MANY journalists would love to have had the phone number of "It Girl" Tara Palmer-Tomkinson but, for Wendy Holden, it was nothing but a curse.

The deputy editor of The Sunday Times' Style section didn't mind ghostwriting a column for the posh partygoer – but it would have made her life much easier if Tara actually answered her phone.

A decade later, 43-year-old Wendy, who lives in Two Dales, near Matlock, looks back at the antics of everyone's favourite upmarket celebrity with fond exasperation. After all, it did give her the idea for her first best-seller, Simply Divine.

"I'd have to ring Tara so she could tell me what she had been doing but it could be tricky to get her.

"So it was ringing her mother, ringing her sister, ringing her agent and then finally you'd get her and it would be at 2.30am and she'd be at some Hollywood party with Tom Cruise. Which could be a little frustrating. But it was a brilliant learning experience and the germ of my first book, which, by way of incredible coincidence, was about a journalist ghosting a column for a celebrity partygoer. And Tara was really good about the book, she very sportingly came to its launch party."

Now a successful author of glamorous comic romances and mother of two, Wendy's fascination with the high life shows no signs of abating. As her latest novel Beautiful People demonstrates, she is still caught up with the lives of the rich and famous.

"I am completely fascinated by celebrities. But only A-list. Not X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing types," she laughs. "I'm sure it's all deeply shallow but it's fun isn't it?"

Wendy has written nine best-sellers since her days of chasing down Tara, yet she seems untouched by her success.

"If you're a comic writer, you can't take yourself seriously.

"You can and should take your work seriously but you can't get up yourself. The writer's life is full of banana skins. Start to think you're great and the next book signing you do will only have about three people at it."

These days Wendy spends most of her time writing and helping to restore her Derbyshire home, which she shares with her political consultant husband Jonathan and their children, six-year-old Andrew and four-year-old Isabella.

Despite her successful career, two homes (she has a flat in London) and happy family life, Wendy insists she is capable of feeling Bridget Jones-style levels of inadequacy.

"Once, at a ball, I trod on Princess Michael's ball gown and then turned around and trod on the writer, Louis de Bernieres. Not my finest hour."

Wendy began writing her first book in her spare time, then convinced a literary agent to take a look at her first few chapters. She explains how she'd run up the stairs to drop off the new pages, terrified of meeting him in the lift.

"I was sure if I met him, he'd tell me to forget the whole thing," she says.

"In the end, I wrote the whole book before he sold it. It wasn't a case of writing three chapters and a synopsis and getting an advance of millions; I had to work for it. But once the book was published, Warner Brothers bought the film rights and there I suddenly was, having lunch with these big-shot Hollywood producers. I was all fingers and thumbs and out of sheer panic ordered fish and chips, while they picked at sushi."

Despite having written an unbroken line of bestsellers, Wendy still refuses to take anything for granted.

"I feel I'm incredibly lucky to be doing this job and want to work at it all the time, writing bigger and better books with funnier and more glamorous characters," she says.

"Beautiful People is my biggest and most glamorous yet and the one I'm writing after that looks set to be even more so."

She writes every day in a hut in the garden, which can get cold in the winter.

"Sometimes I come in and the water in my flowers is frozen. It can be a challenge, in those circumstances, to imagine a beach in St Tropez."

But once she warms up, the inspiration flows.

"I had great fun writing Beautiful People. It enabled me to indulge my fascination with film stars. These beautiful people all want you to think they are leading wonderful lives and perhaps they are. But you can't help wondering what is really going on."

Wendy herself comes from a very down-to-earth background. Growing up in Yorkshire, she didn't meet the elite until she won a place at Cambridge University.

"My dad is a printer and mum is a secretary so I came from a pretty normal family, which I think is essential for a writer. If I'd been born in a stately home, I might have been writing gritty novels about working-class Yorkshire, who knows? But I'm sure I would have been writing something."

Beautiful People

By: Wendy Holden.

Publisher: Headline Review (hardback).

Price: £12.99.