 As a child, she lived in the Midlands before moving to Sussex.She was educated at state schools, won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford and did an MA in English literature and an MLitt on Surrealism in England.After university she worked in publishing for two years and then became a research assistant at Wolverhampton Polytechnic where she completed a Ph.D. in "The Self-Conscious Novel from Sterne to Vonnegut".