The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend | Books | The Guardian The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ by Sue Townsend Week one: the fictional diary Sue Townsend. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian Friday 10 December 2010 19.06 EST First published on Friday 10 December 2010 19.06 EST Share on Messenger Close It is surprising how few novels have taken the form of diaries. The first important English novel, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, includes a lengthy chunk of his diary as a castaway, sure evidence of the "truth" of this ordeal, and plenty of novelists since have included diary extracts. The opening section of Bram Stoker's Dracula is Jonathan Harker's increasingly perturbed diary. In Graham Greene's The End of the Affair the narrator finds and gives us his lover's diary. Part of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook is Anna Wulff's often disturbed diary. But these are partial.

Sue Townsend's true predecessor is George and Weedon Grossmith's late-Victorian Diary of a Nobody, which discovered the comic potential of the form. The diarist, Holloway clerk Charles Pooter, is certainly Adrian Mole's ancestor, privately convinced that his tastes and abilities single him out from those with whom he must mingle. Pooter's restriction is class; Adrian's is age. He sets himself high standards. One of his solemn ambitions is "to actually enjoy" an Iris Murdoch novel. "Then I will know I am above the common herd." One episode in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole seems to imitate one of Pooter's follies. With his mother fled to Sheffield with her odious lover Mr Lucas, and his father sunk in drunken self-pity, he decides to paint his bedroom black. This is in unacknowledged emulation of his privileged friend Nigel, who has every 1980s accoutrement. "Spotlights over his bed.

Black walls and a white carpet and a racing car continental quilt." Over the course of five days, tracked exhaustedly by his diary, Adrian puts on coat after coat of black vinyl silk-finish paint, but without being able to conceal the Noddy wallpaper beneath. "Went over hat bells with black felt-tip pen, did sixty-nine tonight, only a hundred and twenty-four to go." We might think of Pooter who, determined that enamel paint is the latest home fashion, paints every miscellaneous object – the coal scuttle, the servant's chest of drawers, the bath – bright red. The two absurd home-improvers are equally unabashed by the results. Pooter tells his furious wife that she exhibits a failure of taste. Adrian takes solace in an analogy from the history of art: "Know just how Rembrandt must have felt after painting the Sistine Chapel in Venice." He keeps a regular record of his reading, a testimony to his high-mindedness that sometimes seems to lead him astray. "Started reading Animal Farm by George Orwell.

I think I might like to be a vet when I grow up." "I am reading The Mill on the Floss, by a bloke called George Eliot." Naturally, this does not stop him being condescending in these "secret" pages about the literary limitations of others. "Read A Town Like Alice by Neville Shute, it is dead brill. I wish I had an intellectual friend whom I could discuss great literature with. My father thinks A Town Like Alice was written by Lewis Caroll." We take it that Adrian has not put his father right. Adrian fixes his attentions on school bully Barry Kent, whose insubordination will sometimes amuse the reader but never the diarist. "Barry Kent seems to delight in being ignorant." Comedy derives partly from the narrator's inability to know what is going to happen next. The diary form is designed to deflate. In one entry, Adrian records telling his friend Nigel of his "non-sexual adultery" with Pandora's rival Barbara Boyer: "he has been sworn to secrecy." The next day's entry goes, "Nigel has blabbed it all over the school.

Pandora spent the afternoon in matron's office." The natural sin of diarists is self-importance, for they presume that their lives are worth turning into a narrative. But this is a universal sin, which makes Adrian's self-importance delicious. So he is determined to record the events of each day, even if it is to say on one grim Leicestershire evening, "Didn't get up until half-past four this afternoon. I think I am suffering from depression. Nothing happened at all today, apart from a hail storm around six o'clock." His discovery of his "depression" dignifies his torpor. Ordinary things are really extraordinary. His reading reaches a delighted climax when he comes across Dostoevsky. "I am reading Crime and Punishment. It is the most true book I have ever read." It feels like a secret bond between the great Russian novelist and Adrian. The first English diary writers in the 17th century were accounting to God for their daily lives. Adrian Mole (being an "intellectual") would be pleased to know that he preserves the spirit of those earnest Puritan chroniclers.

The diary is all about life's little vicissitudes (hence his refrain, "Just my luck!"). Small things that might not matter to others are of pressing importance to the diarist: above all for Adrian, his spots. Misfortune is everywhere. The tone of heartfelt complaint is only occasionally leavened by some private expressions of delight. When his father has his new girlfriend, Doreen Slater, round for the night, she brings her impossible young son Maxwell with her. Maxwell ends up in their bed, "so my father was unable to extend his carnal knowledge of Doreen. He was as sick as a pig, but not as sick as Maxwell. Ha! Ha! Ha!" Life offers very few "Ha! Ha! Ha!"s, and they are for the diary only. John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and Sue Townsend for a discussion at 7pm on Monday 20 December in Hall Two, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Tickets: £9.50 from kingsplace.co.uk or £11.50 from the box office, 020 7520 1490.

Adrian Mole was a boy racked with adolescent angst, an Abba fan who still wore flares in the 80s. And 30 years ago The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ became the defining book of Alexis Petridis's adolescence Published: 16 Jan 2012 As Sue Townsend's archetypal teen turns 30, it's a good moment to look back and see how much you remember Published: 17 Jan 2012 Anna Trench welcomes a 30th anniversary edition for Sue Townsend's enduring comic creation Published: 14 Jan 2012 Week two: Sue Townsend describes how Adrian Mole and his diary emerged from an old cardboard box Published: 17 Dec 2010 Adrian Mole (Literature) - TV Tropes Adrian Mole You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account Share WMG Adrian, Nigel, and a magazine they'd get in trouble for possessing. A series of books, written as journals, by Sue Townsend, centering around the life of Adrian Mole, a British everyman.

It starts out when he's 13¾, and the series runs until his early forties (at least). With the death of Townsend in 2014 the series has most likely come to an end barring any posthumous publications or continuation by another author. Books in the series: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (pub. 1982; covers events 1981-82; Adrian is aged 13¾ to 15) The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (pub. 1985; covers events 1982-83; Adrian is aged 15 to 16) The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (pub. 1989; covers events 1984-89; Adrian is aged 17 to 22) Adrian Mole and the Small Amphibians (pub. 1991 as part of Adrian Mole: The Lost Years; covers events 1990-91; Adrian is aged 22 to 24) Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (pub.

