Novelist, creative writing lecturer and aspiring bog witch (according to her Instagram bio) Sam Beckbessinger chats to us about her adult debut, ‘Femme Feral’, a werewolf story about a perimenopausal woman who’s done swallowing her fury.
The words ‘adult debut’ might make you think that Sam Beckbessinger is new to writing. She’s not. Sam is the author of non-fiction titles such as Manage Your Money Like a F*cking Grownup and Moving to the UK; she has co-written various books, like Girls of Little Hope and Marvel’s Jessica Jones: Playing with Fire (alongside her friend Lauren Beukes); and she even has some children’s titles, movie scripts and short stories to her name.
“At the moment I’m updating my book Manage Your Money Like a F*cking Grownup, so I’ve been rereading it – and it was great to be reminded that, in that book, which I wrote almost a decade ago now, I was saying you have to have a big dream in your life,” Sam says. “I’ve always wanted to write novels, but I had no idea how to make a career out of it. And I think that figuring out how money works helped to pave the way. So much of that was driven by a sense of, ‘I want to do this thing in my life that I really care about, but I don’t know how to make it happen.’”
Writing part-time and in collaboration with other writers helped her find her feet and ease into eventually going solo. “I really sidled into this career! I was still involved in a bunch of fintech projects up until 2021, when I started writing full-time. My goal was just to earn enough to be able to keep doing this. It’s been cobbling together some screenwriting work and freelance work, but novels are increasingly the bulk of my income – and I feel incredibly lucky.”
Sam is also an associate lecturer at Bath Spa University, where she teaches a master’s programme: a creative-writing workshop focused on writing for young people. “I get so much from it,” she says. “Nothing teaches you better than trying to teach someone else. So much writing is instinctive, so it’s been really lovely to be challenged, and to be thoughtful about the processes and mechanisms.”
In terms of other work, there are some things she can’t talk about yet – let’s just say there are several TV projects in development (*wink, wink*). And she’s working on an animated adult feature film about the rise of fascism, “for no apparent reason at all.”
Currently, her big focus is her second book. “It was a two-book deal with Bloomsbury and Penguin,” she says. “I’ll be working on edits for that for the majority of 2026. We don’t have a release timeline yet, but I think it might be late next year. It’s a similar genre, so feminist horror – or femgore, as they say on TikTok!”
Her writing process, she says, is “utterly bonkers,” and somehow involves spreadsheets. “I think I might be the only novelist to use spreadsheets as much as any writing software. It’s my inner fintech dork, to be honest – the part of me that never let go of tech. I have a naturally chaotic mind, so a lot of my process is about trying to bring order and structure to this absolute tangle of thoughts in my brain. For this book, I had a really ridiculous colour-coded spreadsheet that had about 50 different tabs in it by the end, tracking every single beat in the story. And then I write in my writing software, which is Ulysses. I also use this very dorky writing software called Obsidian, which basically creates a story bible. It’s because my brain is like a wild forest, and unless I bring in some order, nothing happens!”
Femme Feral
So what exactly is Femme Feral about? I’ll let Sam take this one:
“Like most 46-year-old women, hyper-competent tech executive Ellie is already juggling too much. So it’s an inconvenient time to find herself beset by strange physical changes: hair sprouting in new places, running hot, trouble sleeping, losing time, and finding bloodstains on all her clothing. And underneath it all, a boiling rage that threatens to disrupt the life she’s worked so hard to build.
“Her doctor diagnoses perimenopause. But it’s actually another 28-day cycle that’s taking hold – one involving fur and teeth, and a not-insignificant amount of howling at the moon.
‘Her new power’s thrilling. Turns out, there are some problems that can be solved with violence – like the terrible new hire who’s sabotaging her careful plans, or the creep stalking her daughter.
“Only… the beast within isn’t easy to control.
“With an obsessive hunter on her trail and a growing fear of what she’s becoming, Ellie has to find a way to yoke her fury before she tears through the people she loves.”
The process of writing a Jekyll-and-Hyde-style horror about middle-aged rage took Sam through some fascinating conversations and twisty research rabbit holes.
“I think my favourite thing about being a novelist is that I get to be curious about obscure things,” she says, laughing.
