STEPHEN LEWIS talks to York author Donna Hay, whose new book Goodbye Ruby Tuesday concerns strong women and embarrassing mums.

IT'S a fact of life that teenage girls always feel embarrassed by their mums, says Donna Hay. Her own 14-year-old daughter Harriet is already beginning to demonstrate the first signs of this healthy tendency.

"She said to me the other day 'you won't carry on dying your hair when you're old, will you, mum?', and 'you won't still be wearing jeans when you're old, will you?'" Donna says with a giggle.

The York author doesn't divulge just how long her hair-dying and jeans-wearing will continue, but it's fair to assume it could be for some time yet. "A friend said to me once, 'if you're not embarrassing your children, you're not enjoying life'," she says.

Hopefully for her daughter's sake, Harriet's embarrassment won't last as long as that of the central character in Donna's new novel.

In Goodbye Ruby Tuesday, successful 30-something London management consultant Roo Hennessey is forced to return to her roots in the fictional West Yorkshire town of Normanford to help turn around an ailing furniture-making company. And, as she knows before she sets out, going back to Normanford means running the gauntlet of her horribly embarrassing mum Sadie.

Roo was born Ruby Tuesday Moon, and she grew up hating everything about her life - her name, her hand-me-down clothes, and her mother's habit of turning up to school parents' evenings dressed like Shirley Bassey. Most of all, she hated being the daughter of Normanford's only single parent, failed nightclub singer and goodtime girl Sadie Moon.

As soon as she could Roo escaped, changed her name, and built a new life in London.

Now she is back, the uptight London management expert parachuted in to sort out an ailing local firm. But to her horror Sadie, now in her 50s, is as embarrassing - and as inappropriately dressed - as ever.

What follows is a warm-hearted family saga in which four strong women - Roo, Sadie, Roo's grandmother Nanna Moon and her cousin Cat, who Roo believes unfairly stole her childhood boyfriend - circle warily around each-other and gradually learn to understand and forgive.

There is a dash of romance thrown in - Donna did, after all, make her name as a romantic novelist - but the men in the book are pale and unconvincing figures in comparison to the four women, who burst with vitality.

"They are all fairly feisty women," Donna admits, "and it was the relationships between them that really interested me. I wanted to do a story dealing with Coronation Street-type characters, strong women who hold the family together."

Roo, Cat, Nanna Moon and Sadie are all that, in their way. By cleverly switching narrators, the story unfolds from the point of view of each of them in turn. Roo slowly unthaws, hairdresser Cat, who despite marrying Roo's childhood sweetheart Billy has always felt second best to her cousin, rediscovers her confidence, and Nanna Moon bangs heads together as and when necessary.

But it is Sadie for whom Donna clearly has the softest spot. Donna's own mother, like Sadie, was a teenage mum, and Sadie's larger-than-life character springs from the page. Sadie never told Roo who her father was - but gradually, the reader (and a hostile Roo herself) discover the tragic secret behind Roo's birth, when Sadie was 16. It's an emotional journey that packs real punch without ever turning the corner into sentimentality.

"I loved the idea of this woman who had apparently never grown up, who is still perceived as acting like a teenager," Donna says. "She sprang fully-formed from my head. Everybody's mother embarrasses them to a certain extent, and I thought what if their mother is still embarrassing them in their 30s?

"But actually they have all got Sadie totally wrong - her own mum, her daughter, all of them. She's had all this grief in her life, and she's actually shown a lot of forbearance."

Updated: 10:13 Wednesday, August 25, 2004