1993; covers events 1991-92; Adrian is aged 24 to 25) Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (pub. 1999; covers events 1997-98; Adrian is aged 30 to 31) Diary of a Provincial Man (serialised in The Guardian 1999-2001; covers events 1999-2001; Adrian is aged 32 to 33) (published in book form as The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001) Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (pub. 2004; covers events 2002-03; Adrian is aged 34 to 36) Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (pub. 2009; covers events 2007-08; Adrian is aged 39 to 40) This work provides examples of: Abusive Parents : Adrian's parents border on neglectful, although it is played for laughs.

Ambiguous Gender : In order to go to see his current crush, who works at a creche, Adrian borrows one of the neighbours' young children. He doesn't know the child's name and is not sure of their gender, so books them into the creche under the name Emily. He's banned from the creche when the staff had to change the child's nappy and discovered they certainly aren't an Emily. Adrian is unable to determine the genders of his landlord's three children in The Wilderness Years. Tamsin is a girl's name, but Griffith is usually a surname and the third kid is named Alpha . The Ace : Pandora. Beautiful, witty, Head Girl of her school, doctorate from Oxford, fluent in at least five languages, MP and published author, to list just a few of her achievements. Brett Mole is a widely acclaimed author, filmmaker, ladies' man, millionaire stock trader, wit and almost everything Adrian would like to be ... until Brett loses his money during the 2008 recession.

Barry Kent could be considered this as well, since he becomes a widely admired poet...much to Adrian's consternation, as he believes Barry cannot read and Adrian desperately wants to be recognized as a genius poet (or recognized as being ANYTHING wonderful, for that matter). After having been a housewife and mother to a large family for many years, Barry's mother Edna graduates with two first-class degrees, begins a successful career in middle age, and wins awards for her academic papers while Adrian's own life is falling apart. He's stunned. A Dog Named "Dog" : The Mole family dog is only ever referred to as "The Dog". When he dies, his successor is simply referred to as "The New Dog". Alliterative Name : Bert Baxter, Martin Muffet, Pamela Pigg, Wayne Wong Amusing Injuries : The famous Airfix glue incident. And Now for Someone Completely Different : True Confessions starts off with Adrian, before jumping to Sue Townsend herself around the halfway mark and the tail end of the book is the diary of a young girl named Margaret Hilda Roberts .

Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking : At one point, Adrian goes to see a psychotherapist who engages him in an exercise to pretend that a chair is his father and tell "him" why he has disappointed Adrian. The therapist encourages Adrian to be angrier, but he's already said everything he could think of to say, and continues with "... you didn't buy me an anglepoise lamp when I was revising for my GCSEs, and I hate your Country 'n' Western cassettes" Author Avatar : The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole features Sue Townsend as an actual character, whom Adrian believes is stalking him and trying to pass off his diaries as her own works of fiction. She also appears in True Confessions, where the opening blurb explains that Adrian sued her for this. Bad Boss : Brown, Adrian's boss at the Department Of The Environment, is a petty bureaucrat who makes hell for Adrian (and, to a lesser extent, everyone else). He's obsessed with nailing Adrian for stealing postage stamps and doesn't even give him his statutory rights when Adrian's resignation letter (which he wasn't going to submit, having got cold feet) somehow finds its way to him.

Adrian suspects that he cares more about the Newport Pagnell newts than he does about his subordinates. Beardness Protection Program : In the second book, Adrian runs away from home and tries to grow a beard. Beard of Sorrow : Adrian has a beard during The Wilderness Years, a notable emotional low point for him. Birth/Death Juxtaposition : In The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, elderly Queenie dies shortly after Adrian's sister is born, and he reflects at her funeral that she had to die in order to "make way" for the baby. Bittersweet Ending : Most of the books tend to end this way, most notably The Wilderness Years where Adrian has lost Bianca and his flat is burgled, but starts a new relationship with Jo Jo and a possible career as a chef and The Prostrate Years where Daisy leaves him, but he may have gotten back with Pandora. Black Comedy : There are some elements of this in the books, such as the deaths of Ivan Braithwaite and the Moles' dog. An in-universe example is when Adrian writes "The White Van", a sitcom about a serial killer.

The Bore : Adrian's knowledge of the Norwegian Leather Industry and his book tend to be looked upon with little interest from most people. British Teeth : Earlier on in the series, Adrian has an Australian dentist who comments on how bad British people's teeth are. The Bully : Barry Kent in the early books. The Bus Came Back : Several characters return after long absences. Mr. Lucas was absent for a whole quarter-century between Growing Pains and The Prostrate Years. Before he returned in The Cappuccino Years, Nigel, Adrian's best friend in the early books had gradually faded away from the storyline; by The Wilderness Years (in which he does not appear) Nigel was referenced in passing as Adrian's former best friend. Butt Monkey : Adrian. Captain Oblivious : Adrian misses the signs of just about everything, especially when he does something that leads to disaster for someone else. Chuck Cunningham Syndrome : Half-brother Brett Slater (until The Prostrate Years). Also several more minor characters like Animal (from The Weapons of Mass Destruction). Cluster F-Bomb : The trademark of Peter Savage, Adrian's boss at the offal restaurant in The Cappuccino Years We also hear several of these from Rosie during her teenage years.

Coming-of-Age Story : The books start off when Adrian is thirteen and ends in his forties with him becoming a grandfather. Cordon Bleugh Chef : Adrian becomes this in The Cappuccino Years, as Savage instructs him to only cook basic dishes. He gets an abysmal review in The Sunday Times. He becomes a celebrity chef specialising in offal, even though he admits to being unable to cook. By the next book, he's reduced to working in a roadside burger van . Creator Cameo : In addition to Sue Townsend's appearance in The Lost Diaries and her own diaries midway into True Confessions, Adrian's contact at The BBC , John Tydeman, was actually Radio 4's Head of Drama, responsible for the original Nigel Mole radio play and later radio adaptations of the books. Credit Card Plot : Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction has an ongoing plot about Adrian's credit card debts Critical Research Failure :invoked Adrian never bothers researching anything. He sent a character on a day trip to China (...from England) who walked around on the Great Wall because that's all he knew about the place.

