When I was writing my fourth novel, Rebecca Is Always Right, not long ago, I was faced with a dilemma. Over the course of four books, my teenage heroine had started a band, been embarrassed by her parents, found love, lost it again, taken part in a musical, fallen for the wrong boy, participated in a summer rock school and supported her best friend, Cass, when Cass came out as gay.
In the third book, Rebecca Rocks, Rebecca worried that she'd never find love again, but by the end she realised that her life was actually pretty good as it was. In Rebecca Is Always Right, however, she falls for her friend Sam but doesn't know if he likes her back. And that's where the dilemma came in. Should they actually get together? Did I want to imply that a happy ending means finding a man?
I never want to be didactic – I write comic novels, after all. But I’m always aware of a responsibility to my young readers. And I especially never want girls to think that having a partner is necessary for happiness; I always presented Rebecca and her friends as girls who are interested in all kinds of stuff, from starting a band to computer science.
But at the same time I can’t pretend that romance – or the lack of it – isn’t a big deal when you’re fizzing with hormones. When I was a teenager I was fiercely passionate about music and books and social issues. But I also spent a lot of time feeling angsty about boys (or the lack thereof). My diaries may have featured my searing political insights – after the 1992 American presidential election I wrote “Bill Clinton is in! Ha ha! That’s got rid of the old CIA fascist” – but there was also an awful lot of wondering whether boy X really liked me. In fact Rebecca’s melodramatic angst about Sam is much closer to my own youthful experiences than her earlier romantic adventures ever were. In a way I was writing the sort of book I could have really identified with back then.
In Rebecca Rocks I wanted to tell young readers that being single is fine and that romance is just a bonus. So was it a betrayal of that message to then give Rebecca that bonus? In the end I decided it wasn't. Rebecca – and the reader – knows that she can be perfectly happy on her own, but she's making the choice to get together with a nice, smart, funny person who draws comics and who thinks Rebecca's own passion for writing and music is brilliant. And I hope that's quite a positive message too.
