She survived a troubled youth – and a spell in prison – to forge a new life for herself as a writer and campaigner. Now, despite the pain of revisiting those years, she’s telling her story in full
Paris Lees always knew she would write the story of her life. She knew it when she was a teenager in Hucknall, just north of Nottingham, getting beaten up in alleyways, imagining that her bullies would get to read about her in the paper. She knew when she told her auntie Rachael that when she was older, her life would be like Sex And The City, going to book launches and parties, meeting politicians, wearing nice clothes. She knew when an author visited her university during her graduation, and her mother told her it would be her one day. “It was a bit of a running joke,” she says. “I’ve always known. I just had to write this book.”
That book is What It Feels Like For A Girl, a memoir that reads like a novel, written in dialect, Trainspotting-style. Here, it is a Nottingham/east Midlands slang, where “right” is “rate” and “myself” is “mysen”, though Lees has only the bare bones of that accent today. She arrives for lunch almost an hour after we agreed to meet, outside a cafe in Canary Wharf in London, not far from where she lives. “Sorry, sorry,” she says, a fast-talking, 10-to-the-dozen whirlwind in a black hoodie and PVC trousers, hiding for a moment behind tinted Gucci specs in the freezing-cold shadows of metal-and-glass skyscrapers. She didn’t sleep last night, she says, out of nerves. She is anxious about discussing the book, and has been dithering at home, picking up things to give me or show me. She hands over a finished copy of the memoir, wrapped in black tissue, which peels off to reveal a bold, brash neon jacket, with a photograph of young Lees on the cover. In thick eyeliner, hair piled high, she looks like a club kid from two decades before her time. “You tell me how bright this is! Doesn’t it just grab your attention?” she says, beaming.
