Paperback writer

Three cheers for desire, lust and irresponsibility

Melvin Burgess has discovered that girls need filthy books too
Lady by Melvin Burgess

For years now I've been working on a book called Doing It - finally out this May - which is a boy/girl book for boys, the principle being that boy/girl books are all for girls. They're romances, and boys don't read romance. Well, there's obviously something wrong there, because most boys like girls, don't they? The reason was also obvious. Male sexuality is a much less PC thing than female sexuality - it's visual, rude and far more easily separated from its emotional context. So Doing It had to be filthy - in places, anyway. But when I mentioned this to a female friend of mine, she pointed out that when she was a girl, she and her friends were also exceedingly filthy. This statement had a great ring of truth about it, and asking around it seemed to be more generally true than I'd previously thought.

It was at that point that I started wondering if all those nice, romantic books about sexuality and its emotional context for girls were quite as inclusive as I had thought. Where were the books about lust, desire and irresponsibility for young women? Young people, especially girls, suffer endless pressure to be responsible, do it properly and get it right.

But life's not like that. Of course you want to get it right, but a lot of people also enjoy getting it wrong, particularly when they're young. When does anyone talk to young people about how to be irresponsible - an important skill in a world as pressured as this one?

That's how Lady: My Life as a Bitch was born. In writing about the relative importance of being irresponsible, and presenting a character who gets it wrong despite thinking a great deal about it, the book ends up, rather to my regret, being about what's important and what's not; what kind of space you want to make in your life for both things. Oh, well - you can't win them all.

I once remarked, on an occasion when I wanted a good quote for the papers, that the difference between journalism and novel writing was that journalism presented the truth in such a way as to tell lies, while novels told lies in order to present the truth. Like all homilies, it's perfectly untrue - it only talks about the worst journalism and the best novels - but it's fun, and it applies to Lady in more ways than one.

The book belongs to that category that sits uncomfortably astride discussion and fiction. The central proposition, though treated absolutely seriously, is so ludicrous, and so obviously based on a concept outside the story, that the usual suspension of disbelief is permanently compromised. With books like this, the mind is constantly forced to move along two separate tracks at the same time. The reader can never quite forget that none of this ever happened, and that consequently, it doesn't matter a toss.

That's what excited me in the first place about the idea of having a teenage girl, fed up with getting it right and being upright, decent and honest, get turned into a bitch by a drunk on the streets of Manchester. I think it's probably true that books of this kind are fatally flawed by their very nature. I read them myself with a mixture of exasperation and excitement, but they always remain etched into my mind, perhaps for that very reason. I had much the same feelings while writing this one.

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