THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZE

'Tender, wise and funny' Sunday Express
'Beautifully observed, deadly funny' Max Porter

Before becoming an acclaimed musician and writer, Tracey Thorn was a typical teenager: bored and cynical, despairing of her aspirational parents. Her only comfort came from house parties and the female pop icons who hinted at a new kind of living.

Returning to the scene of her childhood, Thorn takes us beyond the bus shelters, the pub car parks and the weekly discos, to the parents who wanted so much for their children and the children who wanted none of it. With great wit and insight, Thorn reconsiders the Green Belt post-war dream so many artists have mocked, and yet so many artists have come from.

"A beautiful writer . . . Exceptional . . . Made me catch my breath . . . Her language is straightforward, chatty, easy-to-read. Musical. Though Thorn tells us sharp truths, we gobble them up because she delivers them in such a deceptively pretty, poignant way" - * Financial Times *

"When Thorn digs into her adolescence, the book sparks with wit and poignancy, helped by extracts from her teenage diaries that she smartly exploits for comedy and bathos" - * Sunday Times *

"Tender, wise and funny" - * Sunday Express *

"Readers of Thorn's two previous memoirs will recognise the tone of this book, with its beautifully clean style, careful self-questioning and pervasive likability" - * Guardian *

"Tracey Thorn's memoir of growing up in suburbia finds the extraordinary in the ordinary . . . Thorn is a writer who can "give the mundane its beautiful due" . . . [A] delightful, incisive memoir" - * New Statesman *