Dawn O'Porter Books in Order

If you want her big contemporary novels about messy modern women: The Cows → So Lucky → Cat Lady → Honeybee
If you're drawn to teenage friendship and 1990s nostalgia: Paper Aeroplanes → Goose
If you like honest, real-life writing: Life in Pieces
If you're into vintage style and fashion history: This Old Thing

Dawn O'Porter was born in Alexandria, Scotland, and grew up on the Channel Island of Guernsey, where small-town life, tight friendships and teenage boredom later fed straight into her fiction. Today she is best known as a writer who talks very plainly about women's lives.

As a teenager she kept detailed diaries and threw herself into school drama, then left the island to study acting at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Partway through the course she realised she was more interested in stories than in standing on stage, and took a work placement on the comedy chat show Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned instead of appearing in the end-of-year production.

That decision nudged her toward television and journalism.

In her twenties she became a familiar face on British documentary TV, fronting immersive films about size-zero dieting, body image, childbirth, polygamy, breast cancer and even her long-standing love of the film Dirty Dancing. She later hosted vintage-fashion series This Old Thing, which tied in with her passion for second-hand clothes and eventually became a practical style book.

Alongside the TV work she wrote columns for magazines, usually about feminism, dating and the messier corners of everyday life. Her first book, the non-fiction Diaries of an Internet Lover, grew out of those years and captured early online dating in her own wry voice.

Fiction arrived with Paper Aeroplanes, a coming-of-age story about two misfit schoolgirls, Renée and Flo, on mid-1990s Guernsey. Loosely based on her teenage diaries, it led to a sequel, Goose, which follows the same girls as they face exams, grief and the pull of life beyond the island. Years later she returned to these characters as adults in Honeybee, exploring how a teenage friendship changes but does not quite disappear.

Her adult novels focus on women who look sorted from the outside but are quietly unravelling. The Cows ties together a single mother caught in a viral scandal, a grieving office worker and a fiercely independent blogger who wants to stay childfree. So Lucky follows a wedding planner, a photo editor and a social-media star whose glossy image hides exhaustion and shame. Cat Lady centres on Mia, whose deepest bond is with her cat, and asks what happens when the roles of wife, stepmother and career woman stop making sense.

Away from fiction, Life in Pieces collects the diary entries she wrote during the first year of the pandemic, while locked down at home with two small sons, several pets and a head full of worry and dark humour. Her fashion book This Old Thing shares her love of vintage clothing, offering practical advice on finding older pieces and wearing them in a way that feels like you.

O'Porter married Irish actor Chris O'Dowd in 2012, and they have two sons, Art and Valentine. After many years in Los Angeles they have settled back in the UK, where she juggles novels, essays, clothing projects and a busy, pet-filled family life, still writing about the same big subjects she started with: friendship, bodies, love, ambition and the stories women are told about who they should be.