Then and now: how things have changed for teenage girls since the 1950s

Clare Furniss explores difficult decisions in the lives of two teenage girls, divided by over 60 years and brought together in the present day, in her new book How Not To Disappear

• Read the first chapter of How not to Disappear here
  

Last year when I was speaking at a festival my interviewer pointed out that my writing emphatically passed the Bechdel test. Usually applied to films, the Bechdel test asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. I hadn’t really thought about this, I suppose because it had never occurred to me to write a book where this wouldn’t happen. I love writing strong female characters, in part because because these are the stories I loved reading when I was growing up. From Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables, through Jo March in Little Women to Lizzie Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, these were female characters who were determined, independent, clever and funny, and to the teenage me, they were inspirational.

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