popular post is still the one that first went viral, about a long day in the summer holidays when everything goes wrong despite Mummy’s best intentions, but when her husband comes home from work, because she hasn’t been at her actual paying job that day, he assumes she must have spent the day with her feet up enjoying her ‘day off’. When in reality she had spent her ‘relaxing day off’ doing endless loads of laundry and taking kids to the doctors and playdates and refereeing fights and trying to juggle endless balls and hadn’t actually sat down all day, and so she did not take such comments well. I think a lot of other people must have had similar experiences. Is everything you write based on true life experience? The books are fiction. I’m not Ellen, my husband isn’t Simon and my kids aren’t Peter and Jane, though Judgy Dog in the books is based very closely on my own Border Terrier. The blog and some of the situations in the book are about the general everyday experiences most of us go through as parents – lost shoes, aversions to vegetables, forgetting how to read. Mummy is a fictionalised mum to, she gets to say out loud what we are all shouting inside our heads. Your tongue-in-cheek take on family life is the polar opposite to the picture-perfect images we are often fed on social media. I am sure most commend you for your honesty but do you ever get any criticism? I’ve been really lucky and most people realise it is hugely exaggerated for comic value. There is the odd person who doesn’t realise it is meant to be humorous and takes umbrage. There are others who get that it is supposed to be funny, but don’t think that it is funny, which is entirely their right to do so, humour is very subjective. When you hear about the hideous things some people get sent, or the threats made to them, I’ve really been very lucky and the criticism is mild in the grand scheme of things. When everything first took off, it wouldn’t matter how many nice comments there were, if there was one negative one that would be what I would focus on. But you learn to shrug it off and grow a thicker skin. You have to really. Your writing is very sweary – would it be the same without the cursing? Personally, I am a big fan of swearing! I was sent a book recently called Swearing Is Good For You, about the therapeutic effects
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