Teenager Of The year

What is it like inside the mind of a teenage girl? It’s a strange, confused and frustrated place, as Anna Carey’s first novel The Real Rebecca makes clear.

“I think the teenage years are a good source of drama and funniness because your emotions are so heightened all the time. Everything, even the small issues tend to be ginormous dramas,” Carey ventures.
“I can still remember quite well what it felt like to be that age and I have all my old teenage diaries as well. It was slightly worrying how easy it was,” she laughs. “Even without the diaries!”
The Real Rebecca is a laugh-out loud story of a fourteen-year-old girl, Rebecca Rafferty. In a neat meta-fictional twist Rebecca’s mother has written a book about a 14-year-old girl – the annoying, boy-chasing, underhand, girl-band-wannabee Ruthie. What’s worse, Mammy Rafferty claims the character is based on her own daughters. Cue public humiliation and mortification, especially as Rebecca is nothing like the obnoxious Ruthie.
“There is a tendency to show teenage girls as bitchy and vapid and not really interested in stuff, whether it’s books or music or doing things. You very rarely see that in mainstream pop culture, even in some quite good things, girls tend to be interested in just boys and romance and nothing else.”
Carey set out to redress this skewed stereotype.
“I think it’s really important to show girls that are funny and nice to each other, even when they fight with each other, rather than this ‘queen bee’ rivalry. I don’t think that’s a very healthy idea to be perpetuating – I don’t think it’s even true. It hasn’t been true in my experience as an adult; it wasn’t true in my experience as a child. As a feminist I think it’s a great tool, female solidarity. We need to get rid of the idea that women are bitches and teenage girls are bitches and would kick each other in the face to get someone else’s boyfriend or job: to me that’s important and more accurate, without being too sanitised and sentimental.”
Life would be bad enough for Rebecca given her sudden semi-celebrity status, but she has a crush on the paper delivery boy too. A paperboy Carey knew many years ago loosely inspired this character.
“I haven’t seen him for nearly 20 years so I hope he doesn’t think it’s a loving portrait of him. It was kind of a joke – ‘Who’s going to go out and say hello to Paperboy?’ Then I went off to college and forgot about him, but a year later my sister snogged him at the Grove! I was trying to think of a way that the kids in the book would encounter a boy. If you are at an all-girls school and your friends don’t have brothers, there aren’t that many ways to meet boys in your daily life so I thought, ‘Ah ha! Paperboy!’ It was the idea of the paperboy, not the one from real life, in case he’d like to sue us!”
That’s hardly likely – Rebecca’s crush is described as jaw-droppingly handsome after all. If anything it’s a flattering portrait.
“A bit too flattering! I can’t even remember what he looked like!”
When a friend of Rebecca’s sister needs to find a new home for his drums, Rebecca’s parents – suffering from guilt – allow her to have them. As her best friends Cass and Alice know how to play piano and guitar the girls form a band. Like Rebecca, Carey joined her first band as a teenager.
“We were terrible, really terrible, and in the way of teenage bands we didn’t have a drummer, we didn’t have a bass-player. We had three guitarists all playing the same rhythm guitar. We used to busk on Grafton Street and I remember spending my busking earnings on The Commitments. Glen Hansard – I still remember this because he was in The Commitments obviously – he gave us a pound one day! See this is what happens if you’re nice to teenagers? They remember and publicly pay homage to you twenty years later.”
If Paperboy and Rebecca’s band are in part inspired by Carey’s own life, the question needs to be asked – what awful embarrassing crimes did her parents commit against their teenage children?
“My parents didn’t have much opportunity to embarrass me on a grand scale. When you think about it that’s kind of mad because I went to the same primary school that my mother taught at. Technically there should have been plenty of opportunities for her to make a holy show of us, but actually she didn’t. I was pretty good at embarrassing myself.”
Carey is working on a second novel featuring the same characters. Luckily, she says, reviews of her first have been positive.
“That’s kind of encouraging. It’s been very nice and more than I deserve – I’ve written a lot of bad reviews in my time! It would have been karma if I’d got loads of terrible ones myself.”

The Real Rebecca is out now on O’Brien Press.