Images 002

Notes

¹ I am often asked whether I am the woman on the cover of Gods Behaving Badly. I am not. It is the goddess Aphrodite. However, I am definitely the woman on the cover of Create Your Own Midlife Crisis.

² There are over twenty international editions of Gods Behaving Badly. The Turkish edition, Kaldirim Tanrilari, has the sexiest cover.

³ You can buy the books by clicking on the covers. Except for the Turkish one. That’s just for show.

Chapter II
{What}

I wrote my first novel at 14. It was called The Lone Bagpipe and its whereabouts, long thought lost, have recently been traced to my brother’s loft. My published novels are Gods Behaving Badly, which is about Greek gods in modern times, The Table of Less Valued Knights, which is about Arthurian knights in Arthurian times, and Oh, I Do Like To Be..., which is a reworking of the Shakespeare play The Comedy of Errors, only instead of identical twins, the protagonists are clones of Shakespeare. I am also one of the shadowy cabal of anonymous women who wrote the spoof Fifty Shelves of Grey - all your favourite books, erotically remastered - under the collective name Vanessa Parody. My newest book, Create Your Own Midlife Crisis, was published in November 2019. It’s a choose your own adventure book about having a midlife crisis. It came out in the US in June 2021, and you can play the first few moves of the book/game here.

I have also written two series for Radio 4, both with the playwright Robert Hudson: Warhorses of Letters, starring Stephen Fry and Daniel Rigby, and Some Hay In A Manger, starring Tamsin Greig and Joel Fry. Both feature animals writing letters to each other. A further series, the Finnish Death Metal-themed Tyrannosaurus Christ, remains mysteriously unproduced.

Here are some nice things people have said about my work:

Gods Behaving Badly: “Very very funny and delightfully original as well as acutely clever in a makes-you-think-about-contemporary-morality-without-realising-it kind of way... This novel will not only make you laugh and give you a nice warm fuzzy feeling, it will also provide a good basic grounding in Greek mythology” – The Independent

"The Table of Less Valued Knights infects Arthurian legend with a brio not seen since Monty Python and the Holy Grail" - New Statesman

Oh, I Do Like To Be...: "Fast, clever and - I can state this with confidence - significantly funnier than the original" - The Spectator

Warhorses of Letters: “What an odd delight… Very funny, but also strange enough to have you staring at the radio in places” – The Guardian

“By far the best spin-off we've read so far is Fifty Shelves Of Grey by the appropriately monikered Vanessa Parody” - GQ

Create Your Own Midlife Crisis: “Women in midlife -- and those exasperated by them -- will laugh out loud, lost in a zany labyrinth of "what if" scenarios scripted by British comedy writer Marie Phillips.... Phillips's fun, clever antidotes offer a hilarious escape from the mundane” - Shelf Awareness