PHOTO HOLLY FALCONER
Lotte Jeffs is an impressive woman. I’ve watched her career flourish from afar, endlessly impressed by the writer, editor and creative director’s Insta-perfect life. She is who I want to be when I grow up. So when I heard Lotte was writing her debut book, a personal memoir-come-witty selfhelp guide, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy. Pitched as a “gentle antidote to a brutal world” and a celebration of soft power, this seemed the perfect cheat sheet with which to level up my life.
But the Lotte I speak to on the phone is very different to the Lotte in How To Be A Gentlewoman. She might seem like she’s got her shit sorted in the book, but it’s a little more complicated than that, it turns out. “Personally, I felt it was the right time for me to write something. I’d come to the end of a chapter in my life. My cousin had died, I’d come out of an emotionally abusive relationship, my dad had an affair and left my mum for a woman the same age as me. And then I met my now-wife, fell in love, and we had a baby. I’d had a happy ending. If this was a movie, this is where it would end. But what’s ironic is that life doesn’t actually work like that,” she laughs. “It isn’t a neat book that you can close and open. It’s sprawling and messy. There’s always difficult things to deal with. It’s a constant process of negotiating yourself in the world.”