Sue Margolis Books in Order

If you want the book that introduced her voice: Neurotica → Launderama aka Spin Cycle
If you like workplace comedy and newsroom chaos: Apocalipstick → Original Cyn
If you want funny family drama with romance: Breakfast at Stephanie's → Gucci Gucci Coo → Forget Me Knot
If you prefer her later, more midlife stories: Coming Clean → Losing Me → Days Like These

Sue Margolis was born Susan Linda Wener in Ilford, Essex, on January 5, 1955, and grew up in Gants Hill, east London. The world she came from, Jewish family life, suburban ambition, noisy relatives, and a lot of wit, would later feed straight into her fiction.

School was not where she first looked like a future novelist. She later spoke openly about doing badly as a child, failing the eleven-plus, then finding a way forward by passing the 13-plus and moving on to grammar school. After that she went to the University of Nottingham, where she studied politics.

Her first working life was in teaching and radio, not books. She trained as a junior school teacher, but a hiring freeze helped push her elsewhere. While living in Leeds, and pregnant with her first child, she started experimenting with a tape recorder from her mother-in-law, made a feature at the kitchen table, and sent it off to Woman's Hour. That homemade start led to BBC work, including a run as the program's Yorkshire correspondent.

Radio came first.

Margolis spent about fifteen years as a reporter before turning to fiction. Then, in her forties, with three children and the usual family noise around her, she finally gave the old idea of novel writing a real shot. One day, while her son was at school, she sat down at his computer and started typing the book that became Neurotica. Published in 1998, it made her name with its mix of sexual frankness, sharp jokes, and very recognizable domestic chaos. Her second novel, Sisteria, had a shakier start in Britain, but American publishers and readers took warmly to her voice.

She kept building from there with books like Sisteria, Apocalipstick, Breakfast at Stephanie's, Original Cyn, and Gucci Gucci Coo. Her heroines are rarely polished or effortlessly in control. They are journalists, mothers, daughters, women with annoying jobs, tricky families, and private lives that keep refusing to stay tidy. The books pair comedy with embarrassment, longing, and the bargains people make between romance and ordinary life.

Her later novels widened the focus without losing the humor. Coming Clean, Losing Me, and Days Like These lean more into marriage, middle age, caregiving, widowhood, and starting over when you thought the big decisions were behind you. Even when the setup is comic, there is usually a real bruise underneath it. She liked writing about women who were tired, underestimated, or stuck, then giving them one good shove toward change.

The settings mattered too.

Again and again, Margolis returned to London and its suburbs, including places like Ilford, Finchley, and Hampstead. Jewish family life shows up often, not as background decoration, but as part of the rhythm of the jokes, the guilt, the arguments, and the warmth. Her years in journalism show up too, especially in the quick dialogue, the gossip, and her gift for spotting the absurd detail that makes a whole scene feel real.

She was married to journalist and biographer Jonathan Margolis, and they had three children. Her books found a particularly strong readership in the United States as well as the UK, and they sold more than half a million copies worldwide. Sue Margolis died of lung cancer on November 1, 2017, aged 62, but her novels still feel chatty, funny, and very much awake.