In addition, Adrian's perpetually mixing up names of all branches of the arts (claiming Rupert Blake wrote "The Tyger", for example) Also, in the first book, he thinks that the Sistine Chapel was painted by Rembrandt in Venice. He finds Pride and Prejudice old-fashioned and thinks that Austen "should write something a bit more modern". He also does not know why someone named "Pandora" would have the nickname "Box". In the second book, he thinks that Evelyn Waugh was a woman and confuses Kingsley Amis with Kingsley Martin. The author herself does this sometimes, too. In one book, Adrian's younger sister becomes a Goth. Townsend seems to have this idea that Goth is some sort of cult rather than a subculture, since Rosie does not wash after this and prays to a callous "Goth god".

(Or maybe the joke here is that Rosie, not Townsend, has no clue what a Goth really is.) In The Cappuccino Years, Adrian is described as being almost knocked off his feet by "Sarah Brightman's opening shrieks" when he plays a The Phantom of the Opera CD too loudly - but Christine, the character played by Brightman, doesn't sing in the opening of the show. A newspaper proclaims Barry Kent's 45 year old father as a burly World War II veteran. Considering that this happens in the early eighties , it's completely impossible . However, as someone who grew up in Leicester, this could be a poke at the local newspaper which has a habit of getting these things wrong. In the second book, a newspaper gives Adrian's age as 5, her mother's age as 58, and mispells their surname as "Vole". Daddy DNA Test : This is how Adrian finds out he is the father of Glenn Bott, and later how the family confirms that Mr Lucas, with whom Adrian's mother had an affair in an earlier book, is the real father of Rosie.

Darker and Edgier : Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction dealt with some much darker topics than earlier books, such as Adrian's debt problems, the morality of the war in Iraq and Glenn's best friend being killed in combat, which has a profound effect on Adrian. The Prostrate Years is even darker than this, with Adrian being diagnosed with prostate cancer and suffering a painful breakdown of his marriage. While not quite as dark as either of these The Wilderness Years was rather bittersweet dealing with a period of homelessness and poverty, heartbreak and the death of Adrian's grandmother. The series as a whole gets progressively darker throughout, which is only natural given that Adrian is growing up, shedding some of his childhood innocence, and experiencing the world as an adult. However, as the series goes on, his friends and family lose their patience with and tolerance of him; admittedly he brings some of it on himself, but at times they're quite openly hostile or nasty towards him, which is a bit jarring compared to earlier books. Additionally, while some of his complaining still comes off as immature Wangst , he also accumulates more genuine worries, often mentions feeling lonely, unhappy and inadequate, and is clearly showing the effects of his troubled adolescence.

Deadpan Snarker : Adrian thinks he's this. His mother fits the trope much better. "Dear John" Letter : During Growing Pains, Pandora dumps Adrian twice this way, once because he wanted to see one of her nipples, the other because he started hanging out with Barry Kent. December-December Romance : Bert and his second wife, Queenie. They get married when he's 89 and she's 78. A Degree in Useless : Adrian's most prominent academic qualification is an A Level in English literature. When he leaves the Department Of The Environment, his jobsearch initially proves fruitless as nobody requires anyone with that particular qualification. Denied Parody : One publisher mistakes Lo! The Flat Hills Of My Homeland as a parody of English literature. Ironically it is by far the best reception Lo! recieves. Determinator : Adrian's constant mailing of his work to John Tydeman at the BBC show that he's absolutely dead set on being recognised as a great writer. Tydeman becomes increasingly frustrated with Adrian's constant letters, especially when he starts sending the manuscript for Lo! The Flat Hills Of My Homeland.

Did Not Get the Girl : Adrian never managed to get his most constant love interest, Pandora Braithwaite but the ending of The Prostrate Years might have changed this. Eagle Land : Hamish Mancini, Adrian's pen pal in the early books. Also, in The Cappuccino Years, his American literary agent fits the trope. The '80s : First few books take place in the 80's, and Adrian captured the zeitgeist very well. Egg Sitting : A variant of this takes place in The Cappuccino Years, when Rosie accidentally gets pregnant and decides to hire a lifelike simulation baby doll to see if she's ready to become a parent. The doll's crying drives her insane, and she eventually decides to have an abortion. Embarrassing Middle Name : Adrian's mother names his new sister Rosie Germaine Mole, after Germaine Greer. Adrian notes that his mother is the only person who liked the "Germaine" bit. Epistolary Novel : The books are formatted as diary entries. Adrian tends to include copies of his correspondence in his entries as well. Executive Meddling : In universe example.

Adrian's mother submits her book, A Girl Called "Shit" to a publisher, who insist she retitles it The Potato Farmer's Daughter. Everything Is Online : Adrian's ex-wife Jo Jo is apparently able to find his bank details, new address, and medical records online. Either that or she's got him under a scary amount of hidden surveillance. Fat Idiot : Sharon Bott, Glenn's mother and Adrian's former girlfriend. Unusually for this trope she is implied to have been pretty attractive as a teen, making her a borderline (former) Brainless Beauty too. He seems to think she's gorgeous in her rollerskating togs, but that might be because they're on a rollerskating date he's heard she's easy. Follow the Leader : In universe Adrian tries this twice: Once by writing in the style of Bridget Jones and once by renaming his novel Birdwatching to try and capitalise on the success of Trainspotting . Adrian's mother tried to cash in on the Misery Lit genre with her autobiography A Girl Called "Shit!" Four-Temperament Ensemble . Among the teenage main characters Sanguine: Barry Kent Well, Pandora's initials spell out PLEB ...

