Interview with Author Sophie Jane Lee

Sophie Lee: Honestly, the book arrived before I felt ready to write it. I think that’s true of the most important things we create.

I had spent years helping other people find their voice—through journalism, brand storytelling, visibility work—while privately wrestling with my own relationship to self-expression. I was watching brilliant women contort themselves to stay acceptable, apologising every time they took up space. Incredibly smart women shrinking, afraid of looking like they’d ‘got too big for their boots’. Women performing ‘fine’ while disconnecting from themselves.

At the same time, I was moving through my own unravelling. Burnout, grief, addiction, and the mental health struggles that often come part and parcel. Questions around identity, visibility, womanhood, and power and this nagging feeling like I was living someone else’s life. What was all this striving for? Who was I trying to please? What was I trying to prove?

I reached a point where I could no longer ignore the cost of trying to remain digestible and acceptable to everyone around me. I had this moment of realisation. I’ve spent so long trying to be both acceptable and exceptional, but it’s an impossible paradox. Acceptable is just so. Towing the line. Meeting the requirements. Whereas exceptional is a supernova of ‘here I am’ in your face pazzazzal. No wonder we’re all so strung out. No wonder so many of us worry about being too much and not enough.

So, I put my idea out into the world and within days had two publishers in my inbox. And from there, I got to work. It helped that I had a very tight deadline, as I couldn’t talk myself out of writing the book.

Beyond Palatable is really about what happens when a woman stops negotiating with herself. When she stops asking, ‘How do I keep the peace and maintain the status quo?’ and starts asking, ‘What would it mean to tell the truth?’

TGBC: The title is so striking. What does “palatable” mean to you, and what does it look like to move beyond it in the small, everyday moments of a woman’s life?

SL: To me, palatable is the performance of acceptability.

It’s the version of ourselves we curate to avoid rejection, conflict, judgement, abandonment. It’s being agreeable when you’re furious. Saying ‘I’m fine’ when you’re drowning. Making yourself smaller so other people can stay comfortable. And most women learn this incredibly early. In the context of women and society, ‘beyond palatable’ means refusing to conform to societal expectations of being ‘agreeable,’ ‘polite,’ or easy to digest. It describes rejecting the pressure to shrink one’s voice, emotions, or ambitions to make others comfortable.

Moving beyond palatable isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it looks tiny and deeply ordinary. Saying no without overexplaining. Taking up space in a room without apologising for your presence. Wearing the thing. Resting before you’ve ‘earned’ it. Telling the truth in a conversation where the old version of you would have shape-shifted to keep the peace. Saying ‘no’ when you mean it.

I think we often imagine reclamation as this huge cinematic moment, but more often it happens in the micro-moments and decisions we make every day.

SL: I don’t think there was one singular lightning-bolt moment. It was more a gradual exhaustion with self-abandonment.

For a long time, I was very good at being ‘good.’ High-functioning, pleasing, productive, high-achieving. But underneath that was a woman who was totally disconnected from her true self and exhausted from all of the performing.

I remember realising that so much of my life had been organised around avoiding discomfort—other people’s discomfort with my ambition, my emotions, my truth, my messiness, my complexity, my fundamental me-ness. The shift came when I stopped seeing my sensitivity and intensity as flaws to manage and began to understand them as sources of wisdom.

Ironically, the more honest I became, the more meaningful my relationships, work, and creativity became, too. Not everyone stayed. But what remained had much more value and depth. And most importantly, I learned how to trust myself and live from a place of truth. I’m now known in professional circles as someone who always tells the truth, which is the greatest accolade.

TGBC: Body wisdom is woven through the book. For readers who have spent years living in their heads rather than listening to their bodies, what is one small practice you would suggest to begin reconnecting?

SL: Start by noticing before fixing. I think many women have become so conditioned to override themselves that they don’t even register what their bodies are trying to communicate anymore. We intellectualise everything. We explain ourselves out of our instincts. And we immediately go into fix mode. Sometimes, the kindest thing we can do is listen and notice.

