Next up in our Out of Office series is the brilliant Yomi Adegoke, multi-award-winning journalist and bestselling author of The List and, with Elizabeth Uviebinené, Slay In Your Lane.

We sat down with Yomi Adegoke to talk about the unlikely road from a law degree to a bestseller – by way of a pop-culture blog and a friend who told her the writing she was already doing for free was called journalism. She wrote The List, her propulsive debut about an Instagram-famous couple whose wedding is upended four weeks out by an anonymous viral list of accusations, during lockdown and in the middle of a breakup, with (she insists), no expectations whatsoever. While everyone else baked, she wrote, and the result became an instant Sunday Times bestseller, a Good Morning America book club pick, and a series now in development with A24, the BBC and HBO Max, which she is adapting herself. As she points out with a laugh, that means that whether viewers end up preferring the book or the show, there’s only one person to be cross with either way.

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From there the conversation roams. We talk about her wary, slowly thawing relationship with the internet, the late adopter who skipped MySpace, and the person who treasures Instagram only as a personal catalogue of “looks and books.” We get into her London: a proud Croydon girl who loves a night at The Standard and Soho House, and who writes upstairs at KOKO in Camden, a building she adores for its double life as both nightclub and quiet members’ floor. We cover fashion as wearable art – her increasingly eccentric, irreverent wardrobe, her love of Charles Jeffrey Loverboy and Fashion Brand Company, and the gloriously named art of “zone-one dressing in zone five.” And we detour through culture, from Tate Modern’s Nigerian Modernism to the childhood Jacqueline Wilson novel that first showed her fiction could be real, messy and a little bit dark.

Then there’s travel, the thread that runs through it all. “I’ve always been someone who just travels on my own, whether I’ve been in a relationship or not. There are places I want to go that other people don’t,” Yomi tells Citizen Femme’s founder, Sheena Bhattessa. Yomi is an unembarrassed solo traveller, and her great love is Brazil – a country she’s felt drawn to ever since a primary-school project in which, of her whole class, only the Brazilian embassy wrote back, posting flags and badges to a delighted eight-year-old. She finally visited in 2016, returned in 2023, and now describes herself, simply, as “spiritually Brazilian.”

We also get the gentler, off-duty Yomi: the devotee of Lifetime and Hallmark made-for-TV films, the daily affirmations her father had her recite as a child, and the chaos of a handbag containing two phones, old tickets, a tiny umbrella and a lip balm (because there is always a lip balm, one tucked into every single bag she owns.)

Find out about her next novel and discover the portrait of a writer committed to authenticity and to telling stories that feel true and real, although possibly not neat. But, isn’t that life?

Watch the full episode now.