This Modern Writer: Kinderwhoring

Every now and then I find that some teen girl has posted one of my poems or stories on her blog. I get all excited and talk about it on my Twitter and Facebook, and send her a comment or email to say thank-you. And perhaps this is annoying. Perhaps it’s like I’m showing off, like I’m shouting “oooh, check me out, I have a fan”, like I’m a total wanker. And I am a wanker, but there is another reason that I do this.

When I was 16, I had a website. It was dreadful, obviously. I was into kinderwhore and riot grrrl and fairytales and confessional, but I did it all in this awful cack-handed teenage way, so it was just bad poetry, lists of my favourite song lyrics, and photos of me reading books in my underwear or pouting in torn slip dresses and a tiara (see photographic evidence). Everything was in lowercase and I used punctuation like ~ and * as little decorative flourishes.  I had lists of words I like to say out loud (caterpillar, amalgamate, she), lists of words I like the look of when written down (coyote, liar, anaemia), things that fascinate me,   things that make me cry, things I like the smell of, me me me me me.  I’m bad enough for navel-gazing now, but at 16 I was infinitely worse.

The only thing I loved more than talking, thinking, and writing about myself was books. I fucking loved books. I loved them in a way that I can never love them again, because no-one can ever love anything with the life-consuming intensity that they do at 16. I lived and breathed books. They told me how to feel, how to react. How to live life, and how to then turn that life back into words. In particular, there was a poet.

This poet, she knew me somehow. She knew what I secretly felt and she knew how to put it into words. Her life was the life I wanted: that wildly creative, fucked-up, dramatic mess that I was convinced would never get boring. Oh, how I loved her! So I carefully typed out a couple of her poems and posted them on my website, below some gushing blurb about how oh-em-gee aMAYzing she was and how I wanted to be just like her.

Imagine my epic, eye-burning, heart-swallowing joy when the poet’s name appeared in my inbox.

“Please remove my poems from your website, as this violates my copyright”.

She was right; of course she was. But I was 16 and I was in love and I had been spurned. I took down the poems and had a sulk and vowed to never read the poet’s writing again. Obviously I can sulk for a really long time, because in writing this post I realised I never did read her work again. She was right and I was wrong, but I still feel like I lost something. Everything I’ve ever read has made me into the person and the writer that I am, but there’s a tiny handful of words that stuck. Perhaps I could have been a different sort of writer if that poet had loved me back.

I am grateful and amazed and appreciative of everyone who has ever read my writing, but those teenage girls are the ones I write for. My dream has always been that my stories will speak to some girl—some lost, dreamy, hopeful, hopeless girl just like the one that I was a decade ago. I dream that she’ll read my story and finally understand something about herself, or about other people, or about the way the world all fits together.

I don’t write stories that only teenage girls will like and I rarely write teenage girl characters, because when I was a 16 year-old girl I did not want to just read about 16 year-old girls. I wanted to read about Daisy Buchanan and Esther Greenwood and Winston Smith and Kate Byrne and Courtney Love and Dirk Gently. Especially Dirk Gently, because I had a crush on him. I wanted to read about explorers and painters and rock-stars and mothers and strippers and existential detectives. I wanted to read about 26 year-old tattooed queers who live in book-lined, chandelier-lit tenement flats in Glasgow with their graphic-designer/musician girlfriends and pet hamsters (well, probably). I wanted to read about people who were mistaken and determined, people in love and falling out of love. I wanted to know the truth about the world, and I wanted it in words.

A decade later I still don’t know the truth about the world, but I know tiny bits of it, and that is what I try to write about.  The copyright-claiming poet was not wrong, but I never want to be right in that way.  I know what it is to love words and stories with such a passion, and I would rather have a dozen girls repost my stories than stamp on their hearts.

In The Virgin Suicides, when Cecilia Lisbon is in hospital after her first suicide attempt, the doctor asks: “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” Cecilia replies: “Obviously, doctor, you have never been a thirteen year old girl.”