“It’s my favourite, favourite, favourite thing. The research for this was so much fun. I was thinking, what is the trail of evidence, of clues, that Ellie is leaving when she’s going on her nighttime werewolf hunts? And I had this thought that she might be killing small animals. That led me to discover this real-life organisation in South London called SLAIN, the South London Animal Investigation Network. It is run by a real-life cat serial killer vigilante who goes by the name Boudicca Rising, which is also a great name. She’s South African, actually! She lives in London and is, by far, the most fascinating person I’ve ever met in my life. I was tempted to drop everything and just write her biography instead.
“Basically, they have been tracking a serial killer of cats who has been operating in South London for several years. She’s devoted her life to this quest, this crusade. And some of the stories she told me were weirder than anything I could put in the novel. But they really inspired the organisation that Brenda runs in the novel.”
Sam also spoke to psychologists who work with stalkers – the perpetrators of stalking – and with stalking victims. “I really wanted to understand that mindset.”
Middle-age rage
By weaving in the monstrous element of Ellie becoming a werewolf, Sam takes what would have been a fairly straightforward woman-of-a-certain-age-has-a-mental-breakdown story and turns it into something visceral.
“I love horror’s ability to speak about very true things in the world, but metaphorically, and I love using dream logic. I also felt that, from what I have seen of myself and my friends as we hit this midlife shift, it is just so much more disruptive than I had anticipated – and so much stranger. I hadn’t even heard the term “perimenopause” until the past couple of years, frankly. I think it’s only now that it’s emerging into the public consciousness. I had this vague idea that it was something that began in your 50s (meanwhile, it can start in your late 30s to early 40s!) and my only associations were, as Ellie says, ‘What I suspect are jokes from male stand-up comedians in the ’90s: hot flushes; wanting to stab people; cobwebs in your minge.’
“That was basically all I knew! But what I’ve started to see is that it’s not just a physical change. It’s a psychosocial change as well, one that carries enormous potential and power. Not to get too Freudian or personal, but I do think that a person’s first novel, especially, is somewhat autobiographical, right? And for me, one of the great gifts of midlife is that your coping mechanisms start to fail one by one – and then you’re forced to confront the things they were masking. For me, that’s been a process of realising how much my hyperfunctioning was allowing me to avoid dealing with uglier feelings – like rage.
“I think that’s the story I was exploring with Ellie. I loved pushing it into that very wild metaphor; it kind of lets you explore what is so strange about this time of life, and it’s almost mythical, beyond just the constrained, medicalised view. Fundamentally, the joke at the centre of the novel is that the medical industry understands about as much about perimenopause as it understands about lycanthropy. That joke was quite fun for me to play with.”
One particular scene was plucked word-for-word from real life. “When Ellie goes to see the doctor and says, “All of these things are happening to me; help me.” And the doctor books a 10-minute appointment and says, ‘You can discuss one symptom at a time… and try losing weight.’ That happened to my closest friend! I was so angry. That anger, I think, powered a lot of the energy that went into writing this book – because this is something that will happen, and has happened, to 50% of the population for the whole of human history. And we get so little support and so little help.”
Each chapter of the book is named after a string of increasingly horrifying perimenopausal symptoms, ranging from burning mouth and dry eyes to loss of muscle mass, brain fog and (no joke) loose teeth. “Every single one is real! These things start happening, and suddenly you can’t sleep, and you feel mad – and you are made to feel mad. And you have no idea what’s happening to you for a long time. I wish I had understood how much earlier it begins – and how much longer it lasts.”
Beyond her own midlife experiences, there are also two very specific things that happened to Sam that inspired her to write Ellie’s story.
The first occurred on a beautiful summer’s day in Cape Town. “I was walking to a friend’s birthday party in the City Bowl, somewhere around Vredehoek. It was one of those days when you’re just in such a good mood; there was a song in my heart and a spring in my step. As I was walking, I realised that there was this creep following me. So I did all the things you’re supposed to do – all the things that every woman who’s ever walked in the world, and especially in South Africa, knows to do: I made some weird turns to make sure I wasn’t just being paranoid. I picked up the pace. And I started planning how I could defend myself if it came to that.
