Jessica Rudd tells regular Bookseller+Publisher reviewer Jo Case about her forthcoming novel Campaign Ruby, and how it felt to watch its political plot ‘become reality in such a gritty and personal way’.

Campaign Ruby seems to mint a new genre in Australian writing—campaign-trail chick-lit. It’s an unlikely but intriguing combination. How did you come up with the idea to marry politics with Bridget Jones style chick-lit?

As a West Wing tragic and Sex and the City junkie, political chick-lit seemed an obvious marriage to me. I love chick-lit—I feast on it. Marian Keyes and Sophie Kinsella make me laugh out loud. I identify with their characters.

When I was thinking about writing a novel an author friend of mine said, ‘it’s your first book—write what you know’. I know politics. I’ve grown up with it and have learned to love it. There is something exhilarating about campaigning, particularly when it’s for a greater purpose. With Campaign Ruby I wanted to share that buzz. The woman who puts Campaign Ruby in her handbag to read on the train should get bang for her buck. She deserves to laugh and cry with Ruby as she takes us on her maiden voyage in Australian politics.

You’ve worked as a PR consultant and on the federal election campaign trail. Your protagonist, Ruby Stanhope, is hired as a financial policy advisor but ends up mostly working in media management on the campaign trail. How has your experience fed into your writing?

When I worked on the Kevin07 campaign I noticed that regardless of a campaigner’s assigned role, sometimes there are things that just need doing which are a world away from your job description. It’s a bit miscellaneous. If you’re a speechwriter and your candidate needs a shirt ironed while they read their speech, you iron the shirt. If you’re a policy adviser briefing your candidate on economic policy and the phone rings, you answer it. In Ruby’s case, if you’re a financial policy adviser and a plane-load of journalists are hungry and cranky, you find a drive-through and feed them. Something else I really wanted to capture and share was the fun chaos of a major political campaign. I remember one particular occasion when we were campaigning in Mackay and Dad spontaneously jumped on board a massive sugar cane harvesting machine and went for a ride with its operator. Camera crew were chasing after this cane-munching contraption in a vast cane field—it was pretty dangerous. I was getting ready to call the paramedics. Dad’s press sec looked like she was going to have a coronary.

In your book, Australia gets its first female prime minister—and a snap election—following a coup by a senior colleague. Was it strange to see this situation mirrored in real life recently? What gave you the idea for this scenario when you were writing?

It was a bit spooky to watch parts of the utterly unimaginable scenario I had dreamed up become reality in such a gritty and personal way. There are a few major differences though. At the time I wrote Campaign Ruby, Labor was doing very well in the polls. The day my Dad stood down the government was on 52-48. It was—still is—a first-term government. In Campaign Ruby, the incumbent was in his thirteenth year in office. They were doing terribly in the polls when the treasurer seized the prime ministership and called an election to seek a mandate from the people.

The full interview and Jo Case’s review of Campaign Ruby appear in the September 2010 issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine, with subscribers this week. For news of forthcoming Australian and New Zealand books, sign up for the free fortnightly Bookseller+Publisher Newsletter here.