Reading through my girlhood past
Sadia Nowshin reminisces about the books that made her, and blushes at a BookTok table
Back in 2012, while my rebellious 13-year-old peers were smuggling cigs and replacing their parents’ depleted vodka with tap water, I had a different kind of contraband hidden in my school bag. Sourced in the school library and concealed inside a folder that disguised its contents, my illicit goods were of a decisively more nerdy quality: one copy of Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging.
I knew that the word ‘thong’ alone would be enough to have the book confiscated should my guilty pleasure be discovered. I say ‘guilty’ — allusions to characters going off to kiss off-page is about as risque as it got, but it was enough to give tween girls their first taste of secondary school grown-up romance.
Adults quickly decided that the book was without merit; in the US, the book is number 35 on the American Library Association's list of frequently challenged or banned books between 2000 and 2009, falling under the category of work that ‘does not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.’ Tell that to a pre-teen girl with dreams of life beyond the training bra.
We saw ourselves in Georgia, with her Wotsit orange legs caused by a fake tan mishap and repeatedly tragic misjudgings of social situations, the awkwardness of girlhood thrown into sharp relief. The objectively terrible film adaptation remains nostalgic for many of my fellow now-20-something women — few films have managed to achieve the same cinematic experience and generational cultural impact as watching protagonist Georgia sprint through Brighton in a homemade olive costume through the opening credits.
While this seminal book of my tweenaged reading list was one I had to hide, there were other titles I could read openly that were just as — if not more, in some ways – controversial. Behind Jacqueline Wilson’s cute illustrated covers and curly font titles were stories of deeply troubling things happening to innocent children.
The Story of Tracy Beaker’s desperate sadness of a girl in a care home waiting for her mum to step up, the grief of losing a sister and always wondering what really happened in My Sister Jodie, child abuse at the hand of a stepparent in Secrets — Wilson’s universe was not one that made us feel seen, but that made us see others. She tackled almost every taboo or trouble that a young person might be struggling with, the dark ones that were whispered about but nobody ever really explained to us.
As Wilson returns with an update on the characters of her Girls in Love series for her now-adult fans, the genre she once wrote so prolifically for looks very different. If I told 13 year old girls today about the books that once made me blush, I think I’d be laughed at. A quick perusal of the ‘TikTok Recommends’ table at Waterstones is enough to make you bashful; the display is piled high with raunchy tales of enemies to lovers, slow burn ‘fake relationship’ stories, a whole subgenre focused on buff rising-star hockey players, and — of course — the ‘passionate, violent, sexy and daring’ five-part series that is A Court of. In a bookshop a couple of weeks ago, a distracted dad handed over his card to a daughter of about 14 who was clutching Ana Huang’s Twisted Love, a book that several bookshops preface with a content warning of ‘a jealous/possessive antihero, explicit sexual content and profanity.’
It’s obviously not up to me to decide what young girls should and shouldn’t be reading — that they’re reading at all should be celebrated. It’s not an all-encompassing pattern, either: the instant hit of the latest Hunger Games spinoff, Sunrise on the Reaping, and enduring popularity of fantasy genres proves that. But at risk of sounding like an American censorship committee, I wonder what the merit of these commercial fiction steam-fests is — and if it’s actually doing more harm to the young readers picking them up than what my generation were reading.
There are innocuous tropes that pop up throughout the romance genre, like a crush on your best friend’s sibling, or opposites attract, but there are also more troubling structures. Take the ‘bet’ trope, where one half of the couple begins their pursuit of the other because they lost or are trying to win a wager — the tension usually peaks when the secret is discovered, but ultimately all is forgiven. That’s the premise behind Anna Todd’s After series of books and now films, which began as a Harry Styles fanfiction and is now often touted as a classic example of toxic romance. Or the ‘possessive boyfriend’ trait, where a character realises that true love comes in the form of a jealous man telling them that they’ll ‘kill any guy who dares look at you’. Bonus points if he happens to be a Mafia boss, inexplicably a popular profession in the genre.
Literature doesn’t have to teach you something to be valuable, and a fun romance has its place on the shelf. Plus, kids have always wanted to grow up quickly — but now that’s coming in the form of books that glorify toxicity, in a society where nearly half of UK teenagers who have been in a relationship said last year that they have experienced violent or controlling behaviours from a partner.
Angus, Thongs might seem silly and childish now, but it had an awkward teen girl at the centre of it all who made immature mistakes yet was nonetheless accepted and loved for her quirks. Wilson taught us empathy, to always consider what might be going on behind the scenes of someone’s life and to realise that some people were dealt unimaginably bleak cards.
I wonder about the lessons young girls are taking away from the TikTok smut romances they’re now reading — largely that it’s okay to put up with unacceptable behaviour if he’s hot and cries when he thinks he’s lost you. I hoped we’d moved on from teaching that a boy is mean, it means he secretly likes you — but here we are, at risk of slipping right back.
Sadia Nowshin is the Junior Editor at Boundless
so skillfully put into words something i’ve been thinking about a lot lately