The Guardian - Life & Style • Jan. 25, 2026, 9:19 a.m.

I sat there in my pyjamas, headset against my ear, and knew I was not doing the right thing I’m not psychic. During the six months I spent working as a telephone psychic, my only supernatural gift was the ability to sound fascinated by a stranger’s love life at 2.17am.

Yet for hundreds of billable hours, I sat on my living room floor wearing plaid pyjamas and a telemarketing headset, charging callers by the minute for insights into their lives. Perhaps this made me a con artist, but I wasn’t a dangerous one.

When it started, I’d recently quit my job as an editor at a publishing company to write a novel while doing telemarketing shifts from my kitchen table. Instead of knocking off a bestseller, I found myself cold-calling strangers about energy bills while gripped by writer’s block and an inconvenient yearning to have a baby.

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