extracts from the superb lonely 80s girl diary "my fat, mad teenage diary" are available on the guardian (click here for link). this is the best writing i've come across in a long time: funny, sad, mordant, honest, and gloriously english. here are some of my favourite moments:"everyone was wearing 'the queen is dead' t-shirts and there are a whole load of people going to the smiths gig (which won't happen). mum refused to give me £12, just in case it is true, which shows she knows nothing about music and doesn't care about me. if everyone comes into school tomorrow holding flowers and talking about the night the smiths reformed, i am bloody running away."
"chloe is pregnant! can you believe it? she has had to leave school and everything. she told me in the sixth-form toilets as she was sitting on a windowsill downing a twix, like it was the most normal thing in the world."
"where do I keep this diary? it's not safe at home or in the locker at school. there's already shit in it that if anyone else saw i would die. just going to have to put it under the mattress and hope. there's no privacy—there's no place to go in the fascist state of mum."
"probably the worst day of this already crap, crap life in a long, long time… came home and went to bed at about six o'clock. been here ever since."
"just been to the doctor's. bethany got a right grilling! she thought they would just give her the pills, but the doctor wanted to know how many partners she has had, how old her current partner is and how many sexual partners he has had. the doctor suggested the barrier method may be better. i had to ask what that was—he means johnnies. bethany then told him that she hadn't used condoms before and he told her to practise on a banana! hello!!!! what do these people think we are?? he gave her the pill in the end with a huge lecture about aids and sexually transmitted diseases. like there is aids in stamford. come on—it's lincolnshire. we only got the wheel 50 years ago."
"smiths on. how soon is now? my song. i wish i could say i wrote it. but it's morrissey. it could have been me, though, because it's everything i think. everything. and you're left alone in a room full of twix wrappers shoved in sheets. and he's singing what you are thinking. and that's all."
wonderful stuff. can't wait for the book to come out.
4 comments:
haha. I used to love Adrien Mole. The last time I touched the book was a long time ago though.
So, so funny.
Sounds suspiciously like my life, actually.
Very funny, Very English, Very naive.
Gretta xx
That is very funny stuff! I wonder if it'll ever be distributed in the US? Prolly not. We get so gypped on these things. Sigh!
I dare not look at my diaries from way back. They wouldn't be half as interesting and reading over them I would sink into a depression and wonder why I'd ever bothered scribbling stuff down on pages in the first place!
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