Teenager Of The year
In her debut novel, Anna Carey delves inside the mind of a teenage girl. She talks about channelling her own adolescence into fiction and recalls her busking adventures on Grafton Street.
Anne Sexton, 16 Mar 2011
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.”
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