"I'm Fine" Is the Biggest Lie: Sacha Hughes on Grief, Pinot & Coming Back to the Body

Sacha Hughes knows exactly what it costs to say "I'm fine" when you're anything but. Her twenties in London ran on recruitment, cocaine, pinot, and the kind of grief that doesn't knock — her mother, lost to cancer, and years of partying with the best of them while keeping the flat spotless, because as long as the kitchen sparkled she could tell herself she had it together. Then she picked up a pen. The result is Love, Grief & More Sex Than Pinot — a debut novel featured in Woman's Own, whose heroine, Soho Summers, carries Sacha's own messy past on every page. In this conversation we go where the book only whispers: the full-moon December night on a beach when she finally handed her grief back to the sky, the chapter her friends insisted she keep — the one about violation, and how many women quietly blame themselves — and the three years she has spent choosing her own company over anyone else's arms. What once broke her is her medicine now. We taste it together — the grief, the pinot, and the coming back to life.