The Whelk Association Trust is a rather more "fun" example. Socialist Lesbians Against Globalisation. Gallows Humour : The author just loves to kill off characters in unusual ways. Gasshole : Glenn Bott gets in trouble for farting in school, and Adrian's mother comments that she's never known anyone to fart so much. Gender Scoff : When George goes to Stick Insect and their newly born son, Brett, Tania drives Adrian and Pauline back to Leicester from Skegness. When they get back, she tells Paulines that "All men are bastards" and shoots a dirty look at Adrian, who takes major offense to this. Good Girls Avoid Abortion : Averted with Rosie. She is really no more "good" or "bad" than any other character, and Adrian takes her to the clinic and she doesn't get chastised or painted as a monster by anyone. Pandora's father claims that his daughter has had at least one abortion, too. Granola Girl : The entire Flowers family (except Daisy). Brown has his moments.

For example, when driving to Newport Pagnell with Adrian to obtain an update on the newt situation, he drives stupidly close to a large truck so as to remain in its slipsteam to conserve fuel. Greater Scope Villain : Adrian's family, his father in particular, consider Margaret Thatcher to be this given the state of his employment history. Growing Up Sucks : Adrian's life gets increasingly crappy as time goes by. When we first meet him, he's being bullied in school and has to deal with his parents, but manages to get Pandora as a girlfriend. By the end of the final book, he has two failed marriages and prostate cancer. Happy Ending Override : The Wilderness Years ends on a bittersweet but clearly optimistic note for Adrian - he has just been through a very low period of his life having lost his Second Love Bianca, but even that pain has made him mature as a person with him finally getting over Pandora, and he is beginning a very promising new relationship with Jo Jo. There is even a suggestion he might have a future in writing after all.

Six years later when The Cappuccino Years starts he's gone through a bitter divorce, been left a struggling single parent, is back to be hopelessly in awe of Pandora and his writing career is no closer to getting anywhere. This happens again between The Weapons of Mass Destruction and The Prostrate Years: at the end of the former, Adrian is married to Daisy, they have a baby daughter and he seemingly gives up diary-writing because 'happy people don't keep a diary'. At the beginning of the latter, their marriage is unhappy (and falls apart over the course of the book) and Adrian is displaying the first signs of his prostate cancer. Have a Gay Old Time : Gleefully played with by Nigel, who starts up a Gay Club at school. When the headmaster objects, Nigel pretends that it's for "pupils who want to be frisky, frolicsome, lively, playful, sportive, vivacious or gamesome during the dinner break. What's immoral about gaiety?" Pop-Eye Scruton: "Nigel, the word 'gay' has changed it's meaning over the past year.

It now means something quite different." Nigel: "What does it mean, sir?" Pop-Eye Scruton: "...." Nigel: "Sorry sir, I can see that I will have to get an up-to-date dictionary!" Heroic B.S.O.D. : Adrian is no stranger to these, but the biggest one comes during Growing Pains after Pandora dumps him. He runs away from home, then upon returning, spends several days lying in bed incapable of mustering up the effort to get up. He gets better when Pandora comes back to him. He also spends some time running with Barry Kent and his gang, and even visits the Kent home (which turns out to be a much less dysfunctional bunch than his own family). Keep in mind that outside of this time, he considers Barry Kent to be an enemy, and seems to develop a deep-seated hatred of Barry's success as an adult. High School Is Hell : Adrian's secondary school life is portrayed as being difficult for him, particularly in the first book where he is bullied by Barry Kent, subjected to humiliation in P.E. classes by Mr. Jones and is generally treated like shit by "Pop-Eye" Scruton.

Hormone-Addled Teenager : Adrian's acne is a source of angst for him in the earlier books and, even into his thirties, he still gets spots. Growing Pains portrays his sexual frustration, especially when Pandora makes him wait, even dumping him when he feels he can no longer do so. Hypocritical Humor : In Growing Pains, Adrian does some last-minute Christmas shopping at Woolworth's on December 23. Then he complains about the long lines and asks, "Why do people wait to do their shopping until there are only two days left before Christmas?" Immediate Sequel : Growing Pains begins the day after Secret Diary ends. Innocent Inaccurate : Played for laughs in the first book; Adrian completely fails to pick up the obvious signs of his mother's affair with Mr. Lucas. In the second book, he fails to realize the signs of his mother's pregnancy. Innocently Insensitive : There are times when Adrian displays a complete lack of tact. When introducing Bianca to his mother, she notes that she has a degree in engineering. Adrian quips that she has not so much as built a LEGO tower since leaving college, which brings her to tears.

Intergenerational Friendship : Adrian tends to get along with senior citizens best, throughout his life. His relationship with Rosie can also count. He has mentioned that she's one of the few to understand him, and he's the one she goes to when she needs to get an abortion. Interquel : The Lost Diaries... sort of. Falling between the The Cappuccino Years and The Weapons of Mass Destruction they were originally published as a weekly column in the Guardian between 1999 and 2001 and were only published in book form in 2008. The chapters remained in limbo in so long most fans assumed they had become a case of Canon Discontinuity , especially because very little in them is mentioned in the later books. Among which include the circumstances of Ivan Braithwaite's death, which are completely different to the description thereof in the book that chronologically follows. Adrian does have a tendency to be a somewhat Unreliable Narrator , so he may simply have gotten things wrong. Mr. Niggard the bank manager early on in the series. Mr. B'astard the landlord later on. Adrian's manager at the Book Shop, Mr. Carlton-Hayes.

Carlton Hayes hospital was the psychiatric hospital just outside Leicester. Adrian notes that Peter Savage is a fitting name for a man of his temperament . Mayï¿½December Romance : Pandora and Cavendish have an affair in The Wilderness Years. He's a college professor in his sixties, whereas she's around 24. Men Can't Keep House : Pauline goes to an anti-nuclear protest at Greenham Common and several women join her at the Mole house afterwards. Several of the neighbourhood husbands show up at the house needing their wives to help them with simple household tasks. Mr. O'Leary can't find his pyjamas and Mr. Singh doesn't know how to use an electric kettle. Never Mess with Granny : After Adrian's grandma learns he's being tormented by local bully Barry Kent, she goes out, returning a little while later with the money Barry took from Adrian, and assurances that he won't be bothering Adrian again. Next day, Adrian writes, "It is all over school that a seventy-six-years-old woman frightened Barry Kent and his dad into giving back my menaces money," although precise details of what happened are never given.

