Writers are often accused of plundering their own lives for inspiration, but in the case of novelist Sophie King, it was fiction that turned into fact. Her fifth book The Wedding Party concerns the impending marriage of Geoff and Monique, who are both in their fifties.

It is Geoff’s second marriage and, some months after writing it, 52-year-old Sophie was marching down the aisle herself for the second time with Shaun, a long-standing family friend.

“I didn’t know I was going to be getting married when I wrote it,” she said. “It was quick, but we decided that we weren’t going to hang around.”

Geoff is the same. He proposes to Monique within a few months of meeting her and then sets about informing his loved ones. His first wife, Helen, is surprised at how much his impending re-marriage throws her. Meanwhile, his daughter Becky is horrified at the speed of the wedding and the fact she hasn’t met the woman he has proposed to. The book is told through their viewpoints and those of Janie, Becky’s best friend and the vicar Mel, who is to marry Geoff and Monique.

Sophie’s books are aimed at anyone involved in the chaos of modern family life and women everywhere will recognise facets of themselves in the different characters.

Becky leads the most insane life, trying to juggle a stressful job on a magazine with two young children and a husband who’s away on business much of the time. Helen, a freelance gardener, has many of the dilemmas of divorced women in late middle age. My favourite character was Mel, the vicar, whose teenage daughter is injured in a car accident near the beginning of the book and remains in a coma throughout.

One thing that makes Mel such a lovable character is because she’s so human. Unable to forgive the lad who knocked over her daughter, she also has to cope with a husband who suddenly gets a job in Leeds (the family live in Oxford) and a teenage son who sleeps in, swears at his Mum and starts a rock band. Then there’s the not insurmountable problem that she rather fancies the groom. You don’t often see women’s fiction with a mainstream religious character, but Sophie has been a regular church-goer for many years. “It’s been a strand of my life and I wanted to put in a woman vicar,” she explained. She interviewed five female vicars and was told some funny anecdotes that have made their way into the book.

Sophie lives in Buckinghamshire, but has a longstanding love of Oxford. With friends here, and a mother who is buried at Forest Hill, she has visited a lot over the years. Ten years ago, she took a creative writing course at Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education and in a neat twist now teaches creative writing there herself.

When I ask what it was like coming back, she says: “It was a ten-year gap, more or less. I think it would have been difficult if it had been a smaller gap, but in fact it’s worked very well. I just basically pass on what I’ve learnt as a novelist, so it’s a very practical hands-on course.”

Sophie’s real name is Jane Bidder and before trying her hand at writing fiction, she worked for many years as a journalist.

So how does she feel that the creative writing course helped her? “It taught me to look at things like viewpoint and dialogue, which I hadn’t considered before,” she said. “And it gave me confidence, because the tutor seemed to like what I wrote.”

So why did she choose to write multi-strand stories about the various generations of family life?

“I just wanted to write books for women and because I like to include teenagers and older people, it stands to reason that the books hopefully appeal to them, too,” she said. “I wanted to write the kinds of books I wanted to read and I wanted humour, because teenagers do say some very funny things.”

Sophie can be heard on the BBC’s Radio Oxford reading from her blog Just A Mum. “I’ve written a no-holds barred diary of a middle-aged mum and I cover all kinds of things frankly. It’s about my life; it’s about juggling children and families. It’s about coping with children after divorce. It’s about getting married again and introducing a stepfather.”

If it is anything like The Wedding Party, it will capture very well the whole chaotic flavour of modern family life. It makes one yearn for the halcyon days where life didn’t seem quite as complicated. Or was that just fiction too?

l The Wedding Party is published by Hodder at £7.99.