| Fiction |
| Humor (Fiction) |
Summary
Author Notes
Sue Townsend was born in Leicester, England on April 2, 1946. She left school at fifteen and worked a series of jobs before becoming a full-time author. She was best known for her books about the neurotic diarist Adrian Mole including The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years, Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years. Her other works include The Queen and I, Number Ten, The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman Aged 55¾, and The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year. She died after a stroke on April 10, 2014 at the age of 68.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
It is surprising how few novels have taken the form of diaries. The first important English novel, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, includes a lengthy chunk of his diary as a castaway, sure evidence of the "truth" of this ordeal, and plenty of novelists since have included diary extracts. The opening section of Bram Stoker's Dracula is Jonathan Harker's increasingly perturbed diary. In Graham Greene's The End of the Affair the narrator finds and gives us his lover's diary. Part of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook is Anna Wulff's often disturbed diary. But these are partial. Sue Townsend's true predecessor is George and Weedon Grossmith's late-Victorian Diary of a Nobody, which discovered the comic potential of the form. The diarist, Holloway clerk Charles Pooter, is certainly Adrian Mole's ancestor, privately convinced that his tastes and abilities single him out from those with whom he must mingle. Pooter's restriction is class; Adrian's is age. He sets himself high standards. One of his solemn ambitions is "to actually enjoy" an Iris Murdoch novel. "Then I will know I am above the common herd." One episode in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole seems to imitate one of Pooter's follies. With his mother fled to Sheffield with her odious lover Mr Lucas, and his father sunk in drunken self-pity, he decides to paint his bedroom black. This is in unacknowledged emulation of his privileged friend Nigel, who has every 1980s accoutrement. "Spotlights over his bed. Black walls and a white carpet and a racing car continental quilt." Over the course of five days, tracked exhaustedly by his diary, Adrian puts on coat after coat of black vinyl silk-finish paint, but without being able to conceal the Noddy wallpaper beneath. "Went over hat bells with black felt-tip pen, did sixty-nine tonight, only a hundred and twenty-four to go." We might think of Pooter who, determined that enamel paint is the latest home fashion, paints every miscellaneous object - the coal scuttle, the servant's chest of drawers, the bath - bright red. The two absurd home-improvers are equally unabashed by the results. Pooter tells his furious wife that she exhibits a failure of taste. Adrian takes solace in an analogy from the history of art: "Know just how Rembrandt must have felt after painting the Sistine Chapel in Venice." He keeps a regular record of his reading, a testimony to his high-mindedness that sometimes seems to lead him astray. "Started reading Animal Farm by George Orwell. I think I might like to be a vet when I grow up." "I am reading The Mill on the Floss, by a bloke called George Eliot." Naturally, this does not stop him being condescending in these "secret" pages about the literary limitations of others. "Read A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute, it is dead brill. I wish I had an intellectual friend whom I could discuss great literature with. My father thinks A Town Like Alice was written by Lewis Caroll." We take it that Adrian has not put his father right. Adrian fixes his attentions on school bully Barry Kent, whose insubordination will sometimes amuse the reader but never the diarist. "Barry Kent seems to delight in being ignorant." Comedy derives partly from the narrator's inability to know what is going to happen next. The diary form is designed to deflate. In one entry, Adrian records telling his friend Nigel of his "non-sexual adultery" with Pandora's rival Barbara Boyer: "he has been sworn to secrecy." The next day's entry goes, "Nigel has blabbed it all over the school. Pandora spent the afternoon in matron's office." The natural sin of diarists is self-importance, for they presume that their lives are worth turning into a narrative. But this is a universal sin, which makes Adrian's self-importance delicious. So he is determined to record the events of each day, even if it is to say on one grim Leicestershire evening, "Didn't get up until half-past four this afternoon. I think I am suffering from depression. Nothing happened at all today, apart from a hail storm around six o'clock." His discovery of his "depression" dignifies his torpor. Ordinary things are really extraordinary. His reading reaches a delighted climax when he comes across Dostoevsky. "I am reading Crime and Punishment. It is the most true book I have ever read." It feels like a secret bond between the great Russian novelist and Adrian. The first English diary writers in the 17th century were accounting to God for their daily lives. Adrian Mole (being an "intellectual") would be pleased to know that he preserves the spirit of those earnest Puritan chroniclers. The diary is all about life's little vicissitudes (hence his refrain, "Just my luck!"). Small things that might not matter to others are of pressing importance to the diarist: above all for Adrian, his spots. Misfortune is everywhere. The tone of heartfelt complaint is only occasionally leavened by some private expressions of delight. When his father has his new girlfriend, Doreen Slater, round for the night, she brings her impossible young son Maxwell with her. Maxwell ends up in their bed, "so my father was unable to extend his carnal knowledge of Doreen. He was as sick as a pig, but not as sick as Maxwell. Ha! Ha! Ha!" Life offers very few "Ha! Ha! Ha!"s, and they are for the diary only. John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and Sue Townsend for a discussion at 7pm on Monday 20 December in Hall Two, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Tickets: pounds 9.50 from kingsplace.co.uk or pounds 11.50 from the box office, 020 7520 1490. - John Mullan Comedy derives partly from the narrator's inability to know what is going to happen next. The diary form is designed to deflate. In one entry, [Adrian Mole] records telling his friend [Nigel] of his "non-sexual adultery" with Pandora's rival Barbara Boyer: "he has been sworn to secrecy." The next day's entry goes, "Nigel has blabbed it all over the school. Pandora spent the afternoon in matron's office." The natural sin of diarists is self-importance, for they presume that their lives are worth turning into a narrative. But this is a universal sin, which makes Adrian's self-importance delicious. So he is determined to record the events of each day, even if it is to say on one grim Leicestershire evening, "Didn't get up until half-past four this afternoon. I think I am suffering from depression. Nothing happened at all today, apart from a hail storm around six o'clock." His discovery of his "depression" dignifies his torpor. Ordinary things are really extraordinary. His reading reaches a delighted climax when he comes across Dostoevsky. "I am reading Crime and Punishment. It is the most true book I have ever read." It feels like a secret bond between the great Russian novelist and Adrian. - John Mullan.
Booklist Review
The messy, inconsistent world of adulthood is seen through the eyes of British teen and aspiring intellectual Adrian Mole, whose pithy observations on adolescence are totally captivating.