No Can Opener : Happens in one of the early books when Adrian goes on a camping trip, causing him to note "Thank God cheese doesn't leak, break, soak up water or come in a tin." Perhaps because of this incident, when he ran away from home in the second book, he made sure to take a can opener with him. Not Even Bothering with an Excuse : In Growing Pains, Adrian has to have one of his front teeth pulled, and some of his classmates tease him about it. Two days later, still embarrassed and depressed, he stays in bed all morning instead of going to school. He manages to pull himself together and go to school in the afternoon, so he asks his mom for an excuse note. She writes a note that says, "Adrian did not come to school this morning because he didn't get out of bed until 12:45." Oblivious to Love : Adrian is pretty dense when women are making the move on him. Notably, Bianca drops several huge hints towards him before they get together and he is called out for his not picking up on this by both his mother and his landlord.

He's partly also afraid to make the first move himself being afraid of misjudging the situation. One Drink Will Kill the Baby : Marigold Flowers reacts with absolute horror when Adrian offers her a glass of wine while she's pregnant (although she's faking it so he will agree to marry her.) Adrian states that his mother did not adhere to this belief, and drank three cans of Guinness a night during her pregnancy. Papa Wolf : Adrian and his father have both had moments. Unfortunately, one of these moments was averted, leading to the incident mentioned in Never Mess with Granny . Pocket Protector : Bert Baxter has a Bible with a bullet hole through it, and claims that it saved his life during WWI. Adrian notices that the Bible was printed in 1956. Porn Stash : Adrian's mother discovers the porn mags he has hidden under his mattress. She also discovers the phone bill (hidden for completely different reasons) and assumes there may be some additional perversion. At least, until she finds out it was a collect call from TUNISIA. Pretty Fly for a White Guy : In the early books, Adrian's classmate Danny is a Jamaican Rastafarian who happens to have albinism.

After he calls Adrian a "honky" Adrian writes: "what a cheek, he's twice as white as I am!" Pronoun Trouble : In Weapons of Mass Destruction Adrian's employer, Mr Carlton-Hayes, always refers to his unseen partner Leslie (a unisex name) by name rather than "he" or "she," leading to a Running Gag throughout the book whereby Adrian wonders whether Leslie is male or female. The Prostrate Years reveals that Leslie is a man. Not only that, but Adrian looks forward to going to Mr. Carlton-Hayes' house to find out Leslie's gender. Put on a Bus : Several characters. The most prominent is probably Adrian's younger son William, who moves to Nigeria to be raised by his mother and is never seen again. Sue Townsend justified this in an author's note a the end of The Prostrate Years by stating that William restricted the storylines she could do with him. Racist Grandma : Adrian mentions that his grandmother is "not keen on black, brown, yellow, Irish, Jewish or foreign people".

Rapunzel Hair : Poppy Flowers has "the longest hair (Adrian has) ever seen" and it takes her four hours to wash and blow-dry her hair. Reality Subtext : Adrian's friend Nigel loses his sight over the course of the books, as the author did in real life Retcon : In The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, Jo Jo's second husband is named as "Colonel Ephat Mapfumo." In later books he is Wole, to which Adrian's son William changes his own name in honour of the stepfather. Rosie is initially described as "looking exactly like Baby Spice" (Emma Bunton, who is blonde and pale) but by The Prostrate Years she has dark hair and skin which leads Pauline Mole to suspect that Mr Lucas is Rosie's real father, later confirmed by a DNA test on The Jeremy Kyle Show There's some confusion over the ages of Adrian, his son Glenn, and Rosie at different stages in the books. The Other Wiki goes into more detail. Glenn appears to gain 5 years (born in 1990 but joins the army aged 17 in 2002.) To say nothing of the death of Ivan Braithwaite ...

Scruton retires during Growing Pains, but during True Confessions, Adrian mentions that he is still headmaster at Adrian's school. The Wilderness Years is set in 1991, during which time Adrian moves to London from Oxford thanks to a change in career and a new girlfriend. He's also established to have only passed one of his A Levels; English. In The Cappucino Years, he mentions in 1997 that he's been living in London for the past eight years. He also mentions that he has two A Levels, both of which took him three attempts to pass, though it is possible that he attempted Biology again in the intervening years. The Rival : Barry Kent, for most of the series. Adrian's half-brother Brett occasionally fills the role instead. Romantic False Lead : In The Wilderness Years, Pandora's boyfriend Jack Cavendish. Her husband Julian may also count; Adrian is clearly jealous, although Julian is a Flamboyant Gay and it's a marriage of convenience. Running Gag : Adrian's talking to many people about the Norwegian Leather Industry, and how they're all bored/annoyed by it.

In The Prostrate Years, most people Adrian talks to mispronounce the word "prostate." It's even in the book's title. Sadist Teacher : Reginald "Popeye" Scruton generally tends to make Adrian's life hell in the early books. He's implied to have been in his prime during the days when teachers could still physically beat students. Adrian's diagram of interpersonal relationships in Growing Pains lists him as a villain alongside Mr. Lucas, Margaret Thatcher and the Manpower Services Commission. Shout-Out : Bridget Jones makes a brief appearance as a character in The Cappuccino Years, when Adrian hears of her diaries being published and later sees her out on a lunch date in the trendy London restaurant where he works. He then tries imitating her writing style in his own diary but very soon decides that it's irritating and reverts. When Adrian incorporates his work at Savage's restaurant into his book, he creates an Expy for his co-worker Luigi named Mario . Slap-Slap-Kiss : More like divorce divorce kiss. Adrian's parents are always splitting up and then reuniting.

Small Name, Big Ego : Adrian is, or wants to be, this - he considers himself a celebrity (due to once presenting a show on cable about how to cook offal) and a gifted author (although his unpublished work is terrible, and his only published book was written in his name by his mother.) He frequently writes to famous people to offer "suggestions" about their lifestyles, ask for favours (e.g. to speak for free at the Christmas dinner for his book club) or ask radio/TV executives to give him his own show. Stalker with a Crush : Adrian is almost this to Pandora in the early books, after they break up as teenagers (and Pandora eventually marries another man.) In The Cappuccino Years he acquires his own Stalker with a Crush , Eleanor Flood. Starter Marriage : Adrian's love interest Pandora deliberately has one of these; it's a marriage of convenience, since her husband is gay, and she believes that first marriages should "be got over with quickly." Adrian and Jo Jo's marriage also counts. It lasted only a few years, due to them having too many social and cultural differences to be sustainable.

