Hello and welcome to Ask Penguin, the podcast all about books and the people who write and publish them.

I'm Rihanna Dillon and today I'll be sitting down with author and journalist Brianie Gordon

before putting some of your brilliant listener questions to her and some of our penguin colleagues

to top your reading pile with some great reads.

Brynie Gordon is a journalist, an author and a mental health campaigner.

She writes for the Daily Mail and was previously a columnist for The Telegraph,

becoming one of the paper's best-loved voices across her 24 years there.

She's the author of a number of non-fiction bestsellers, including You Got This and

Mad Girl, and she's the founder of mental health mates, a global peer support network, which

encourages people with mental health issues to connect and get out of the house. People Pleaser

is her debut novel. Brianie, thank you so much for joining us on Ask Penguin. I'm very excited to talk to you. And congratulations on your fiction debut. Thank you. I'm, I look at this. It's gorgeous. If you're listening, well, everyone's listening, aren't they? It's, I'm stroking this. You are indeed. This baby. It's very strokeable.

And also I love, it's a very tactile book, but it's also leopard print.

And I really like how that plays into the plot as well.

Yeah.

Well, I always think, you know, I was thinking about this this morning when I was getting dressed.

And I was like, Brian, you can't wear colorful shoes and a bold top and like loads of eye makeup.

And I was like, why can't you, Briney?

And because I had this kind of voice in my head that was implanted in my youth, which was, don't look too much.

Don't be too much, you know.

Don't wear bold lipstick and eyes and all of this.

And, you know, leopard print was just like an absolute no.

But that was partly also because fashion.

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