Men: A user's guide

"I'm coming! I'm coming," author Kathy Lette sings out in a cheery voice from the top floor of her London home.

She's been on the phone to her best friend back in Australia for a catch-up girly chat and is running a few minutes late for the interview.

Lette's housekeeper brings in tea and biscuits as I wait in her bright and airy lounge admiring its centrepiece - a modern metallic lamp hanging from the ceiling with dozens of long, thin spikes radiating from a silver cylinder.

Attached to each spindle is a small piece of white paper with quotes from Lette herself, famous friends including Dannii Minogue and other writers such as Dorothy Parker.

On the brown coffee table underneath the lamp sits a hardback copy of The Beatles Anthology, while Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses and other books about Rupert Murdoch and Patrick White stare down from the packed bookshelves on the wall opposite.

Despite the serious tomes, this room, Lette tells me later, is the scene of much frivolity, including dance lessons from Australian pop star sisters Kylie and Dannii Minogue.

"They come over for dinner," Lette explains.

"Often there's Salman Rushdie or Stephen Fry so we have intellectual conversation around the table and then we come in and push the furniture back and they teach us how to dance.

"They're trying to teach me to dance because I'm still doing all my 80s moves, which crack them up.

"And I've got no music because I listen to classical music. I've got an old Michael Jackson CD or something. The last time they were here they put it on and we were dancing to Thriller.

"But they are very funny girls, they are just lovely. You couldn't say a bad word about either of them."

Lette finally ends her phone call and makes her way downstairs, apologising profusely for being late and explaining how she and her girlfriend had been trying to touch base for weeks.

We sit down on her huge caramel sofa ready for our own lengthy girly chat about one of womankind's favourite subjects - men.

Lette's latest book, Men: A User's Guide, is a collection of clever and caustic quips collected from her wealth of writing and observations from her marriage to human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robinson.

There's advice on men to avoid (doctors, lawyers, celebrities, hedge fund managers, male models and royals to name but a few), sex, love, marriage, parenthood, infidelity, divorce and even murder.

"It's a fun book," says Lette.

"I've written so much stuff about men over the years and love and sex and Geoff said I should do a quote book because every time I open one of those quote books, there's a lot of my quotes in there.

"It's anything I've gleaned over the years. Anything I thought was witty or pithy or true I've put into those categories. It's like a haiku. It's a dipping-in-and-out book.

"I wrote it really for women as full-on girl talk. But men could learn a few things by slipping between those covers - if they dare."

Skimming through the 184 pages, there's not a lot of positive things Lette has to say about the male of the species.

But she insists the book isn't an exercise in man-bashing.

"It's not man-bashing, it's just annoying them until they start paying us more attention and pull their finger out," she says.

"I said in the book now that women are economically independent and we can impregnate ourselves, if our vibrators could kill spiders in the bathtub and light the barbie would we need them at all? No we wouldn't.

"Until we get equal pay I'm going to comically kneecap men as often as possible because it's still a man's world and they deserve raspberries.

"I have this argument with Geoff all the time where I'm saying he's got to help me more around the house and he always says, 'I'm a man and I can't multi-task'.

"I said to him in an argument one day, and I've used it in the book, 'That's a biological cop out because no man would have any trouble multi-tasking at an orgy'.

"And they wouldn't. Menage a trois - it would all be going, in out, round, up, down, out, in, out, forward, back, thrust. He had no answer to that.

"It doesn't mean he's done any more housework though."

Despite her swipes at men, Lette has been happily married to Robinson for nearly 20 years.

The secret to their success appears to mirror one of Lette's quotes: "If only men would understand how simple the marital equation really is. Basically, happy wife - happy life."

"We're such opposites," she says. "We're so yin and so yang. He's a grown up. I try to get him to grow down a bit and he tries to get me to grow up a bit, so we meet somewhere in the middle."

While Lette may have found her ideal partner, there's plenty of women out there who keep falling for the wrong blokes.

The main problem, as Lette sees it, is that women make that mistake of thinking they can change men.

"You can only change the male of the species out of a nappy," Lette says.

"He 'ain't going to change. You've just got to accept them for their faults and foibles or not."

So what's the one bit of crucial advice about men Lette gives to her daughter, 17-year-old Georgie?

"I told her that every man is guilty until proven innocent," Lette says.

"You must have chronic skepticism when it comes to men. Be skeptical of them all. There are good ones out there and she's going out with a gorgeous one at the moment.

"I think the younger men are nicer anyway. I meet all Georgie's male friends. They cook, they sit and talk about feelings, they go shopping with the girls.

"I think they are a much much more better-rounded breed than the men we grew up with. I'm quite hopeful younger women will have a better time then I did."

With her guide on men out of the way, Lette still has plenty on her plate including developing a script for a TV version of her novel How to Kill Your Husband (And Other Handy Household Hints) and pitching an idea for a women's chat show to the BBC.

She's just finished recording a duet with Rolf Harris for his new album and is preparing to head home to Australia for the Byron Bay Literary Festival in August.

There's also a new novel - her 11th - in the works.

Lette is reluctant to reveal too much, but says she wants to make it a bit different from her previous best-sellers.

"I don't like to talk about it too much," Lette says, in an uncharacteristically coy moment.

"I'm trying something new. We'll see. If it doesn't work, I'll go back to what I normally do.

"I'm putting the pen in the artery this time. I always do but I always disguise it with humour.

"I always write about what's driving me crazy, what's whirling up in me, whether it's the way that women are treated when they are pregnant or whether it's the way mothers are sidelined, or ageism.

"But this time I'm trying to be a teeny bit more serious."

A serious novel from Australia's queen of the quip? One suspects though that Lette will still manage to leave a smile on many a woman's face.

- AAP