Statuesque Stunner : Adrian's first wife, Jo Jo is almost six feet tall and noted as being way out of Adrian's league. Part of the reason that his marriage with her breaks down is that he's insecure of the fact that she's taller than him. Stay in the Kitchen : Part of the reason Adrian's teen relationship with Pandora fails is that he wants to marry her straight out of school and expects her not to work outside the home, whereas Pandora has ... higher aspirations (see The Ace above.) Straw Feminist : Adrian's mother goes through a phase of this in the first two books. Although it's toned down in later entries, she does include an entirely irrelevant chapter about gender politics when she writes a cookbook in Adrian's name. Pandora, to a lesser extent. Adrian tries to write a book with no vowels. Dsn't g wll. Ditto for his awful pseudointellectual novel Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland. And his epic poem The Restless Tadpole, which one publisher dismissed as "effete crap". The Prostrate Years has Adrian's mother trying to write her own book, a Misery Lit memoir entitled A Girl Called "Shit"! The publisher wasn't impressed.

Probably because it was full of Blatant Lies . Barry Kent's poetry is similarly awful, yet he is incredibly successful at it. Suspiciously Specific Tense : In Growing Pains, Adrian is writing about "Stick Insect", the woman he thinks is his father's ex-mistress: "I have just realized that Stick Insect used the present tense when she was referring to her relationship with my father. It is absolutely disgraceful. A woman of thirty not knowing the fundamentals of grammar! " Teen Genius : Adrian's classmate "Brain-Box" Henderson, who reappears as an adult in Weapons of Mass Destruction. Telegraph Gag STOP : Adrian receives a confusing telegram from his mother stating "Adrian stop coming home stop" and disregards it since it makes no sense as he can't stop coming home. This leads to later problems when his estranged mother turns up "without warning". Textual Celebrity Resemblance : In Growing Pains, Nigel tells Adrian that he looks like Dustin Hoffman, to which Adrian's mother scoffs "You should be so lucky, dearie." In The Wilderness Years, random passers-by mock him for looking like John Major.

Time Skip : After Growing Pains, which is an Immediate Sequel to the first book, subsequent books take place several years after the previous books. Adrian's section of True Confessions starts off while he's still in school and has sporadic entries over a number of years, noting Adrian's post O Level schooling and the beginning of his subsequent employment at the Department Of The Environment. The Baby Trap : Marigold tries this on Adrian, but turns out to have been faking it. The Topic of Cancer : Adrian suffers from prostate cancer in The Prostrate Years. Theme Naming : Daisy, Marigold and Poppy Flowers There Is Only One Bed : Many years after they had ended their sexual relationship, Adrian and Sharon Bott are forced to sleep in the same bed for a night. Sharon's current boyfriend almost starts a fight with Adrian when he finds out. Cindy, Barry Kent's ex, names her child Carlsberg. Adrian's landlord in The Wilderness Years has three children named Tamsin, Griffith and Alpha. Women Drivers : Tania Braithwaite is a mild example in that she refuses to drive above 30 mph.

Wrench Wench : Bianca Dartington is a qualified hydraulic engineer, albeit reduced to working in a newsagents and then as a waitress. Write Who You Know : In universe, "Aiden Vole" from Barry Kent's highly successful novel, Dork's Diary, is basically a Captain Ersatz of Adrian. Which also makes Barry Kent into something of an Author Avatar . The books actually exist in universe, written by Sue Townsend, whom Adrian thinks is stalking him, stealing his journals, and passing them off as her own work. (His memory is bad enough for him to really think this, even if events are only vaguely similar.) Adrian tries this with his own novel, basing characters on people he knows and puts his protagonist into similar situations to the ones he's just witnessed. Your Cheating Heart : Adrian, who became involved with Daisy while he was engaged to her sister Marigold. In The Prostate Years his marriage to Daisy breaks down when she has an affair of her own. Adrian's parents have had multiple affairs and are forever splitting up and changing partners; notably, his mother's lover Mr Lucas turns out to be the real father of Rosie.

This manages to become (at least for Adrian's desires) something of a Tangled Family Tree as Adrian's mother marries Pandora's father, and Adrian's father marries Pandora's mother, making the double-step-siblings for a time...until everyone divorces and gets back with their original spouses. Bianca ends up leaving Adrian for his stepfather, Martin Muffet. :: Indexes :: The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole English Literature Essay The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole English Literature Essay Published: Last Edited: 23rd March, 2015 This essay has been submitted by a student. This is not an example of the work written by our professional essay writers. Adrian Mole is a worrier and dogged by ill health. He believes he is an intellectual and because of that he writes poems and reads a lot of books. In fact he isn't that smart at all, but just an ordinary boy. He also looks like one. He has, through his eyes, enormous spots (the amount of that often returns in the book). He thinks, till the part when he finds out that two women are in love with him, he's very ugly.

He interferes himself with everything and comes up for what he thinks that's right. Though he is also afraid of a school bully named Barry Kent. Other important characters: Mrs. Pauline Mole is the mother of Adrian, but not a very good one. She's member of a club that comes up for the rights of the women and because of that she won't do the household only by herself anymore. After the disapproval from her husband she leaves him for the neighbour. He treats her like a sexobject, what is also against the rights of the woman, so she leaves him as well. Mr. Mole is the father of Adrian. It seems that he doesn't care a lot about his son. If the troubles are too much to him, he drinks them away (like when his wife leaves him, he feels lost and starts drinking). Most of the time he 's unemployed. He doesn't care about his looks, and that you can see. 'If my father took more care of his appearance, none of this would have happened. It stands to reason that any woman would prefer a man to wear a suit and a lot of gold jewellery to one like my father who hardly ever shaves and wears old clothes and no jewellery.' Mr.

