Lionel Shriver’s teenage diary: bad spelling and unreturned affections

The We Need to Talk About Kevin author is laying bare her adolescent self for Radio 4. Here, she talks about her refusal to go to church and her years-long crush on a boy called Roger

In my teens, I eyed my adulthood with trepidation, as if stalked by a stranger – one who would seize control as if by demonic possession and regard my fledgling incarnation with contempt. I was terrified of growing up to become the anti-me, maturing into a woman whom I would not recognise, and who wouldn’t recognise her younger self. I doubt I was alone as a teenager in seeing adulthood as a lurking betrayal, an impending death. That may be one reason teen suicide rates are so high: for many adolescents, growing up presents itself as a form of bereavement anyway, so it seems as if there’s nothing to lose.

Asked to fill the painfully comic Radio 4 slot My Teenage Diary, I scrambled into my attic recently to dig up the damp, furry-cardboard covers of the journals I began keeping when I was 12. Before rereading them for the first time in 40-some years, I worried that I would be embarrassed. Instead, I was infuriated.

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