Lust, cruelty and a desperate need for attention … I thought my old journals would bring back warm memories – in reality they were a document of the unique misery and painful insecurities of adolescence
I own nine of the most devastatingly embarrassing books ever written. They might be the only books that attempt to algebraically prove the existence of God 14 pages after the words, “I don’t want to touch his penis.” Actually, that’s probably not true – the books are my teenage diaries, and there’s nothing unique about the humiliating and exhilarating experience of being a 14-year-old girl.
If there’s one thing in the world I never want to be again and wish I never had to be in the first place, it’s a teenage swot with PE in the morning. When I ask female friends if they think being a teen was uniquely awful, one replies “uniquely awful and uniquely special” – but I don’t think that is something I ever felt. I love to see the magic of girlhood represented in coming-of-age movies such as Lady Bird and Booksmart, but I look back at my own adolescent self and see a floundering fish who hurt and was hurt with little meaning or beauty.