Lucas is the neighbour of the family Mole. He has just divorced and when Pauline feels sorry for him he becomes her (secret) lover. His nickname by Pauline is Bimbo but Adrian calls him 'creep Lucas'. He looks very fine as you can also read in the quote by Mr. Mole (there he's the man with the suit etc.). Bert Baxter is the (89 year) old man Adrian takes care of, for the Good Samaritans group. Bert makes a bad first impression upon Adrian. 'But worst of all, Bert Baxter is not a nice old age pensioner! He drinks and smokes and has an Alsatian dog called Sabre. Sabre was locked in the kitchen while I was cutting the massive hedge, but he didn't stop growling once.' Later in the book they become friends. When Bert, with a lot of protest, must go to the hospital for his health he meets Queenie. They fell in love and marry. Pandora is the new girl in class whom Adrian is secret in love with. When she's going out with Nigel, Adrian is in total shock, very sad and desperate.

Later when the couple breaks, Adrian is full of joy and, after the next relationship of her and Craig Thomas, he and Pandora fall in love. 'There is a new girl in our class. She sits next to me in Geography. She is all right. Her name is Pandora, but she likes being called 'Box'. Don't ask me why. I might fall in love with her. It's time I fell in love, after all I am 13 ¾ years old. Pandora has got hair the colour of treacle, and it's long like girls' hair should be. She has quite a good figure. I saw her playing netball and her ches was wobbling. I felt a bit funny I think this is it! Nigel is the best and only friend of Adrian. Adrian is most of the time jealous of the things Nigel's got. Like Nigel's new yellow bike, Pandora and the fact he hasn't got a single spot. Summary The book is a part of the diary of Adrian Mole. It tells about 1½ year of his life.

In this part: His parents are in a break-up, his mother leaves his father for the neighbour, but get's back to his father after a while. He fells in love with Pandora but his love isn't answered for a long time. He is bullied by Barry Kent. Adrian becomes a poet (receives two letters from the BBC therefore) and an intellectual. Gets a new (very old) friend by his Good Samaritan work and meets also new friends by his father's new work. Gets in contact with a prisoner, named Grace Pool, because she has made a toothbrush holder for Adrian. And Adrian is being terrorised by big spots You can say, a very busy year for a boy who worries all the time. Biography Sue Townsend is born 2 april 1946 in Leicester. At the age of 15 she already worked as an attendant of a garage. She was interested in literature and read much. After her divorce she began to write, in the beginning for theatre. The First Diary of Adrian Mole was her break-through in 1985. This book was immediately a world wide success, what led to a couple of sequels. Also she wrote a few (humoristic) novels.

Sue is still active, but became blind due diabetes. Personal Response 1. I've really enjoyed reading the book, because Adrian has a very hilarious look at life. He worries just too much about his problems, and that's realistic for a teenager (who also wants to be an intellectual). His two New Year's resolutions give a good example of how he wants to live, those resolutions are idiotic but not unthinkable. I think that makes the book 'both touching and screamingly funny' , his life and opinion of life is idiotic but not unthinkable. 2. I liked the book very much because it's quite comparable to about any teenager's life. Of course his character and troubles are different but it has aspects you recognize. 3. At one point Barry Kent tries to rob Adrian twenty-five pence every day, and Adrian kind of (he tries to be in the gang of the biggest third-years) lets that happen. 'Barry Kent said he would do me over unless I gave him twenty-five pence every day. I told him that he was wasting his time demanding money with menaces from me. I never have any spare money.

My mother puts my pocket money straight into my building-society account and gives me fifteen pence a day for a Mars bar. Barry Kent said I would have to give him my dinner money! I told him that my father pays it by cheque since it went up to sixty pence a day, but Barry Kent hit me in the goolies and walked off saying 'There's more where that came from.'' I just can't imagine you can let that happen or that there wouldn't be anyone who immediately stands up for you (later in the book his grandmother does). I just wouldn't give the money: that makes Barry only more powerful. If he would hit me I would try to get help as soon as possible or else hit back. Maybe it wouldn't be as hard as Barry does, but I wouldn't allow him to get his money by hitting people. Nevertheless, this made me empathize in being a victim of bullies, and I think that's a good lesson, to know what it's like for his side in such situations.

The true confessions of an Adrian Mole addict | Culture | The Guardian Adrian Mole The true confessions of an Adrian Mole addict Adrian Mole was a boy racked with adolescent angst, an Abba fan who still wore flares in the 80s. And 30 years ago The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ became the defining book of Alexis Petridis's adolescence Secret Diary of Adrian Mole: the cast of the 1985 ITV series, with Gian Sammarco as Adrian. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features Monday 16 January 2012 14.00 EST First published on Monday 16 January 2012 14.00 EST Share on Messenger Close It was the defining book of my early adolescence and, it seemed at the time, everybody else's as well. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ was the only book I can remember becoming a phenomenon, in the same way that a film or a TV show or a band would become a phenomenon.

It swept through my school like a craze, like the Rubik's Cube with knob jokes, or Panini Football '81 stickers with a streak of social comment about Margaret Thatcher's Britain. Indeed, it became such a craze that my school eventually banned it, with exactly the effect you might expect: it made the book even more popular, lending Adrian Mole, an Abba fan who still wore flares in the early 80s, a deeply unexpected sense of outlaw cool. Perhaps they banned it because of the amount of time its hero spends obsessing about his penis and reading a porn magazine called Big and Bouncy; they were saving us from ourselves. More likely because banning it formed part of the English department's apparently dauntless campaign to dissuade pupils from reading anything at all: the classroom was lined with Penguin Classic editions of The Moonstone, Dombey and Son, Jane Eyre, and sundry other novels carefully handpicked for their lack of appeal to your average 12-year-old boy. They were the kind of books that even Adrian Mole , with his pretensions to being an intellectual ("I wrote to Malcolm Muggeridge asking what to do about being one"), would have considered a schlep.

