The Half Life of Stars by Louise Wener

Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99

1996 WAS LOUISE WENER’S year. As the lead singer of the indie band Sleeper, she had two Top Ten hits, one of which — the spiky Sale of the Century— became a Britpop anthem. Sleeper’s second album, The It Girl, went platinum. When they supported R.E.M at the Milton Keynes Bowl on the evening she turned 29, Michael Stipe and 70,000 fans sang happy birthday. And if that wasn’t enough, she was voted 37th sexiest woman in the world by FHM — above Claudia Schiffer and Sharon Stone.

Then, in 1997, the first single from Sleeper’s third album bombed. Ten years later, sitting in her favourite Italian café in Crouch End, London, the 40-year-old Wener shudders at the memory: “The day that single came out, I knew it was over. I was walking down Oxford Street after an interview for Radio 1, and I remember thinking: ‘This is the beginning of the end.’ It was crushing, but I knew that I was going to be all right.”

She was right. Wener survived the great Britpop crash, and reinvented herself as a novelist. Her first book, Goodnight Steve McQueen, a tale of a struggling musician cursed with a famous name, came out in 2002. Like its protagonist, it is scruffy, funny and immediately likeable, and was accordingly well received. The Big Blind, about an overweight, agoraphobic poker genius called Big Louie, followed a year later. Her third novel, The Half Life of Stars— out in paperback this month — is her most ambitious. Narrated by the thirty-something, divorced, shambolic Claire, it tells the story of her search for her missing brother Daniel, which leads her to their childhood home in Miami. With the help of some outrageous Floridians, she finds more than she bargained for — a series of family secrets that turn her life upside down.

Claire and Daniel’s father — who dies in the first few pages — is central. Talented, difficult and full of thwarted ambitions, he is rather like Wener’s own father, who was an RAF navigator in the Second World War before being “shoehorned” into a family and a job in the Civil Service. He always dreamt of being a lawyer, and, in his retirement, finally began his studies, in which he excelled. But it was too late: two years into his course lung cancer was diagnosed and he died soon afterwards. Wener was in her mid-twenties and was stung by the missed opportunties; both her father’s and her own in taking him for granted.

Her father’s death gave her “the impetus to go out and make it work”. Having grown up in Essex, a lonely, sickly child — often in hospital with chronic asthma, and unable to find anybody who shared her enthusiasm for Blondie — she arrived at Manchester University to study English, history and sociology in the late Eighties, and gleefully immersed herself in the music scene.

After singing in a couple of bands she started writing songs with her guitarist boyfriend Jon Stewart. They moved to London, recruited Diid Osman on bass and Andy McClure on drums and became Sleeper.

Thoughtful, softly-spoken and dressed down in a grey top and jeans, Wener — now the mother of an 18-month-old girl, Iris — remembers the early Nineties as a time of “joyful conviction”, filled with waitressing jobs and grimy rehearsal rooms. When Sleeper achieved the holy grail of a record deal in 1993, their lives became “very dreamlike”. They played Top of the Pops, they toured the world: Wener remembers “arriving in California for the first time and the four of us just running straight into the Pacific Ocean”.

She is amused to recall her reign as the big-mouthed queen of Britpop, mocking po-faced feminists and writing songs about sex, spray painting and meat-eating. She earned such a reputation that men wrote to music papers demanding that she be burnt as a witch.

It was “like a game” — but while she felt in control of her outspoken image, her career was in the hands of the record company, who were woefully unprofessional. “The music industry was retarded. Everyone was a f***-up: we took cocaine but there was also a lot of heroin and crack around. It was depressing.” And band relations — already “intense and incestuous” — were further complicated when she defected from Jon to Andy during the recording of The It Girl.

When Sleeper collapsed Wener had a solo record deal, but her heart wasn’t in it and, distracted by the lure of a new typewriter, she began to tap out a novel. Her first attempt — a comic thriller about the music business with a million different characters and a tortuous plot — was hopeless. Then, a third of the way through Goodnight Steve McQueen,she decided she might have something worth reading, and — after a fortnight in which she spent every afternoon in the cinema to distract herself from the fear of rejection — the publishers agreed.

She is now working on her fourth novel, featuring a female explorer in the 1930s. Wener (who “doesn’t get” marriage) still lives with Andy, and together they have formed Huge Advance with the music journalist John Harris (guitar) and a Faber editor, Hannah Griffiths (bass). They play purely “for the hell of it” at fringe literary festivals such as Port Eliot. Although she has no desire to relive her glory days, she sometimes wonders what would have happened if Sleeper hadn’t made it — like Claire in The Half Life of Stars, she is acutely aware that “a simple twist of fate” can shape a life.

She needn’t worry about unfulfilled potential: “Whatever happens,” she says, cocking her head to one side, “I’ve done some stuff.” And that, perhaps, is what separates Louise the pop-star from Wener the novelist: the fine art of understatement.

Paperback writers . . .

JULIAN COPE After the Teardrop Explodes imploded, Tamworth’s freakiest son set pen to paper, writing several books about either (a) himself, or (b) stone circles.

PATTI SMITH A published poet, punk rock’s high priestess is now working on a book about her former lover Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer, who died in 1989.

STEVE EARLE The lefty country-rocker produced the highly praised regret-and-redemption short story collection Doghouse Roses in 2001.

BILL DRUMMOND & MARK MANNING Former KLF pranksters who now write mad novels together.

NICK CAVE The murder-balladeer and former heroin addict who took a rock to Kylie’s head in Where the Wild Roses Grow drew on his substantial pool of grotesqueries for his novel about an inbred outcast, And the Ass Saw the Angel

Click here to buy The Half Life of Stars

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy