House of Hermes

As she strolls away we stare after her, the photographer, his assistant and I. Tall, willowy, and as beautiful as her publicist had promised, she's off to meet her mum in the fabric department at Peter Jones. "Such is the exciting life of a novelist," she joked. In years to come she may long for such mundane interludes, for you don't have to come from Delphi to predict a successful future ahead if the hilarious, intelligent Gods Behaving Badly is anything to go by.

Days later I check out her four-year-old blog, strugglingauthor.com - as expected, we've made an appearance: "On Wednesday I was interviewed by The Scotsman. Interviews are funny things, especially if, like me, it's your natural inclination to talk endlessly about yourself but have spent the last 30 years being socialised not to do so. It sort of feels like eating an entire box of chocolates, knowing that not only will you not feel sick afterwards, but that it will have positive health benefits. Especially because the interviewer was so friendly, which I think is part of having your first novel out. I don't think they send in the rotweillers till it's your second novel and it's time to cut you down to size. (Something to look forward to, then.)

"Anyway, after the interview was the photo shoot, which was on a few locations in Greek Street (get it?). This was my second photo shoot, the first being the one for my official author photo. I nearly got the giggles because it turns out that photographers really do say 'Look to the left - now in the air - now at yours truly - big smile - gorgeous!'"

Phillips, 31, was brought up in Chalk Farm and Hampstead in north London. Her father is the Lord Chief Justice; her French mother acts as a tour guide at the Wallace Collection. She has two sisters, Sophie and Rebecca, and a brother, Jean-Yves. It's a harmonious nuclear family, but Phillips admits that living in a big, busy household and also going to boarding school helped inform the part of her novel that is set in a crumbling house in the capital.

For that is where we find the immortals. Having quite literally come down in the world, they're holed up in a house purchased in the period when the plague caused prices to drop, and before the Great Fire sent them skyrocketing again. Tough times have befallen them. Hera stands guard over the attic where Zeus is locked away, blithering and worryingly prone to hurling thunderbolts at the unsuspecting. Hermes works as a bike messenger and Artemis as a dog walker. Dionysus makes potent homebrew then sells it at his ultra-decadent nightclub, Bacchanalia. Athena's scribbling inscrutable reports about the state of the world, Aphrodite's giving phone sex and servicing various members of her family, while Apollo's reduced to posing as a television oracle. Into this craziness stumble two shy, star-crossed mortals: Alice, a cleaner, and her would-be boyfriend, Neil.

Phillips had already written and shelved a novel when she conceived the idea for Gods while helping make a documentary in a school. "The teacher was talking about the difference between the Greek and Roman gods and the Judeo-Christian God, and a light bulb went on. What if we were wrong and they were right? What if the gods of the ancient world really were the gods? What would that tell us about the world? Would that seem plausible? Even more plausible than the god that we struggle to understand? Why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? Well, if you've got a bunch of gods who are selfish, manipulative and don't really care, then that explains that very neatly," she says.

But even the best ideas throw up problems, she discovered. "The mortal characters were horrendous to write. Neil and Alice were not in the book for the first two years that I was writing it. There were two completely different characters who never came alive. It took me such a long time to figure out what was wrong. It turned out that the problem was they were confident, incredibly intelligent, successful, and for a long time they were already in a relationship until Apollo came and ruined it, so the unrequited love element didn't exist, either.

"Then I went to see comic Daniel Kitson, and one of his characters was this very meek lollipop lady and I was like..." - she gasps - "Oh, they need to be meek!" Phillips jettisoned her mortals, found new ones, developed an unexpressed love story, and created an area of quiet to contrast with the gods' larger-than-life antics. "Almost every word of the novel has been changed since day one, but the concept, the plot, that all existed from the start. It's quite easy when you're nicking other people's myths."

Phillips has borrowed masterfully. Her book also riffs on the tale of Orpheus and Euridice and the story of Daphne (turned into a laurel after spurning Apollo's sexual advances), resulting in a glorious pastiche that pulls the reader along by the funny bone to a wonderfully satisfying finish.

She learned about pacing and storytelling, she tells me, while studying anthropology and working in television. As her own tale unfolds I feel as though I'm with a precocious schoolgirl, at once eager to please and keen to show off. Her carriage is erect, her hands expressive. The accent's plummy, and you can hear the punctuation marks when she speaks. (There, that's as rotweiller as I get.)

Writing, it seems, was always her final destination, but Phillips rightly realised she had no material. "My autobiographical novel wouldn't be very interesting. My life has been lovely for me, but there are no wonderful insights for the rest of the world to share in. When you're having no ideas there's no point in writing."

Accidentally lured into an anthropology lecture at a university open day, she was "completely smitten" and wound up going to Cambridge's Robinson College to read social anthropology. How's that different from ... I start to ask. "Anti-social anthropology? Which is when you go off to foreign countries and are rude to people and make fun of their cultures," she finishes.

But seriously, it was great training. "You're constantly trying to put yourself in the position of someone who's different from you and to see the world in a different way. Yes, it's an instinct for narrative, but also an instinct for character. Why are people so different? Or, why is it that people who seem so different are actually so similar to me? That's very much the anthropologist's urge and the storyteller's urge."

She worked as a TV researcher and went to Manchester for an MA in Visual Anthropology. Coursework involved shooting hours and hours of film, purely as an observer, then studying it to see where the story emerged. It was a great antidote to self-absorption, training her to look outside herself for inspiration. She returned to the BBC's current affairs development team and spent her days percolating ideas. "Suddenly the part of me that had never been able to think of good ideas outside of my own life story - and those ideas weren't very good anyway - was coming up with ideas all the time."

She is already working on a new book - although working, for Phillips, involves a great deal of procrastinating (it's one of the reasons she started a myspace page) and watching a lot of trash TV and fantasising about running away with the current Doctor Who. When I tease her, she retorts, "Nabakov was addicted to really shit television, so that's a precedent. If he can watch Bonanza I can watch Neighbours." I don't dare ask about the boast that she can recite every word of Princess Bride - in character.

There's also her blog, which she updates daily, citing the availability of broadband as a chief reason she's still sane after the intensity of writing a novel, scrapping it, and then seeing Gods to completion. "I'm not worried about giving away material, because the blog is my real life and my writing's not autobiographical. Though I do get occasional e-mails saying, 'Please stop writing about David Tennant.'"

• Gods Behaving Badly is published by Jonathan Cape on 2 August, priced 12.99.

A writer in the making

Marie Phillips says Little Women got her reading. "And The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy got me writing."

Lots of girls cite Little Women as a seminal influence, but Phillips didn't idolise the central character, Jo. "I identified with Amy, the stuck-up, spoiled, ignored youngest who was always trying to be older and who marries Laurie, which was just a triumph. From eight to ten I was reading it like people painting the Humber bridge, then I got the play version and my friend and I used to act it out. She, bizarrely, identified with Meg. No-one identifies with Meg! Maybe we just picked the pretty ones."

When she was ten, her older brother gave her a copy of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide, which she cites as a big influence on her style. But she may have her teachers to thank for unlocking her creativity in the first place, after she wound up at a school that assigned a short story per week. "It hadn't occurred to me that stories were made up, that they didn't exist until someone thought of them and wrote them down. I thought, 'Great! You mean I can just make my own? Brilliant!'"