About Sally

I finally created a website bringing my different books together. I thought I couldn’t before because they were too disparate. I’m an ex comedian who got into the science behind menopause and who loves nothing more than growing trays of bean sprouts, it’s a bit of an odd combo. but I think you can handle the complexity.

I grew up on a council estate in New Malden, I was expected to get married, have children and…………no that was all!

Luckily I couldn’t follow that example, and after being seriously naughty for the whole of my school life, I went back to college in my late teens and then onto do a degree by the sea (Bournemouth). After that I worked in the City (the big one – London) with these new fangled things called personal computers. It was the late ’80s (loadsamoney!!). I was so good at my job that the company suggested that I might have management potential. I couldn’t imagine anything more horrendous so I started moonlighting as a stand-up comic. I was truly dreadful at it for about two years apart from the occasional gig where I would start chatting to the crowd and get better laughs. This kept me going and I realized I would never get consistently good at it while I had a full time job. So I gave it up and became a starving artist. Sometimes I was so skint I had to walk to gigs (no money!!). After each performance I would analyze what had happened, “Never blame the audience,” was my motto. I realised my biggest problem was lack of confidence. The answer was for me was therapy and impro classes, together they helped me become my best self on stage (and in person). The bookings started to pour in and I was proud to become a professional comedienne.

Eleven years into my dream, disaster struck. It was 2001, strangely the same week the twin towers came down. I’d had an operation and got an infection and suddenly I was so ill I could barely walk up the stairs. Eventually it became clear I had one of those fatigue illnesses where people think you’re mentally ill and doctors tell you to go away.
Every now and then I still wake up from a nightmare where I’ve lost my health, I’ve lost my career and I have to sell my house, and then I realize, Yup that happened!! At the time I watched other comics with health problems doing Edinburgh shows both hilarious and deep about their illnesses. I was too knackered to do any of that and too ashamed and so I disappeared into the shadows. There are still comics I knew back then, who I’ve never said goodbye to.
I got into resting and pacing and healthy eating, and even into a long-term relationship with a musician called Steve who didn’t seem to mind that I spent half my life in bed and couldn’t walk very far. We moved to the seaside and spent a wonderful ten years together with our little poodle.

I was still struggling with my energy but was able to start teaching stand-up and  joke writing workshops. This led to my first book The Serious Guide to Joke Writing. Teaching knocked me out so much, I decided to write my course down and do something gentler instead (you can’t teach comedy in a low-key way, believe me). Myself and Steve had got into bean sprouting – at the time I was trying anything and everything to see if it would help my health. We started giving sprouting talks in order to get into festivals for free. This led to another little book, Sprouting in the UK (only 30 pages) written to sell at the talks, but now available on Kindle. When I was in my 50s I managed to stop my hot flushes by growing plant hormones on my windowsill – yes it turned out sprouting covered that as well – so along came another book Grow Your Own HRT . I thought it was going to be a pamphlet but ended up taking three years to write and has 400 scientific references. The publishers didn’t want it under the same name as my joke writing book so it came out under Sally J Duffell, but within a month of it being published the publisher sold out to a big American company who didn’t give a damn what my name is and so I’m now coming out as having written the two books.

Now I’ve swapped genres again and am writing a novel. Apparently that’s not a good thing to do because you need to build a following and then keep giving them more of the same. But I just can’t do that! What’s the book called? Well so far the title is Collusion & Delusion but who knows what it will end up as. As soon as I have a publishing date I will put up an opening couple of chapters. How’s my health now? Well in 2021 I finally discovered I had a lot of tick borne infections, including Lyme disease. This gave me something to attack directly and am now making amazing progress. Whether I will ever completely recover I just don’t know it’s been 24 years now but I am the best I’ve been which I’m so grateful for. I’ve always kept a diary of all the different things I tried and what helped and what didn’t, which I like to think I’ll publish when I’m completely well, but not until then as I don’t want to lead people on. 
I now live in a community in Dorset.  I moved here during Covid, I was very lonely, and my little dog died too. The community is teaching me so much about myself and being with other people and all the other cliches about being your true self and maybe I will write about that one day too…Thank you for reading this, and I hope you enjoy one or other of my books.