When I first heard about this book (it was excerpted in The Guardian's weekend magazine) I thought, Oh, big deal, I've got a fat, mad teenage diary and no-one's interested in publishing that! And then I read it. And it's great.
Rae is a normal 17-year-old girl. She lives in Leicester and attends public school (on a scholarship). She's overweight and insecure and obsessed with the things 17-year-olds were obsessed with at the end of the eighties: the charts, Nuclear war, raves, prawn cocktail crisps...
She has problems with her mother, with the boy(s) she likes, a bitchy best-friend ... you know, the usual teenage angst stuff. She's also recently spent time in a psychiatric hospital, but that's really glossed over in this book - it's less about serious mental illness and more about the random mental trauma we all go through as a teenager.
This is apparently Rae Earl's actual diary. If that's true - and after reading it I do believe it is - then she has my utmost admiration. The contents of this diary are so similar to the contents of my own teen diary, that I was often hot with embarrassment while reading it.
It's compulsive reading and highly entertaining. If you were a teenager in the late eighties there is so much in here you'll identify with. Unless, of course, you were popular, thin and not mad as a teenager, in which case, get away from me.
Oh and the reason my diary hasn't been published? Because I destroyed it in the early nineties. The shame.
Rating: 4/5
Like this? Try But Enough About Me by Jancee Dunn
Can I just point out that the cover says "If Adrian Mole had a sister..." but Adrian Mole did have a sister (Rosie). And, yes, I know I'm a dork.
