Carmen’s totally embarrassing and revealing teen diary…
I was nervous about writing for teenagers, believe me. Like every other grown-up I know, I have tried my best to blank out those seven tricky years along with the excruciatingly embarrassing moments, terrible outfits and haircuts.
However, writing Secrets at St Jude’s is not just great fun (as I channel my inner teen) but very good therapy.
Four of my crucial teen years were spent boarding at a school just like St J’s - it was St G’s. Now the first two years were hell. No other word for it. I was miserably homesick. I missed my Mum, my Dad, my little sisters, my dog, having my own room, the countryside, everything… just miserably. Those were two of the worst years of my life. I found the girls at St G’s mainly snobby and unfriendly and the school so cold, bossy and uninspiring compared with the (somewhat Hogwarts like) school I’d been to before.
But then I got older, I came out of my shell, I got used to boarding school, made some great friends and the last two years were much better.
Me: 
I was Miss Artsy-Boho as a teenager and a bookaholic. My favourite reads were: Tess of the D’Urbevilles by Thomas Hardy, On The Road by Jack Kerouac, Hamlet (yes, I know it was for school but I loved that play), The Wasteland by TS Elliot (ditto), La Chateau De Ma Mere by Marcel Pagnol and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I read my way right through the complete works of Herman Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, most of Heinrich Boll, plus some Thomas Mann and Proust. I mean, I was serious! (Although I did find time to read Vogue, Elle and Just Seventeen every month too.)
My favourite films were Annie Hall and Manhattan by Woody Allen and My Life as A Dog, which I watched so often I could practically speak Swedish.
I didn’t watch any TV! Imagine!
I usually wore Levi jeans or black jodhpurs(!),
a beloved black cashmere jumper, flat mens’ shoes (it used to be so hard to get size 8s) hooped earrings, much turquoise and bead jewellery and my hair up at the front in a semi-beehive.
Playing on my stereo was Bob Dylan, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, David Bowie, Aretha Franklin and Blondie. (And OK, occasionally Madonna, who despite the Hesse and TS Elliot, was something of a personal idol!)
I certainly knew by age 16 that I was going to be a writer. But it’s OK not to know what you want to do… one of the very funniest and nicest people I knew then still isn’t quite sure and her four children are keeping her very busy while she decides!
Obviously being a teen in the 80s was particularly cruel. We had to have big spiky hair and flappy, baggy clothes. When we went out of an evening, the look was ‘electrocution in a wind tunnel’. Not that fashion is much kinder today though with all that tight, tight stuff. Even though (looking back!) I had a really good figure, I was so self-conscious about being over six foot tall and having boobs that I’d have died of embarrassment if I’d had to go out in some skin tight crop top. And on the subject of looks, I did not have one single spot until I turned 21, then I got post break-up acne. Talk about being a late developer. My acne advice BTW: apply surgical spirit, de-stress your life and see your doctor.
And now onto the all important subject of boys:
Obviously the first very important man in my life was my lovely Dad. He is the best-looking Dad ever and he’s very nice too. Whenever he’d try to get angry and tell us off, he used to just burst out laughing. He did find having three teenage daughters so embarrassing he could hardly speak to us until we turned 20.
When I was 9, I went to the strange Hogwarts-like prep school which was full of boys. I was the only girl in my class for at least a year. So although I don’t have any brothers (but I do have a son!), I’d say I know boys pretty well. They are great! Much kinder, less complicated souls than girls if you ask me, just don’t ask them to talk about their feelings though…
From the age of 12 to about 15 I had the most phenomenal, unrequited crush on the best-looking boy I have ever met. He was absolutely gorgeous but tragically uninterested. I know I sent him several declarations of undying love, but he was nice enough to just pretend that those hadn’t happened! This is when being a writer can cause big problems. Basically if you wouldn’t say it to someone, you shouldn’t write it to them either!
LOVE
Age 16 I finally, after months of frenzied speculation, started going out with The One. My ginormous, huge, red with a big red ribbon tied around it First Love. For the next five years, while everyone around me was on the emotional roller coaster of falling in and out of love, I had my wonderful boyfriend who was my best friend and all-round soul mate. All through A Levels, my year out and university… until… rrrrrrrrrrrrrrip, crash, smash… we both made a horrible mess of breaking up: the first time… and the second time. Ouch, ouch, owwwwww. Heart-break is just the absolute pits. It’s the uncertainty (will you or won’t you get together again?) and the rejection (you know me completely and utterly and you’re still walking away!) that make it such torture. And take my advice here, stay away from the hairdresser’s until you are feeling better.
However… as (Woody Allen?) once said: the heart is a very resilient little muscle. And there was this cute, funny, spec-wearing guy on my journalism course. He was my friend for months… then the course ended and we were about to go our separate ways to different parts of the country and suddenly that seemed like a terrible idea! I have been very happily in love with that cute, funny, spec-wearing guy for 17 whole years so far…
Everyone is so dismissive about ‘teen love’ these days, now that everyone waits until they’re about 54 to get their joint mortgage and consider having babies.
But people used to get married in their teens and base the rest of their lives on that decision. My Mum was 16 when she first set eyes on my Dad. And my sis was 14 when she started going out with this boy in her class… they (finally!) got married eight years ago. How romantic is that?!
You can be just as in love at 16 as at 38, in fact at 16 you’re more likely to love with all your heart and nothing in reserve… so treat your feelings and your hearts with care.
Boy/friends
You know, friends who are boys, but not boyfriends. I have always had lots of these and they are a very good thing. Not that girl/friends aren’t brilliant: you can borrow their clothes, do their make-up and sit on the sofa with them for hours drinking tea and talking about how everyone feels about everything.
Whereas boy friends play you six million rubbish songs from their ‘incredibly cool’ music collection, stuff you with cheese bagels, make you laugh hysterically and insist you sit through the ‘greatest cowboy/ Kung Fu/ Japanese/ cartoon film ever made’.
The future…
Your teens are when you get to dream about the big, exciting world ahead and the wonderfully fabulous life you are going to lead. My friends and I were such an arty crowd! We wanted to be writers, painters, musicians, creators and film-makers. We couldn’t believe classmates were going off to university to study law and medicine and… accountancy!!
And you know what? Despite all that tut-tutting from our parents, teachers and careers advisers, most of us are doing the things we dreamed we would. It may not have turned out quite like we expected, but it's still ‘in the ball-park’, if you know what I mean. My old friends are teaching art as well as creating it, running record labels rather than touring, big in the filmbiz, agenting artists and in my case… writing romantic comedy rather than Kafkaesque poetry!
So although your dreams may adapt… you certainly don’t have to give up on them. (And hey, maybe the accountants are having a great life too!)
Writing…
And while we’re on the subject of dreams… if your dream is to be a writer, go ahead and write!!!! The more you write, the better you get at it. Soon words will be flowing from your fingertips, travelling in all the right directions and telling your readers just exactly what you want them to.
There are all sorts of jobs for writers: on newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs, in advertising agencies and of course… at publishing houses! Don’t ask me how to get a novel published though. That is hard!!
I’d probably written millions and millions of words: poems, shorts stories, love letters, English essays, newspaper articles and abandoned novel chapters… before I finally managed to write something that was good enough to be published. So keep practising, keep trying and just remember, every writer I’ve ever heard of got rejected at least once! I think the writers who get published are the stubborn ones who just keep writing and refuse to give up!
