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Author Julie Burchill talks about writing Sugar Rush and her own teenage years
Although she may have written a successful teen-novel that has been adapted as a comedy drama for Channel 4, by her own admission, Julie Burchill brings a whole new dimension to laziness. If her own confessions are to be believed, she breezes through life lounging around on her sofa, watching daytime TV, eating chocolates, drinking heavily, and knocking out the occasional column in a matter of seconds. She even claims to have written Sugar Rush in ten afternoons.
If you believe what you read, in articles penned both by her and rival scribes, she is a bitchy combination of Beelzebub and Cruella de Vil, with a pen sharp enough to slice even the most leathery hide. Yet, in conversation she's friendly, funny, and pleasantly self-deprecating.
If you believe what you read, in articles penned both by her and rival scribes, she is a bitchy combination of Beelzebub and Cruella de Vil, with a pen sharp enough to slice even the most leathery hide. Yet, in conversation she's friendly, funny, and pleasantly self-deprecating.
So why is the black-hearted scourge of, well, of everything, turning her hand to writing fiction for teenagers? "I think I might have struggled writing adult novels in the past," she admits, "and maybe that's why they didn't do too well, because my heart wasn't in them. This was just very pleasurable and very easy to do."
Easy is one thing, but a novel in ten afternoons? "I think it might have been eight or 12, but I was drunk all the time, so I don't really recall it that clearly," she says (presumably disingenuously, though it's impossible to tell). "It just went by in this blur of drunken bliss. It was the easiest book I have ever written. Some people would say that shows, of course. It was just really easy and good fun to write."
With characteristic candour she admits that writing for teenagers comes to her easily because there is something resolutely immature about her. "I shall be 50 in five years' time, so actually, it's a tragic case." If there is something of the teen about her, you don't have to be a psychology professor to understand why. She spent the first half of her teenage years having "quite a poxy time". She was a "strange and alienated teenager", desperate to escape the working class drudgery that led everyone to assume she'd go and work in the local box factory in her home town of Bristol. "I wasn't moping about love most of the time (unlike her heroine in Sugar Rush) I was moping about what I saw as the bad hand I'd been dealt in life."
Easy is one thing, but a novel in ten afternoons? "I think it might have been eight or 12, but I was drunk all the time, so I don't really recall it that clearly," she says (presumably disingenuously, though it's impossible to tell). "It just went by in this blur of drunken bliss. It was the easiest book I have ever written. Some people would say that shows, of course. It was just really easy and good fun to write."
With characteristic candour she admits that writing for teenagers comes to her easily because there is something resolutely immature about her. "I shall be 50 in five years' time, so actually, it's a tragic case." If there is something of the teen about her, you don't have to be a psychology professor to understand why. She spent the first half of her teenage years having "quite a poxy time". She was a "strange and alienated teenager", desperate to escape the working class drudgery that led everyone to assume she'd go and work in the local box factory in her home town of Bristol. "I wasn't moping about love most of the time (unlike her heroine in Sugar Rush) I was moping about what I saw as the bad hand I'd been dealt in life."
Julie eventually escaped to London, only to end up married aged 17, with a baby soon afterwards. She subsequently made up for a lost teenage hedonism though, as her provocative and frequently outrageous columns have documented in gruesome and highly personal detail.
Sugar Rush is a funny, sometimes touching book that has been nominated for a prestigious teen fiction award and now adapted into a wry, poignant and more adult Channel 4 series.
Sugar Rush is a funny, sometimes touching book that has been nominated for a prestigious teen fiction award and now adapted into a wry, poignant and more adult Channel 4 series.
