Meet Simone Lia, cartoonist and champion of the humble worm

“Whenever I was between projects,” says Simone Lia – comic-strip cartoonist in the Observer and author of a new children’s book, The Secret Time Machine and the Gherkin Switcheroo, about the unlikely friendship between a bird and a worm – “I couldn’t stop painting worms. I didn’t know why.” As I walk into her house in south London, I notice a huge painting in her hall with a caption in shaky capitals: “WORM HARMONY”. The worms look like demob-happy frankfurters. They have floaty bodies, dazed smiles. She knew enough, she goes on, to know she should pay attention to this obsession. And, with a laugh, she explains she realised how much she admired the character of the worm: “They’re very humble, live in the ground, do good work, get on with it.” These qualities, she says, “I’d like for myself.”

If this sounds like a Christian aspiration, it will not surprise Lia’s many fans. In 2011, she beguiled readers with the book that made her name: Please God, Find Me a Husband! The belief in God was no joke. But the book was very funny. In one irresistible sequence, Lia, whose boyfriend had just ended their relationship by email, walks disconsolately across Leicester Square. She hears the lyrics of INXS’s Need You Tonight playing from a bar and believes God is communicating with her. Before long, in her mind’s eye, she is dancing friskily with God – a bearded, bespectacled bloke in a pale blue, calf-length dress. Her story leads her to a religious order in Wales (“I’m so not going to find a husband hanging out with nuns”) and to Australia, where she meets a handsome horseman who, in the way of handsome horsemen, disappears over the horizon.

It is eight years since that book was published (it has five worms on one of its opening pages). As we sit down in Lia’s front room, I ask how long it took God to get his act together. “Ten years,” she says. “I thought I’d trick God by doing a book. I felt sure God would give me a happy ending and I’d definitely get a husband. But it doesn’t really work like that. I finished the book and there was no one. I was 33. I didn’t meet my husband until I was 41. We married two years later.”

I am looking at her as she speaks, her bright, smiling face always on the edge of wincing at herself. I am thinking how nice it would be to have a black-and-white drawing of her because her clothes would be such fun to colour in: scarlet T-bar shoes, a mustard-yellow cardy, a blue-and-white skirt. The man we’re talking about, Timothy, a graphic designer, is the son of an inspirational Australian artist friend of hers. When his mother came to London to visit her son, they both called in on Lia.

One of Lia’s friends had told her it was pointless to wait for a man to come knocking at her door. “But Tim literally did knock on my door. He was really handsome and we had so much in common – it was amazing.” She adds: “We even had a little bit of matching eczema on our foreheads.” This, clearly, was a mark of God, I say. She shrieks with laughter (I can imagine her drawing the matching eczema – it would be the sort of zanily miniaturist detail she relishes). “I now think God meant me to wait in order to appreciate what happened next.”

She was nearly 44 when their daughter, Anjès, was born. Anjès is a “really friendly” two-year-old, she says, adding: “Where does that come from? I’m not like that, I’m really withdrawn and a bit weird.” Nonsense, I say. Not only is Lia herself “really friendly” but her focus, in her work, is on the mystery of friendship – human, animal, divine. Her latest children’s book could even be, she suggests, about marriage. The Secret Time Machine and the Gherkin Switcheroo describes the challenge of living with an old bird who does the crossword puzzle and does not want to go out, and a worm who dreams of wriggling back underground. Having said that, the worm overturns Lia’s definition of wormdom by mainly living above ground and by not being humble at all. He swings between feeling he is worthless and believing himself a genius. Like most of us, he is ordinary. “I relate to the worm much more than the bird,” she laughs.

Lia’s parents came from Malta – her father was an electronics engineer, her mother a housewife. She grew up in a housing settlement in Haverhill, Suffolk – an alienating, ill-conceived place with few amenities. With her sleek black hair, she was often jeered at, called a “Paki”. She did an art foundation year in Ipswich, studied illustration in Brighton and, while doing an MA at the Royal College of Art, met Tom Gauld, who “got me into comics”, and with whom she collaborated (on Both).

I am so diverted by her, I forget to ask where God fits in nowadays and pursue the subject by email. She replies in full. She explains she needs to “come out” as a Catholic because “our culture is not set up for a relationship that takes place in silence and solitude”. In the interests of honesty, she feels she should not leave out “the dark bit” of her life. Raised a Catholic, she lapsed in her teens: “Putting things mildly, there was a lot of fighting at home. I felt very alone and felt even Jesus was not listening to my prayers – it felt like he did not care. That is when I stopped praying, became interested in art. Drawing and painting was an escape. I could enter another world and forget about feeling lonely or afraid.” Throughout her 20s, she was “searching to find myself or to find something I guess. I wasn’t ever quite sure of my place in the world. That might be how Fluffy came about.”

Fluffy (2007) was a graphic novel about the relationship between a rabbit and the floundering human being he thinks of as his dad. It looks like a children’s book but isn’t. Fluffy keeps asking his “dad” what Miss Owers (Fluffy’s nursery teacher) is doing spending the night with him, and the book includes irresistibly wacky ideas such as the moment when a dust particle takes over as narrator. It was while researching for Fluffy in Sicily (the rabbit goes on hols there) that Lia rediscovered God. A randomly encountered Mormon asked her whether she still prayed. She went into a baroque church but all she could think of was to ask God for a better hotel room (she feared she had been staying in a brothel).

“Despite my rubbishy prayer, I felt something out of the world in that moment. It’s very hard to explain but it was as if my heart opened up and rain was falling on me and the rain was love. I lifted my head and let it drench my being. In my mind’s eye, I could see a golden light falling from above. It sounds loopy if I say it out loud. But from that moment, something shifted inside of me.” She left the church feeling full of joy and, 10 minutes later, found a superior hotel room. “Funnily enough, there was a picture of the sacred heart of Jesus in that room, the same picture I’d poured my heart out to as a child with my woes and worries.”

Lia’s gift has always been for identifying the comedy in her woes and worries. Even during a difficult labour, she says that she managed to have a laugh. And often, when writing, she imagines she is “talking to my sister to make her laugh” – which might explain the warmth of her work, the way she makes you feel she is your friend.

I tell her I particularly loved a recent column in the Observer’s New Review entitled “How to get a winter body fast!”, sending up potentially harmful articles that tell women who to be/what to eat. “That week I’d eaten a whole packet of custard creams in one sitting,” she exclaims. Trying to sum up her sense of humour, she continues: “I don’t like making jokes about other people. But if somebody laughs at the jokes I make laughing at myself, I really like them.” Every day, she asks herself: “What have I accomplished?” Her aim is to make sure that, even if she has achieved nothing else, she has had a “good old belly laugh”.

• The Secret Time Machine and the Gherkin Switcheroo by Simone Lia is published by Walker Books (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99