A simple practice I return to is pausing throughout the day and asking: “What is my body trying to tell me right now? What does it need? How can I give it what it needs?” It could just be a stretch or a yawn (or a snack!). I try to respond as best I can to what comes up.

TGBC: So many of our members will recognise the questions you raise in the book: Am I too much? Not enough? Too complicated to be loved as I am? What would you most want to say to a woman sitting with those questions right now?

SL: I would want her to know that those questions did not appear in a vacuum.

Women are raised inside systems that profit from our self-doubt. We are taught to constantly calibrate ourselves against impossible standards—desirable but not threatening, ambitious but not intimidating, vulnerable but not inconvenient. Why do you think that monologue in the Barbie movie hit everyone so hard?

The too much / not enough paradox, as I mentioned earlier, comes from this sticky liminal space we’re expected to exist within, where we try to be both exceptional and acceptable, and it’s a game we cannot win. Exceptional women, by our very nature, are too much. We’re getting far too close to our true potential and are harder to manipulate. The pipe down, get back in your box, you’re too much narrative is a very quick and clever way to put us back in our place.

The right people will not require you to dim your light; they will celebrate your shine.

Your complexity is not evidence that you are broken. Your emotions are not proof that you are difficult. Your needs are not a burden. You are allowed to exist as a whole person in all your myriad complexities.

TGBC: At the Gloss Book Club, we believe real change happens when women come together and feel truly heard. How do you see community fitting into the work of becoming unapologetic, and why is doing this alongside others so different to doing it alone?

SL: I think shame thrives in silence. So many women believe they are individually failing when actually they are responding very normally to enormous cultural pressure. The moment women come together and speak honestly, something powerful happens: we realise we are not crazy, weak, dramatic, broken, or alone.

There is something profoundly healing about being witnessed without needing to perform.

Community gives us permission. It expands what feels possible, and sometimes another woman living truthfully becomes evidence that we can too.

And practically speaking, becoming unapologetic can feel terrifying if everyone around you benefits from your silence. Doing this work alongside others creates safety, solidarity, and momentum.

TGBC: You talk about Beyond Palatable as a movement, not just a book. What does the Reclamation look like in practice, and how can readers find their way into it?

SL: The Reclamation is about returning to the parts of ourselves we had to abandon in order to survive, belong, or be loved.

In practice, that can look wildly different depending on the woman.

For some, it’s leaving a relationship. For others, it’s finally speaking up in one. It might be starting the business. Taking up creative space. Setting boundaries. Letting yourself be visible. Resting. Feeling anger instead of suppressing it. Wanting more. Becoming less apologetic about your desires.

I want the book to feel like an opening, not a conclusion.

The movement around Beyond Palatable is really about creating spaces where women can tell the truth, reconnect with themselves, and stop living in reaction to everyone else’s expectations. Through conversations, workshops, community gatherings, storytelling, and collective reflection, the invitation is always the same: come home to yourself.

TGBC: As an award-winning journalist turned voice and visibility consultant, you have spent years helping women find their voice. What is the most common thing that keeps women quiet, and what tends to be the unlock?

SL: Fear of consequence. Not just fear of judgement, although that’s part of it, but fear of losing love, belonging, approval, safety, identity etc.

Many women are not actually struggling to ‘find’ their voice; they know exactly what they want to say, they’re struggling to feel safe saying it. The unlock is often less about confidence and more about self-trust and the continual cultivation of the courage to go beyond palatable and be true to yourself, even when it’s scary.

When a woman realises she can survive disapproval, it no longer carries the same weight. When she stops outsourcing her worth to other people’s reactions, her voice becomes much harder to silence

TGBC: If you could place Beyond Palatable into the hands of one woman, who would she be, and what would you hope she takes from it?

SL: The woman who feels like she has spent her entire life trying to earn the right to exist as herself. She is exhausted from shape-shifting and secretly longs to be more honest, more alive, more visible, more free. The woman who has mistaken self-abandonment for goodness.