"It's kind of mortifying that people think Suzy is anything like me," says Maley.

"One of my very good friends, who read the book early, rang me and asked if I'd had an affair with a married man and hadn't told her about it ... I was like, no, God, I would never do that, how could you think that?

"Yes, it's definitely inspired by my own experiences but I want it noted for the public record that Suzy's sex life is 100 per cent more interesting than mine was when I was writing the book."

We also love the reflections on the state of journalism, the new breed of reporter, the descriptions of a chain-smoking news director, the ascerbic art critic

"And I know people in the office were wondering which of the characters might have been based on them, but no one is really based on anyone."

Maley is enjoying the twist in perspectives as she does publicity for the book.

The Walkley Award-winning journalist is usually the one asking the questions and it's somewhat satisfying, both for her and me, to be talking about motherhood, life as a single woman, journalism, and how women need to stop apologising for being selfish.

"Even now it's like, am I even allowed to take a day off to write, I have a little advance on the next book, is it okay now it's income earning or is it still a selfish whimsy?" she says.

Maley took a chunk of long service leave in 2018 to write the book. She wouldn't read the paper, she deleted social media, wouldn't look at the internet. She read books, went for walks, let her imagination roam.

"There's this feeling, as a journalist, that you have to always be on top of things ... but it was heavenly to switch off. I'd take my daughter to daycare, come home, go straight to my study, leave the phone in the other room and write solidly until lunch.

"My imagination was free, my thoughts were free to amble around, when you're working in a full-on job your thoughts are just a constant whir, I didn't feel like I needed to have an opinion on anything."

The Truth About Her follows Suzy as her career and personal life unravel somewhat, after a wellness influencer commits suicide following a story Suzy has written about her.

Suzy's story reveals Tracey has faked her cancer and exploited her followers. Much of the plot picks up on the friendship that develops between Suzy and Tracey's mother Jan, after Jan hires her to write Tracey's real-life story, a good news story.

It's an interesting study of female friendship and how Suzy deals with the guilt over it all..

At home, Suzy raising her young daughter Maddy, and in a relationship with two very different men.

Her married boss, and a handsome young artist, who seems the more inappropriate choice of the two, but by the end of the story, might be the right choice.

"I wanted her to have desires and appetites and be quite unapologetic about them," says Maley.

"She's someone, in a way, who doesn't care a lot what other people think, she's quite self contained and she's had to be.

"She almost sees it like she's got these needs and she takes care of herself, it's almost like she's using sex almost like a hobby to busy herself so she doesn't have to think about other things.

"But then I didn't want to pathologise it either. I didn't want to be like, oh, you know, she's having sex because she's so broken. She's not.

"She's just a single mother and she doesn't have time, she thinks she doesn't have time, for a relationship, or the emotional energy for a relationship, so she's like, I'll get these needs met this way. I quite liked that about her."

Does she think she would be friends with Suzy, that if they shared a corner of the newsroom, they might find something in common?

"I've thought about that, it's an interesting question, I don't think I would be. I don't think Suzy does female friendships well at all, she's a bit prickly."

Maley, 43, grew up in a house where there was a lot of fiction, she says. Her parents separated when Maley, and her brother Paul, also a journalist, were young and they grew up on Sydney's north shore with their mother Judy.

"We talked about literature a lot, we were a bookish family I suppose."

Maley went on to study arts law at the University of New South Wales but her experiences in the workplace led her to be disheartened by the law. She was working in Ireland when her mother sent her an advertisement for a cadetship at the SMH.

"I think I became a journalist in the end because it was a legitimate way of earning a living by writing," she says.

Maley joined the SMH in 2003 and since then she's often set the agenda writing about gender, politics and power.

She won a Walkley in 2020, alongside Kate McClymont, for her investigation that revealed sexual assault allegations against former High Court justice Dyson Heydon.

Did the journalism help or hinder the fiction writing?

"When you've lived with deadlines for so long you're not very precious about churning stuff out, just getting it down on paper.

"Also, I had a job, a small child, I was tired, I couldn't waste time just staring out the window or waiting for inspiration to strike.

"But in another sense when I first started writing the book I was probably a little inhibited in my style, I was thinking too much like a journalist, I had to consciously remind myself I could make up as much as I wanted to."

Her daughter Evelyn has just started school, she's moved into a new house with her partner Australian Financial Review journalist Michael Roddan. Things are in a good place and she's started on the next book.

"I kind of know what I'm doing, it's quite different to this one. The main problem now is finding time to write.

"But writing this one was one of the best things I've done. It was hard, the most technical task I've ever undertaken, the structure and narrative of a big book was something that I had never done before.

"But I loved it, loved being in this little world, that was my world, I loved that selfish aspect of it.

"As women we need to let ourselves know that is okay."