There is the dandy, or there is Virginia Woolf who was famous for going about in rags, practically. Very nice clothes are not incompatible with the writer’s profession, in a way that they are for a painter or a dancer.

I had occasion to remember this recently as I contemplated my ancient trainers and fake Levis before I attended a book party at the Reform Club. I have no idea what the right garb is for networking, now that I spend much of my day alone, dribbling into my keyboard. I do occasionally dress up for my own amusement, but it’s often quite hard to explain why you’re wearing velvet hotpants at 11 am, as I did the other day, if one of your housemates happens to pop home. (I was delighted that the hotpants still fit – I last wore them in public twelve years ago but I can‘t really carry them off these days).

And many days of my writing life do indeed feel like a grand waste of a decent outfit: even when someone handsome comes to read the electricity meter, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this wasn’t the life Isabel Marant dreamed of for her diffusion line. In my hot youth, I quite often got spectacularly dolled up on a Saturday night just to watch Casualty at home. Now that my outfits cost serious money, however, it feels as though they deserve some kind of audience. Somehow, not even I am narcissistic enough to indulge in leopard print and lipgloss just for my own benefit. It might have made Carrie Bradshaw happy but typing in La Perla and Manolos didn’t do much for her prose, did it?

For writing, I may dress like a Dalston schoolgirl (hoop earrings, jeans and white trainers) but even I know that something more is required for impressing potential employers. I know what to wear for real parties: something low-cut and a glazed expression. I have loads of slut-wear, far more than any of my better-looking friends, which tells its own story but I know this won’t cut it at book launches. For the Reform Club, I contemplated asking a friend to bankroll an ankle-length Laura Ashley frock as this seemed to be what was required. I considered not going at all. Finally, I solicited the advice of a trusted friend who uttered soothingly “If you’re a writer though, they’ll expect you to turn up looking slightly eccentric. Anything just south of Isabella Blow will be just perfect.”

She’d said pretty much the same thing last year when I’d gone to Vogue House for a meeting, and she had been right. On that occasion, I’d done my prep. Helpfully, the latest edition of the magazine had featured a full page colour shot of the editor I was due to meet in her favourite outfit: monochrome Prada. In panicked response, I’d bought a fuschia pink cloche hat (it was the only Sonia Rykiel item I could afford in the Liberty sale) before discarding it and settling for a Jigsaw twinset and maddeningly expensive jeans. It worked just fine but I began yearning for something a little more de trop as I watched Sloanes in furs and artfully laddered tights strut around Hanover Square.

Anyway, waiting for the sartorial muse to strike, I sulked so long and hard before the Reform Club party that I had to get ready in a hurry and cut a gash into my leg whilst shaving it. I threw together the least offensive items from my wardrobe (Jigsaw skirt, Gap T Shirt and Birkenstocks) and prayed that my leg would stop bleeding. I contemplated buying some dove-grey fishnets in Boots on the way but settled for arriving late, rain-sodden and apprehensive. Carmen Calil was there, looking magnificent in Missoni but I just stuck out amidst all the braying Tories and girls in sweater dresses and I regretted the Birkenstocks. I looked wrong, and couldn’t wait to go home so I drank too much and swore copiously. I don’t think I can blame my ill-advised footwear but I flirted with all the wrong people and developed a speech impediment before fleeing into the night. Still, at least I didn’t fall over.

Last summer, I met a boy at a party who happened to be Jewish and I happened to fancy; he told me, “There’s no way you are not Jewish. You are the most Jewish-looking girl ever.” He’s not the first person to make the observation but looking the way I do doesn’t, however, make me any less of a gentile. I’m disappointed that the rare man who finds me attractive usually wants to be wilfully misled over how exotic I am. Needless to say, the men who make it past one night are the ones who seem oblivious to the fact that I don’t conform to an Anglo-Saxon ideal.

It’s an issue beyond the bedroom as well, of course. I used to work in an Afghan restaurant and was befuddled by an American customer who sobbed, “We’re sorry for what’s happening in your country, right now.” I must have looked confused as she said “You’re Afghanese, right?”

Things are slightly worse outside of London. Exasperated by an inquisitive bagel vendor in Brighton, who insisted I was from Kuwait, I snapped “My Dad’s a taffy, that’s all”. Undeterred, he replied “Ah, that’s why your hair is so dark … Celtic”.

Whether you choose to exploit it or not, men will, seemingly, always want you to be more exotic than you are. Maybe it’s the circles I mix in, but even Zadie Smith demurs that much of her undergraduate success with men was due to her perceived exoticism. It’s not a thing she necessarily invited, although she was smart enough to realise that exoticism works both ways. In an interview in the Guardian Review, she explains that she made the most of it: “I was pretty much the only black girl. So I was something of exotic interest, in the same way that I found public schoolboys incredibly exotic, because I’d never seen anybody like that. So, you know, you get laid a lot. That’s one advantage.” This ignores the fact that she’s the only Booker-nominated novelist who looks like a supermodel, irrespective of colour. Thanks, Zadie. But what about those of us of indeterminate hue who have neither the Orange Prize nor good looks to recommend us? But, actually she’s right.

I’ve yet to bed a man who can disguise his disappointment when it turns out beneath my underpinnings, I am as white as he is. This might be merely an aesthetic consideration (pallid limbs are not really having a fashion moment right now) but it’s still unsettling. And it’s not just men studying post-colonial literature, either. I think it’s to be expected that students (and I’m guessing, but I may be wrong, that Zadie encountered a few of these) who’ve ingested too much of the Wide Sargasso Sea spirit will want you, but it’s not confined to them. Even a former landlord told me I looked “ethnic”. As I avoid tribal dress, I found this linguistically, as well as morally, baffling. I suppose he meant that I look as though I come from somewhere. As opposed to the proverbial English rose, I guess, who he must imagine is made from Marmite and Birds custard.

