Gill Sims, author of Why Mummy Drinks, to bring her Tits, Gits and Little Sh*ts tour to Cambridge
Gill Sims, author of the Sunday Times best-seller Why Mummy Drinks, is on a UK tour that will reach Cambridge on April 17.
Her new show, Tits, Gits and Little Sh*ts: An Evening with Gill Sims, involves the writer and blogger in conversation with Jo Middleton, author of Playgroups and Prosecco: The (mis)adventures of a Single Mum and creator of the Slummy single mummy blog.
They discuss, among other things, the changing face of motherhood and the highs and lows of the school gate. There will be readings from Gill’s critically acclaimed books.
Her first, Why Mummy Drinks, was the best-selling hardback fiction debut of 2017, spending more than six months in the top 10 of the Sunday Times best-sellers chart. It was also shortlisted for Debut Novel of the Year at the British Book Awards.
The four Why Mummy titles have sold nearly a million copies across all formats to date and have been published in 18 territories worldwide. Her new novel, The Saturday Night Sauvignon Sisterhood, will be published on May 12.
Gill reveals how she launched herself on the road to book-writing success (she previously worked for an engineering company): “I started back in 2016 as a sort of joke with a friend,” she recalls. “I started a slightly rant-y Facebook blog about parenting called Peter and Jane and I thought no one would ever read it, apart from my friend who had told me I should start doing this...
“But people did; people shared it, people liked it, people enjoyed it – quite a lot of people started reading it and it grew from there. Then I was asked if I would like to write a book along the same lines so obviously I said that would be brilliant, without really thinking it through.
“I then realised that 100,000 words for a book is very different to 700 or 800 words for a blog post, but I got there. The first book was an amazing success so they asked me to do some more and I’ve just really been very, very lucky. It’s been quite unexpected but an amazing thing to have happened.”
Gill, who lives in Scotland with her husband, two children and two Border terriers, realised that others could relate to what she had to say. “When I started blogging, so many parents in the playground started coming over and saying, ‘Oh my God that’s how I feel’, ‘My child did that today’ and I thought, ‘I’m not the only one’.”
Tits, Gits and Little Sh*ts is Gill’s second UK tour. “I did one in 2019, which was amazing,” she says, “and it’s fantastic to be able to get the chance to go and do it again, especially after the last couple of years.
“I’m really looking forward to actually getting out and meeting people again; I think we’ve all spent too long just talking to people behind screens, haven’t we? So it’s going to be really, really nice to be able to meet people face-to-face and have a chat and hopefully have a laugh.”
Elaborating on the structure of the show, Gill says: “Jo Middleton, who blogs as Slummy single mummy, is interviewing me and there are three main sections. “‘Tits’, where we talk about motherhood and being a woman and what it’s like for us these days. For ‘Gits’, we touch on relationships! That’s obviously only there because it rhymes and I’m not implying anything about anyone’s partners...
“And for ‘Little Sh*ts’ we talk about family and children and the various challenges our little darlings present us with.”
Gill, who grew up in East Africa before moving to Scotland at the age of 11, adds: “The audience questions as well at the end are always really interesting – they can throw some curveballs, but it’s always good fun to hear what people want to know and what people are thinking.”
Gill Sims will be appearing at the Junction’s J2 on Sunday, April 17. Visit junction.co.uk. For more on Gill, go to gillsims.com.
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