I've been keeping diaries since 1983, and have published two of them. I'm a diary fan.
In 1990 twenty-year-old Natasha finds herself in France on her university year abroad. She is ANGRY. Everyone should be a lesbian, or she will punish them for their oversight (particularly her bemused fellow English assistant friend, Ange).
The frites and the pâtisseries are not helping Natasha recover from her bulimia. And the door-to-door Mormon missionaries are bedevilling her reluctant search for God.
Natasha does not respond well to the frosty demands of the headmaster of the school where she is teaching.
She passes her time befriending a pair of thieving drop-outs on the run from the law, skinning up grilled banana skins, dodging flashers, and hitch-hiking around Europe.
In 1989 nineteen-year-old Natasha is obsessively in love with her former teacher, Miss Williams. The tattoo she flashes around says so. Natasha meets Alex, a girl her own age, who questions her about the tattoo. An awkward romance is born.
In this real-life teenage diary Natasha records her panic at a looming LESBIAN relationship. To lose some excess fat, she starves herself of food ... whilst working in a chip shop. And just to make sure she's gay, Natasha drags five boys into bed in the space of a week, a sin for which the sexuality police threaten to kick her out of the university Lesbian and Gay Society.
In this coming out story and love story, Natasha struggles with clumsy attempts at heterosexuality, the sickening effects of weight loss techniques, disapproving shaven-headed lesbians, and sexual harassment in the chip shop.
In 1983 thirteen-year-old Natasha is in love with her French teacher, Miss Williams. When Natasha is cruelly banished from Miss Williams's class forever, the love develops into obsession ... stalking ... unhealthy behaviour ... and painfully misguided cries for attention.
This uncomfortable yet light-hearted memoir in diary form is primarily a record of obsession.
Natasha is a love-sick lesbian teenager in an all-girls school in the eighties, juggling her Latin homework, Bible study, a crush on Elaine Paige, and her suppressed sexuality. How can she make sense of it all?
But more importantly ... tormented by unrequited love ... how can Natasha make Miss Williams love her back?