And if I kick against the arbitrary nature of labels, I’m not above celebrating the difference. What I don’t understand is why so many people (and all of them men) find my right to define myself as British so contentious. I’d pass any citizenship test with flying colours. And yet, I’m no nearer being able to end the persistence of the question “Where are you really from?” than my mother was, forty years ago. Things are complicated, I suppose, by the fact that in the most literal, non-political sense, I’m very white. It’s not a thing I enjoy – if I had the choice, I’d rather look like Beyonce than Dita von Teese (and I don’t look half as good as either) but we all have to play the cards we’re dealt. And whilst I resent the fact that women at make up counters cluck and wield their bronzer brushes as I approach, there is no way that falsely re-branding myself as “black” is going to change that.

Whilst it is offensive and retrograde that those of us who do not conform to an Anglo-Saxon stereotype should be expected to qualify our Britishness, even I know that this doesn’t make for great post-coital conversation. Perhaps I should relax. Instead of my usual Lady Bracknell act when men enquire yearningly about my parentage, I should lie. After all, I’ve been guilty of exoticism myself.

As Katja in Gwendoline Riley’s novel Sick Notes says,

I’m so sick of this situation, of everyone asking ‘And what are you doing now?’ Like I’m just converting my latest book for the big screen, and finding a cure for cancer and AIDS. God!

Well, quite.

When I was doing work experience in publishing, “What do you do?” used to be me my least favourite question. This was partly because I envisaged myself as Ford Maddox Ford in lipgloss and the reality didn’t quite match up.

I got so sick of saying “Well really, I’d like to edit books but at the moment, I’m working in the I.T. department of a publishing house you haven’t heard of for free and hopefully that will lead to …” In the end, hapless boys at parties who made the mistake of asking me what I did for a living got the standard “I don’t” response. How droll, I know. Although there was a brief respite when I finally got a job in editorial, it turned out that I didn’t like it very much and now that I’m a writer, I’m almost back to the self-abnegation of “I don’t do”.

The problem is that being a writer is much like being a sculptor, or an actress, or a stripper in that no one is prepared to take your word for it. And yes, I am writer in the sense that I write things (e-mails to my mates mostly, book reviews and features sometimes, and a novel occasionally) and I don’t have an income from anything else.

I have an agent which is something I announce with unseemly haste whenever people look a bit sceptical. Still, my oeuvre is pretty slim and in the eyes of the world, the unfinished manuscript I’m working on doesn’t count for much.

I do get button-holed by a lot of sassy young misses (mainly at book launches, admittedly) who try to come across all sisterly and say “Do you hate talking about your writing? Do you really hate it?” Well, the answer’s no, because I’m a total narcissist.

I think this illustrates that the fault lies with talking about your job (pretty much no matter what it is) with strangers in the first place, as it tends to instantly expose the questioner’s own prejudices and insecurities. My friend Zoe (who has been to as many bad parties as I have) has summed up the pitfalls of this better than I can: “Leading in with ‘what do you do’ is going to unleash a lot of dreary explanation, generally with a tedious self-justifying slant, leading to conversational doom and over-consumption of hula hoops.”

I think this is true whatever you do, regardless of whether your job is your true calling, or whether you are a little ashamed of it. I love writing so much that it gives me physical pleasure and trying to write for a living is easily the most satisfying (as well as, sometimes, the most upsetting) thing I’ve done. This still doesn’t mean this is what I want to talk about (or by extension, be judged by) on a Saturday night.

Isn’t it time we all started evolving an alternative set of opening gambits for parties?

Still, this won’t stop anyone carping when they meet someone who is consumed with passion for what they do. I know why people do this because I used to do it myself when I met someone who, yawn, said they were writing a book, or making a film or starting a charity. Oh yeah right, I thought. This was in because in my heart of hearts, I thought that what everyone wants is a pension, colleagues and enough disposable income to shop at French bloody Connection. It turns out not only is this not what everyone wants, it’s not even what I want.

And of course, being a freelance writer is it’s only private hell of boredom, loneliness, anxiety and sheer bloody poverty. It’s not for everyone and I certainly don’t think it’s for me long-term, mainly because I like being institutionalised. (I’m going to do some work in an office next week, and am embarrassingly thrilled at the prospect of having someone other than the kettle to talk to during the day).

Still, if you want to do something meaningful, giving up the 9 to 5 can sometimes seem like the only way. Of course, you have to be bloody-minded; no one else can tell you that you are doing the right thing. But isn’t life like this anyway? As Jenny Turner points out in her brilliantly vicious novel The Brainstorm, there is always the consolation of philosophy (in particular, Rilke) but even this has it’s limitations:

This is more or less what Rilke says in his Letters to a Young Poet lying neglected and getting curly on Kelly’s chest of drawers: ‘There is no one who can advise you or who can aid you: no one. There is only one way: you must go inside yourself.’ But then Rilke had not been troubled by the problem of interest piling up on student loans and overdrafts. Rilke had not had to worry about grooming, rising house prices, the problem of getting a boyfriend and so on.

It may say a lot about my life but I think this is the truest thing I’ve read all year. Of course, the realities of debt and not having the right blusher are things that grind me down as much as the fact that my writing is not as good as I want it to be.

Conviction and integrity do not keep a girl warm at night but, so what if a few losers snicker at parties when you say “I write Haikus, in Flemish, that’s how I make my bucks” ? If they’ve got nothing more imaginative to ask you, then stuff them. It’s the only way.