We're having dinner in her hotel in Dublin, a stuffy, formal restaurant, so when she gets up and moves to a clearing in the room to perform her take on Irish dancing, the sleepy heads of ageing men at nearby tables bob up in disbelief as the sprightly woman in the teeny-tiny Moschino skirt starts bouncing up and down whilst kicking her legs furiously.

Michael Flatley has a lot to answer for.

We order a bottle of wine and she tells me we had better hurry on with the interview before we get drunk. "I'm a oneglass screamer, " she says, "so pathetic".

Her latest book, How to Kill Your Husband, is written in typical Lette style . . .

high-speed, full of one-liners and no holds barred. Her three protagonists are married women in their 40s, all experiencing their own take on the reality of marriage turned boring. The result, despite Lette's trademark humour, is that the issues dealt with can be a little depressing. "That's why I put a happy-ish ending, " Lette says about the downbeat tone. "I never have an ending where a woman is rescued by a knight in shining armour, but in this book I was quite tough on men the whole way through and I want any men reading it to know that there is a solution. That whole chapter at the end where he does sort of do everything around the house . . . complete fantasy of course . . . and she gets her orgasm back, " she says, beaming, as if she's selling orgasms. "I wanted men to know they can redeem themselves, because I don't think women are asking for that much. All we want is a man to do a little light housework and talk to us. Also, I would say hug us occasionally when we're not horizontal, y'know? Because I think it's outrageous when the man hasn't spoken to us all night, we've done all the cooking and all the housework then you get into bed and he's thinking you're in the mood for love. What you're in the mood for is running him through with a carving knife." Heads pop up again at the next table.

So why do women perpetuate such behaviour by tolerating it? "Men play on our good nature, " she says, warming up now. "And because we're busy, especially working mothers, it's faster to do it yourself than to keep nagging him about it.

But half of all marriages in Britain today are ending in divorce and for the first time in history the majority of those are instigated by women, so men need to get their act together."

She says the book came from her own angst about being a working mother and doing just about everything. "And it wasn't just me. I was asking all my girlfriends. I knew they were having less sex with their husbands and they were so resentful and unhappy with them because they weren't helping around the house. Even though we make up 50% of the work force we still do 99.9% of all the childcare and housework. I say to my husband you need to help more around the house and he says 'I'm a man, I can't multi-task'. I always say I bet you could multi-task at an orgy. I can't imagine a man having any trouble at that particular time, " she says, with her tongue hanging out comically, her eyes blinking and her hands groping in every direction.

Lette says she wrote the book to show women that they no longer have to put up with such behaviour. "I wrote this book first of all so women could have a really good laugh but also so they could read bits out to their men. I think men need to know these things." She says she hopes she can give women who may not have the 'chutzpah' themselves " the verbal ammunition" to say what they need to say in their relationships.

Lette says that she does not understand why men are not treating their women better, especially considering the figures.

"The figures I quote in the book are accurate . . . something like 42% of women wish they never got married; 50% thought about running away with someone else every day and a third admitted to finding sex boring. It's dismal. Men should be walking round with their heads hung in shame that they've let us down so."

So what's to be done? "I just think men need to go to some sort of husbandretraining class. Flop onto the shore and evolve. But that's why male chromosomes are in decline. They've only got something like 150,000 years left and now they know how to fertilise an egg from another egg it could just be a planet of females. Which is sad in a way because I do love men. Naked.

On a bit of lettuce." Would Lette mind converting to lesbianism then, if push came to shove? "I would love to be lesbian.

It is after all only a slip of the tongue, but I'm just not into tits and clits. Wouldn't it be heaven though? I adore women. I like to flirt with men and I like to have sex with them, obviously, but I much prefer female company."

What is little-known about Lette is her enormous success as a teenage author in Australia and her status as one of the originators of the genre we now know as chick lit. "I don't like the way it's gone now, " she says. "When I started writing first person, funny female fiction there was nobody else doing it. Those first books were really sort of explosive and they got a lot of hideous reviews from men." She was just 18 when her first book, Puberty Blues, became a best-selling cultural phenomenon in Australia (the latest edition has forewords by Kylie Minogue and Germaine Greer). "It spawned a huge movement, of course, but I don't like the way it's gone on. How I describe chick lit now is Mills and Boon with wonder bras.

It's all about being rescued by something tall, dark and bankable and I'm just so allergic to that notion." Still, she finds the term 'chick lit' "demeaning for women's literature". She talks about the difference in the way Nick Hornby's books are treated. "I mean Nick Hornby's not doing anything, but he wins prizes and has serious reviews in literary organs because he's a man. He's writing about domestic terrain and he was compared to Chekhov, " she says, appalled. "All the male authors I know, they sit in their attic and their wives bring them up their little sandwiches and they're like, 'shhhh, daddy's working, genius'. As a working mother writer, if I get half an hour in between stopping Julius disappearing up the stairs with a math tutor between his teeth and taking Georgie to the dentist, I'm writing. When you have babies you get used to working wherever. I was correcting book proofs between contractions for The Llama Parlour. It's very hard. Cyril Connolly said the pram in the hallway is the enemy. But if the husband just took the pram out once in a whilef"