“This is something that had happened to me many times, but for the first time, I didn’t just feel afraid; I also had this very clear feeling of being angry. And I had this fantasy of reaching into my handbag, pulling out a gun, and turning to him and making him feel afraid. Which is weird, because I hate guns. I just felt so pissed off; I was like, ‘I’m having a good day, and you have ruined my day, and how dare you?’ And I wished I could be violent in return. That memory stuck in my head for a long time. And that, I think, was the seed that became this novel… I wished I could have turned around and grown claws.
“The second thing that happened was when I was still working in tech, the last job I had before I started my own business. I had an incredible boss. She was about 10 years older than me, and she was my role model. She was a lot like Ellie – that very competent woman who holds the entire place together. Everyone would say, ‘We couldn’t run this business without you.’ And everyone was certain that when our CEO retired, she’d take over. And then the inciting incident of the novel happened: They hired an outsider who knew nothing about our business or about our industry. That was the reason I quit tech. I realised that I had naïvely believed the glass ceiling no longer existed. But seeing how it still very much does has stayed with me. It was a splinter that stayed inside me for a long time.”
Caged and compliant
In the book, Ellie has a running to-do list that she recites to herself, which perfectly captures the mental load of being a mother, a wife, a caregiver, a competent employee and an eldest daughter – the one who holds it all together.
“I think Ellie’s voice – and her list, her endless list – is something that came quite early on in the writing process. It was one of the first pieces that felt very true, and I think that list was my key into the character: the eldest daughter, the good girl. I think it’s a tale as old as time that a certain kind of woman is socialised into taking care of everyone and everything. The tragic thing is that the more competent you are as a woman, the more there is an assumption that you will do it. And the more competent you are, the more that mental load is invisible to the people around you, because it’s just being done. So, in a way, I feel like her competence is her cage.”
As much as she empathises with her own main character, Sam says that there are many things about Ellie that infuriate her.
“There are many things that drive me nuts about Ellie. I think she’s so repressed. Most frustrating is the fact that she’s a dialled-up version of the things I like the least in myself, obviously! But Ellie has also just been ignoring so much for so long, and now it’s curdled into some ugly things. And while she does have a lot to be legitimately angry about, we see that when you don’t process your anger and don’t really look at the things that are making you angry, that rage has the tendency to vent at whatever target is the closest. I think that we, as white women in particular, are sometimes guilty of this – that narcissistic “speak to the manager” rage. And there are moments in the novel when Ellie does that. Because she works so hard not to face the things she needs to face, she hurts a lot of innocents. Somehow, in the year of our Lord 2026, female rage is still seen as such an unacceptable emotion. For me, growing up in South Africa – where the rates of violence and gender-based violence are extraordinarily high – I certainly felt suspicious about rage as an emotion because it felt terrifying, and connected to violence.
“But the thing about anger is that it’s one of the most foundational human emotions. Babies feel anger; it’s one of the first things we feel as human beings. For so long, I avoided anger and was groomed to see anger as an ugly thing to feel, especially for women. The older I get, the more I feel like we should be so much angrier than we are. Anger is information. It tells us that something in our life is wrong and it invites us to change it, either for ourselves or, even more powerfully, in the world. It can be a beautiful thing.
“There has been a raft of novels in the last couple of years in which you see a woman in the throes of a midlife crisis blow up her life. And it’s somewhat based on truth. This is a time of life during which a lot of people blow up their lives. But I think, very often, it’s overdue. It can be an incredibly beautiful unravelling. That was also what I was exploring.”
One particular source of inspiration that Sam cites in the book is an essay by journalist and author Caitlin Moran titled Me, Drugs and the Perimenopause. “She says that we think about menopause as being the aberration where women change. But actually, perhaps a more accurate way to see it is that in the fertile years, we have elevated levels of oestrogen, and that makes us more compliant. It makes us more lovey-dovey. It makes us forgive shit we maybe shouldn’t forgive, you know? And Caitlin Moran talks about – and I cite this explicitly in the book because I think about that essay so much – how, in many ways, menopause is a time of life when you get sober and gain more clarity about what you’ve done in those fertile years: You have given so much of yourself to other people who might not even value you.”
Sam also mentions Sam Baker’s The Shift – ‘It was one of the most optimistic and positive books I’ve ever read about how powerful falling apart can be’ – and All Fours by Miranda July: “It came out as I was going through the editing process on this novel, and I was like, ‘Oh no, I think Miranda July has written the better version of my book!’ I think it’s extraordinary.”
