Talk about the Wizard of Oz: Julie Burchill has been variously described as "the cleverest woman in Britain" (Observer) and "having had a bigger influence than Diana, Princess of Wales" (Radio 4). The infamous journalist/writer who first built her career on the basis of being "the new Dorothy Parker" (Cosmopolitan) and later as a "communist, lesbian icon" (Channel 4) is in real life a very disarming, giggly and funny 38-year-old woman who speaks with the sort of high, squeaky voice that makes her sound like a busty extra in an early Carry On film, especially as she is wont to pepper her conversation with expressions like "oh, that's a bit saucy" and suchlike.
"Everyone is surprised by my voice and how little girly it is,' she squeals. "That's why I don't do television, though it's not for the want of offers." A bit disappointingly happy and chatty, she explains that there are two of her. "There's `Julie Burchill' who writes all those horrible and wonderful things and there's Julie Burchill which is me," she says.
The two of them have just met, shaken hands and exchanged more than pleasantries in her autobiography, modestly titled I Knew I Was Right, in which she set out "to make sense of everything that has happened to me, especially the excesses". Along the way this takes in her communist upbringing, her heady rise to the top of journalism (by the age of 17) her two marriages (which she walked out of) her drugaddled 30-something years and her recent Sapphic conversion.
The product of a good Marxist family, her heart very much belongs to Daddy. "I grew up in a Bristol suburb and my dad was a communist, a real Soviet communist and I used to go off secondary picketing with him and attend all the TUC conferences - I was a bit of a mascot," she says. Very much a communist herself, she tells a touching story about "the most beautiful, sentimental moment of my life: it was when the VC took Saigon during the Vietnam war and my dad came up and woke me up and said `We won'."
Funnily, she always refer to communists, as in - "we're on the way back, you know" - the way blokes refer to their football teams, by the use of the first person plural.
Quickly flipping back into her "Julie Burchill" persona she launches into a bitter attack on the current Labour movement: "Tony Blair is an evil man. He's like a militant entryist the way he's destroying the party. It's Freudian, he has all these unresolved issues because he was born working class but adopted and brought up by middle class parents. That's why he's setting out to destroy the working class but he won't. And Cherie, please! Why does she gape at him in that stupid way all the time? It's not as if she's never seen him before. She's got evil eyes, she's dangerous. And I could tell you the real reason why they sent their kid to that posh school but it would close your newspaper down."
That over, she comes across all sentimental again as she talks about her "isolated" upbringing in Bristol. "Even though my mother taught me how to read at three, she was very alarmed at why I used to read so much. Books were my saviour growing up. At the age of 12 I was already hip to Nabokov and Graham Greene and my mother used to cry all the time, wondering why I read all the time and wasn't out on the street like the other girls. My parents were political and clever, it was sophistication they had no use for - that whole working class `getting above your station' thing. So when I wanted a typewriter to start writing my own stuff, I told them I needed one to train to be a secretary."
Books aside, music helped her through a very troubled adolescence - she stayed indoors for years on end and cried herself to sleep at night because Marc Bolan (T. Rex) didn't know her name, and listened endlessly to the opening bars of Miss Luba Sancus (as featured in the film If) alongside Black soul music.
Aged 17, she responded to an advertisement in the then influential music paper, New Musical Express, which was looking for a "hip, young gun-slinger". Julie dashed off a review of Patti Smith's Horses and got the job - ahead of 15,000 applicants - "bliss it was to be alive in that dawn with a safety pin through both nostrils". She overcame her "shyness" through a combination of snorting speed and drinking speedbites.
The NME was terrified of the black leather clad, pouty young prole who arrived in their midst. "It was full of middleclass hippies who went around saying `man' all the time. I used to put barbed wire and broken glass around my work desk so they wouldn't come anywhere near." Two years of ultra-sharp, spiky and scintillating writing later, she moved on to the Sunday Times, and before she was 20 she was earning over £100,000 a year as a culture analyst and spirited interpreter of the passing scene: everything that came under her gaze, from feminism to futurism, was Burchilled into shape courtesy of the sassiest prose written since Dorothy Parker (whom Burchill is very tired of being compared to).
When she was 19 she married fellow NME journalist Tony Parsons, who gets more than a bit of a kicking around in her autobiography: "Serves him right," she says. "I was the one who walked out of the marriage but the second I went through the door, he started writing about me in his magazine columns. When he got married he installed us in a house way out in Billericay in Essex and I couldn't see anyone because he was jealous. Ironically, when I did convince him that we should get out more, the first party we went to I met the man I left him for, Cosmo Landesman."
By meeting Landesman, she had fulfilled all the ambitions of her adolescent years, which were: 1. Get famous, 2. Sleep with an American Jew, and 3. Take loads of drugs. Now not so keen on the idea of marriage, why did she do it twice, and one of those times when she was only 19? "I suppose I was responding to a dumb strand of conventionality, the working-class girl that I was. Funnily enough, my next novel goes under the title Married Alive (giggles). The people I was married to for 16 years never really knew me. I was just a cast of corny characters to them: Working Class Angel, Demon Nympho, Castrating Bitch." Oddly enough, Cosmo Landesman (also a journalist) is not mentioned once (by name) in her autobiography and neither are the two children she has had, one in each marriage - the fathers have custody of both boys. "I kept the children out of it because I'm not Paula Yates and I didn't mention Cosmo by name because he is a gentleman," she says, in as firm a manner as her voice will allow.
After publishing a series of books (mainly non-fiction) and starting up the Modern Review magazine ("it was supposed to be F.R. Leavis editing Smash Hits") she went through her cocaine phase, becoming "the Queen of the Groucho Club" - a well-known London media haunt.
"There are only so many nights you can do cocaine up to your eyeballs. The first 999 nights are bloody good fun, on the 1,000th night it starts to get a bit boring." She says she was saved by the love of a good woman - the 25-year-old Charlotte Raven who worked with her on the Modern Review. Their relationship made front page news last year and she had to get used to seeing her name somewhere other than on the top of newspaper articles.
She writes in her autobiography: "Charlotte Raven, in the space of less than a year, came to know me more thoroughly than I have ever been known in my life. When she touches me, it's like she's reading Braille." She snorted her last in London, moved to Brighton and credits Charlotte with saving her life and her work. She's also reconciled with her parents. When she first started writing she says they thought she used to make up fake newspapers with her name on them and only really understood she was famous when her name was mentioned on Brookside and she was the answer to a question in a television quiz - "they needed to have my fame fed back through their own culture".
Surprised at how happy she is, both living in Brighton and with her work, she's going to be all over place this year: apart from the autobiography, her biography of Princess Diana is to be published soon: "It's sort of like Norman Mailer on Marilyn. I was appalled at the way she was treated by people who seem to be scarcely human. I hope it will have a major impact, unless the libel lawyers cut it to pieces," she says.
There's another novel due soon (Married Alive) and a non-fiction book called The Death Of Female Desire In The Twentieth Century, and today she starts a new column with the Guardian newspaper. Like the good journalist she is, though, she finishes with a surprise: "I'm not going out with Charlotte anymore. She's a soulmate and you can't have sex with a soulmate. I ran off with her brother. He's lovely." Series not concluded.
Julie Burchill's autobiography, I Knew I Was Right is published by Heinemann (£15.99 in UK).