Comedy has been a salvation for the novelist Kathy Lette, says HANNAH STEPHENSON.

SHE’S been nicknamed “the mouth from the South”, thanks to her quickfire humour, endless put-downs and hilarious one-liners.

So keeping up with wise-cracking Australian wit Kathy Lette, whose best-selling books include Puberty Blues, Mad Cows and How To Kill Your Husband (And Other Handy Household Hints), can be an exhausting experience.

Now she’s spouting off about men’s weaknesses and women’s strengths in hilarious tones similar to those in her novels, banging the drum for women’s rights through her satirical prose. But has she mellowed at all during her 50s?

“I should have mellowed now, but no. It’s getting embarrassing. I’ve actually got a little bit wilder,” Kathy says.

“I used to tell people I was approaching 40 but not saying from which direction. Then once I’d turned 50 I felt fantastically free. I’ve swung off more chandeliers in the last couple of years than I ever did.”

The 54-year-old adds: “I never cared that much what people thought about me, but at 50 I cared even less. I thought, ‘I’ve got three decades of fun and frivolity left in me if I’m lucky’, so the now or never thing kicked in.”

Lette, who is married to human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robinson, with whom she has two children, Julius and Georgie, plays for laughs but she is also an intelligent campaigner for women’s rights.

“If you can sugar-coat your message with humour, you’re much more likely to have an impact,” she says.

Her latest book, Love Is Blind, is a bite-sized novel penned as part of the Quick Reads campaign, an adult literacy charity producing six new titles by famous authors in an attempt to hook reluctant readers.

Kathy’s contribution is about Jane, a woman who moves to the Australian Outback in search of a husband, to the horror of her prettier sister Anthea.

When Anthea receives a wedding invitation, she ventures to Australia to try to stop her sister’s latest crazy plan – and ends up taking a walk on the wild side herself.

In typical style, she shows how women stick together when the chips are down and, perhaps more unusually, that not all men are idiots (but some are).

Behind the wall of comedy, however, writing has been Lette’s salvation while coping with her son, Julius, now 21, who has Asperger’s Syndrome.

She opened up about it last year in her novel The Boy Who Fell To Earth, about a boy with Asperger’s, and while it had the trademark humour of all her books, it was a darker read.

Julius was diagnosed when he was three and had stopped talking. “When you get a diagnosis like that it’s like a cold knife sliding into your heart,” Kathy says. “You are just in the dark. The first thing that happened was denial. I just ricocheted around the country seeing every expert I could.”

Her husband could compartmentalise things to get on with everyday life, but she couldn’t, she reveals. “I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I escaped into comedy at the worst times. It’s a defence mechanism. If you can crack a joke, you don’t have to strip off your emotional underwear.”

Love Is Blind by Kathy Lette is published by Black Swan, priced £1.