'Women should be each other's wonder bras... uplifting and supportive'

At 65, she's in a new relationship, she's just written her 20th book, she's spending more time in Australia, her two children are now adults and thriving.

"There's this idea that women pass their 'amuse-by' date once they hit the menopause," she says.

"Whereas in fact post-menopause is the best time of a woman's life."

While her mother's generation might not have embraced it, "tucked away in the cardigan coven in the corner of the kitchen, whispering about the change as though Voldermort was coming", Lette is joining other high-profile women - women such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey - and shouting about it from the rooftops.

"It's so liberating to not give a flying you know what, my whole message is for women to have a sensational second act and not feel guilty about it, you've earned it."

Lette's first act started with the publication of Puberty Blues 45 years ago.

The book came out of the experiences Lette and co-author Gabrielle Carey were having as working class surfie chicks in Sydney's Sutherland Shire.

"I've always written books I wish I had when I was going through something," she says.

"Puberty Blues was written for those other schoolgirls to say to them you're more than just a life support system for a pair of breasts.

"I've written about being a young woman looking for her first relationship, about being married, childbirth, motherhood, raising teenagers, raising autistic teenagers, divorce, menopause, post menopause, because I've always had this strong need, which I think I get from my mother, to help explain and educate women coming along behind me."

She says fiction, and particularly her brand of comedic fiction, is the perfect way to do this.

"You can disarm with charm ... let the feminist message slip if, and it goes in easier if it's coated with sugar."

Her latest book, The Revenge Club, follows four women at the top of their game whose lives get turned upside down when they are suddenly passed over, personally and professionally.

Lette's own life reads like a good novel, full of sex, drama, love and relationships.

She left school when she was 16, wrote Puberty Blues and subsequently became a newspaper columnist and sitcom writer. Her next novel was Girls' Night Out in 1988 and she's turned them out regularly ever since.

When she was 21 she met Kim Williams, who's just been named as the new chairman of the ABC, and they were married for about six years. "I found him dazzling," she has said.

In 1989 she was asked to appear on Geoffrey Robertson's television show Hypothetical. It was like she had been struck by lightning. Lette divorced Williams, Robertson left Nigella Lawson, who he was dating at the time, and the pair married in 1990.

In 2017 they announced their split after 27 years and two children.

"I adored him passionately and he was the great love of my life, but we grew apart," Lette told The Australian Women's Weekly recently.

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"A lot of this was to do with the fact that he's a workaholic, mostly working pro bono. Geoff would be the first to agree with that! Basically, I suffered from subpoena-envy."

While she still believed in love, she never thought she would find it again. But in 2019, she was jogging through London's Regent Park when she almost literally stumbled over Irishman Brian O'Doherty who was sitting under a tree playing Bach on a guitar.

A year after he moved in and the pair now share their time between London, and increasingly Australia, so Lette can be closer to her mother Val, still going strong at 93, and her sisters.

While she's never held any formal position, Lette has been an ambassador for her home nation for years.

"Australian women are the world's best kept secret, I've lived in LA, New York, London and Australia, and I've never met women as wonderful as our home-grown breed - funny, feisty, loyal and so much fun."

Her Australian girl gang in London includes the likes of Kylie and Danii Minogue, Deborah Francis-White of The Guilty Feminist fame, former prime minister Julia Gillard, now serving as the inaugural chair of the Global Institute for Women's Leadership out of King's College, London.

"One of my major mottos in life is that women should be each other's wonder bras, uplifting, supportive and making each other look bigger and better," she says.

"I think when a group of women get together like that, the sisterhood can be really powerful."

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