BARES ALL BY ROSALIND TULLOCH
person you want to gravitate towards at a party, because you know that the conversation will never be dull and the drinks will always be flowing.
Samantha Renke is not only one of PosAbility’s beloved longstanding columnists: she is also a successful media personality, presenter, actor, speaker, and inclusion and equality consultant, and she has just added author to her long list of talents and achievements. Samantha’s new book, You Are The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread, is out now and we spoke to Samantha to find out what we can expect from her debut book and how she rose to the challenge of becoming an author. or anyone who is familiar with Samantha’s work or writings in PosAbility Magazine and beyond, you will know that she has character in abundance. Samantha calls it as she sees it; she is bold and confident, and draws people to her vivacious personality. She is the
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Samantha has written for PosAbility for a number of years (we tried to recollect how many, but neither of us are very good at dates, so we landed on six or seven), however we have rare face-to-face meetings as we live at opposite ends of the UK, instead we have occasional meet ups at events and plenty of emails. It was therefore, very refreshing to see her face over Zoom and have a chat about her book, and in true Samantha style she appeared on my screen with the line: “sorry I have no make-up on, I’m really f***ing hungover,” followed by her unmistakable and infectious laugh. Turns out Samantha was living it up at a red-carpet event celeb spotting and taking advantage of the free bar the night before. Who can blame her? In the background, her Sphynx cats Lola and Bruno lazily stretch out in a hammock and occasionally attract my attention as they jump down, bored at our conversation or upset at the noise of too much laughter disturbing their peaceful existence. Samantha tells me she has now acquired a cat pram to enable her to proudly parade her two beauties around outside. She is a self-confessed cat mum and her book shares some very interesting insight into why she feels such an affinity with Sphynx cats, a breed that she describes as “marmite” for most people in her eyes are beautiful.
With our catch up and cat introductions out of the way, Samantha shares how she came to write her debut book that has been published by Ebury, part of Penguin Books, which she admits was exciting in itself as she remembers her first books at school being Penguin published books. I think most of us can relate to that. “Before the pandemic,” said Samantha, “I was supposed to be doing Happy Place Festival and that’s how the book came about. I was supposed to be one of the speakers for Happy Place and it didn’t end up happening in the way I wanted, it all went virtual. I had really wanted to meet Fearne Cotton; I really wanted to be on stage, and then that didn’t happen, but I did became really good friends with Fearne and we were sending each other WhatsApps all the time and that’s when she told me she is doing this book imprint through the Happy Place brand. Every year she is aiming to publish four books through Happy Place and Ebury, and wants to get voices out there, then she said ‘do you want to be one of them?’ I was like, yeah!” When asked to describe what the book is about, Samantha tells me: “It’s a funny one: because it is in conjunction with Happy Place they said it has to have that Happy Place feel, so I think a lot of disabled people will first of all be going, ‘oh my god I don’t want it to be an inspiration piece’ – because we all hate inspiration porn, right? I was
