Novelist Fiona Neill's morning sounds like something straight out of her new book "Slummy Mummy" — a plumbing crisis left her floor under 2 inches of water and she was late getting her children to school because the car broke down.

When she arrives at a north London cafe for an interview, though, Neill seems to hold onto a calm that eludes her protagonist. Maybe that's because of the book's success in her native Britain, or the plug it got from Vogue magazine ahead of its U.S. release July 5 (Riverhead Books).

"Slummy Mummy" offers a comical window into the life of Lucy Sweeney, a high-powered television news producer turned stay-at-home mother of three, who is drowning in the anarchy of domestic life.

Unable to control the mess that surrounds her, Lucy careens from one disaster to the next: She's detained to wait for police when she tries to buy gas with a credit card she's reported lost. She accidentally sends an embarrassingly personal e-mail to all the parents at her kids' school.

Meanwhile, questioning her purpose in life as well as her marriage to a caring but tightly wound man, she flirts with the Sexy Domesticated Dad she meets at the school.

Neill, 41, who lugs a tote bag stuffed with newspapers and old sneakers and wears a jean jacket over a casual print sundress, is clearly familiar with the kind of domestic disorder that Lucy's facing down. She's still able to giggle, though, while juggling motherhood with a successful writing career.

"Slummy Mummy," which started life in 2005 as a Times of London column, sprang from a conversation Neill had with a friend.

"We were sort of comparing notes on motherhood and saying how nothing you really see (in print) reflects the reality of the chaos of being a parent," she said.

A longtime journalist for The Times, she found her fictional column a hit, and soon landed the book deal.

The title is a play on "yummy mummy," the label the British press has given the wealthy, well-dressed women pushing strollers through London's posher neighborhoods. Neill recalled saying to her friend, "Far from being the yummy mummies, we're the slummy mummies. And I just knew when I said it, that was it."

The book hit a nerve in Britain, becoming one of the more successful in a wave of so-called "mum's lit" titles. Many have done well as "mommy lit" in America, too, said Jonny Segura, an editor at Publishers Weekly, including Allison Pearson's "I Don't Know How She Does It," Sophie Kinsella's "Shopaholic & Baby" and Jill Kargman's "Momzillas."

Such novels are often lumped together as lightweight heirs to the "chick lit" phenomenon launched in the 1990s by another British import, "Bridget Jones's Diary," by Helen Fielding. The characters (and writers) are a decade or so older and adapting to a new phase in life.

An excerpt of "Slummy Mummy" ran in June's Vogue, and the magazine's editor, Anna Wintour, predicted in her introduction to the issue that it would be a literary phenomenon in America to rival Fielding's book. The new novel, she wrote, "plays with the chaos and comedy of 30-something metropolitan maternity and brings it to an unexpectedly moving conclusion."

Behind their pastel covers, many of the "mommy lit" books — including "Slummy Mummy" — delve into the serious issues women grapple with as they try to balance work and family.

Neill said she wanted to underline the stark choices still facing women, and what she sees as the work world's inflexibility and failure to create meaningful jobs compatible with motherhood.

"Instead of trying to find solutions, (public discussion) has all been quite divisive," she said. "It's a debate that needs to be carried forward."

Her novel's other theme is the contrast between struggling Lucy and the super-organized, perfectly groomed mothers she meets at school and nicknames Alpha Mum and Yummy Mummy No. 1.

"There are those kinds of mothers on every playground and they often make women feel worse about themselves," she said.

Neill thinks parents would be better off eschewing perfectionism, ignoring the child-rearing advice books and trusting their instincts.

"The more serious you make (parenthood) and the more anxious you make it, the less pleasure mothers get out of it," she said. "You laugh a lot (with children), there are lots of really funny things, and I sort of wanted to rescue that. But to rescue the comedy, you have to let go of the perfectionism."