Wellness culture
Sam also explores Ellie’s misguided beliefs about mental health in Femme Feral. “Dwell on something, and you just reinforce its significance to you,” Ellie muses. “Focus instead on the good things, the things you’re grateful for, and they become more real. You can learn optimism just like you can learn anything else. You can choose to be happy.”
Sam makes a face when I read this quote back to her. ‘I think Ellie has bought way too much into self-optimisation and toxic positivity. And this is a way that she has justified it to herself, and rationalised never really looking at the things that are wrong in her life.
“I think this is such a thread in the tech-enabled wellness culture that she lives in, which wants to take really big, complex human problems that are often sociological as well, make them personal failings, and make them just another thing, particularly for women, to add to the infinite to-do list. Like, you should personally go and fix this problem. ‘So you’re upset – this is because you’re not trying hard enough. Try harder.’
“That is what she has bought into. It’s asking good girls to be “gooder” girls, thereby absorbing everything that’s wrong in the world. And increasingly it’s all been monetised. I don’t know how much of this has hit South Africa, but in the past couple of years, there’s been such a gold rush of menopause startups. You see ads all over the Tube, everywhere – for supplements and apps and various subscription services. And again, it’s just another thing that we’re being asked to do.”
Stranger than fiction
In the book, the wellness app that Ellie helped create starts to incorporate AI chatbots, with disastrous results. “I wish someone would go back in time to 2021, when I started writing this novel, and tell me, ‘Don’t write a book about AI!’ At the time, it felt like science fiction. When I came up with the joke of them pitching a therapy chatbot, I honestly thought I was pitching a ridiculous joke. Now, it’s all too real.
“Fundamentally, I was less interested in the abilities of the tech; I was interested in the culture of the tech industry, and how it’s impacting the world. I think it’s overflowing with this incredible carelessness and thoughtlessness. And yes, we’re seeing real-world consequences of all of these things. The thing about being a fiction writer is that your imagination can’t keep up with the strangeness of reality.
“I feel like writing about AI right now is like trying to sketch the ocean while you’re drowning in it. It’s changing so fast, and none of us actually knows what we’re living through yet. AI is something that I personally feel deeply angry about as someone trying to make a living in a creative field. Some of my books are in Libgen, which is the database that was pirated to train AI. Recently, there’s been a court case in the US where Anthropic has agreed to pay a fine – but as a South African, I’m getting none of that.
“I also recently added my name to a campaign in the UK, because our government at the moment is literally looking at changing the regulations to allow AI companies to undermine copyright law entirely. What they’re doing right now is just not enforcing it, which is equally frustrating. One of the reasons it took so long for this book to come out is that I insisted that my publishers add a no-training-AI clause to the front of the book, which they were very amenable to, but they had never done it before, so it had to go through the entire legal team.”
Deeply South African
In her acknowledgements, Sam mentions her editor, Katherine Fry, who “patiently weeded out my South Africanisms.”
“You don’t realise how much you are shaped by a place until you become a migrant. I am so deeply South African, and it comes out on every level in my prose. I’m still learning not to call pants pants, and not to call robots robots! But I’m very happy to have been shaped as a South African. I think I see London through an outsider’s eyes, which gives me a unique perspective. So much of my world here is and always will be gratefully, delightfully South African.’
When I ask her what she misses about home, Sam is effusive.
“Oh, I miss so many things. I miss my people most deeply. But I also miss the country in some really bone-level ways. It is so deeply ingrained where I’m from that my body doesn’t feel right when I’m not there.
“I’m also deeply proud of South Africa. Even though it is a country with problems, I think it’s a place that inspires such hope in me about the moral arc of the universe, I guess. I was born in 1987, so I was 7 when apartheid ended. And so much of my life has been shaped by this sense of hope and optimism for this new country that I was part of, that I remain part of.
“I’m extremely lucky in that I’m still able to come home several times a year. I think of myself as a migrant rather than as an expat. It’s difficult to rip your heart in two and to belong to two places. London has given me so much – but leaving South Africa has been the hardest thing I think I’ve ever done.”
