With so much great new fiction coming out this summer, it was also delighting to receive two new non-fiction releases in the mail this week: Catherine Ryan Howard's Mousetrapped and Different For Girls, a memoir focusing on the music world.Different For Girls: A Girl's Own True-Life Adventures in Pop was penned by Louise Wener, lead singer of 90s band Sleeper. Sleeper disbanded in 1998, but Louise has since written four novels. Here's more information about the memoir, which is released on June 10th:
This is a story of an ordinary girl's transformation from awkward 80s suburban pop geek to 90s jet-set pop goddess. It's about the embarrassments of growing up and experimenting with who you are and how pop music is both the comic and life-affirming soundtrack that runs through it all. "Different for Girls" is for anyone who ever sang into a hairbrush and slow-danced to Spandau Ballet's "True". It's about growing up with "Look-In" and "Jackie" magazine and daubing your hair with poster paint to look more like Toyah Wilcox. It's about bad perms, bad boyfriends and the nagging feeling that no man will quite measure up to Nick Heyward from Haircut One Hundred. It's also about the journey from bad band to great band, from gigs in toilets to gigs in stadiums with all the mistakes, joys, disappointments and successes in between. It's a journey which starts with a 12-year-old perfecting her dance routine to Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" in front of TOTPs and ends, almost 20 years later, with the same girl having REM's Michael Stipe sing happy birthday to her on a warm summer's evening accompanied by 70,000 strangers.