The ban notwithstanding, something similar was clearly happening all over the country. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole was published on 7 October 1982: three days, coincidentally, after the Smiths played their first gig, which rather makes the week commencing 4 October 1982 the zero hour of solipsistic 80s angst. Initially, it received little fanfare, as befits a book that was written in secret: its author Sue Townsend had been writing for 20 years, always hiding the results from her then-husband and children. A glowing review by Jilly Cooper first pushed it into the bestseller chart, but teenagers kept it there "for what seemed like years," laughs Townsend down the phone from her home in Leicester, where she has just completed a new novel, The Woman Who Went to Bed. "At one point the hardback and the paperback were both No 1. Then The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole came out and that went to No 1. They just stayed there. There was cheering all over literary London when they finally weren't No 1 any more.

I was carving up the bestseller list with these two bloody books." The thing is, she says, the book wasn't even aimed at teenagers: "It was written for parents, that was the intended audience. It was for the mothers of teenage boys." That seems obvious now. Reading it as a 40-year-old father, I recognise it as a book clearly written by one of my own: Mole is simultaneously lovable and completely exasperating, and as anyone who has had kids will tell you, love and complete exasperation are pretty much the defining emotions of parenthood. I find my interest resting less on Mole and his on-off girlfriend Pandora than his mum and dad, particularly his mum Pauline, with her ambitions crushed by the suburbs and her late-flowering feminism and her fantastic line in The Growing Pains about how the only thing more boring than listening to other people's dreams is listening to other people's problems. Indeed, reading it as a 40-year-old father, I occasionally wonder what I got out of it 30 years ago. I missed almost everything I now love about the book.

I didn't notice how doleful its very Midlands sense of humour is – like a long resigned sigh you laugh at – or how beautifully drawn the other characters are: not just his parents, but Bert Baxter, the octogenarian communist who refuses to die until he sees capitalism dismantled, and Pandora's earnest, Guardian-reading family, their marriage torn asunder by the foundation of the SDP . I didn't get a lot of the references. I had no idea who Iris Murdoch was, nor Malcolm Muggeridge, nor indeed RD Laing, whom one of Mole's teachers doorsteps during a school trip to London in the hope he will give the delinquent Barry Kent "a quick going-over". And I completely overlooked how Townsend uses Mole's naivety as a vehicle for the occasional burst of more vicious wit: "Bert showed me a picture of his dead wife," he writes. "It was taken in the days before they had plastic surgery." "That would have been a completely serious point to Adrian too," says Townsend. "He wouldn't think there was any humour in that at all.

When it was done as a radio play that was what was so wonderful, the actor who read it was 13¾ as well and he didn't get it at all. He read it without any semblance of humour in it: he didn't know." And 30 years ago, that was the point. I identified with Adrian Mole, which on one level seems bizarre – he is a self-obsessed prig and a hypochondriac to boot – but on another seems perfectly understandable. His brand of adolescent angst felt and still feels more realistic and relevant to me than any other hero of the great teenage novels I went on to read. Holden Caulfield might have been alienated, but he knew how to book into a hotel, get served cocktails and hire a prostitute, all of which marked him out as almost unfathomably exotic and alien. Adrian Mole couldn't even repaint his bedroom without the Noddy wallpaper showing through, which seemed much more my style.

I fell so in love with Mole that, in lieu of any new books about him, I bought Joe Orton's diaries , simply because they had a quote from Townsend on the cover, thus adding myself to a long line of teenage boys who found an encounter with Joe Orton to be rather an eye-opening experience. And I fell so in love with Mole that I made the fateful decision to start keeping a diary of my own. Actually, fateful isn't the right word: it implies something happened. That was the problem. Nothing happened. The only way my diary would ever have been considered fateful was in the event that someone read it and was bored to death as a result. Alexis Petridis as a teenager in the 1980s. Photograph: Guardian Adrian Mole may have been largely oblivious to the events that were taking place in his life - "there's always drama swirling around him, affairs happening, people falling in love," says Townsend, "but most of it passes him by. He really believes that his mother and Mr Lucas won't let him in the kitchen because they've got their hands full fixing the boiler" – but at least he had events to be oblivious of.

I, on the other hand, embarked on a career as a diarist unabashed by the fact that nothing of interest whatsoever took place in my life. I went to an all-boys school, so there was no Pandora and thus no need to spend time worrying about the size of my thing. Our school trips passed without a Barry Kent-like figure going awol, then getting arrested in a sex shop for the theft of some Grow It Big cream and two "ticklers". My parents stubbornly declined to lose their jobs in the recession, or get wildly drunk or run off to Sheffield to set up home with an insurance salesman ("Was it an act of God?" cackles Bert Baxter, brilliantly, when Mole informs him of this turn of events). Furthermore, I didn't use it to record my feelings either, thus managing the remarkable feat of being even more buttoned-up than Adrian Mole. I suspect my reluctance to do so might have had something to do with growing up in Yorkshire, a part of the world famed for many things, but never a fatal lack of reserve on the part of its male population.

For all I know, it might have changed with the times – the streets of Keighley might these days be thronged with men weeping on strangers' shoulders as they unburden themselves of their innermost woes – but in the Yorkshire that I knew, discussing your feelings as a man wouldn't have been considered a sign of weakness so much as proof that you were mentally ill. So I didn't. "Got up, went to school, came home, had tea, played computer games, went to bed," read my diary, over and over again, like someone making an incredibly heavy-handed point about the mundanity of middle-class life in the suburbs. The book's other great appeal, even before my school banned it, was that it carried the slight whiff of the forbidden. Perhaps because it wasn't actually intended for kids, perhaps because Townsend "thought it was a scandal that children didn't know about their sexuality, that no one ever talked about boys and what happened to them at that age", the book was pretty racy stuff, at least by the standards of the time.

Watch a sitcom from the early 80s and you can still hear a slight gasp in the audience's laughter when a character says "bloody": two years before Adrian Mole was published, the BBC had banned the Specials' Too Much Too Young because it featured the word "contraception". I can remember a cassette of the Jam's Setting Sons being passed around like contraband at my school: astonishingly, one song used the word "fucking". So did 12-year-old schoolboys, of course, and so did The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole: decorously asterisked out, but you didn't need to be an expert in semantics to know what had been censored. It addressed sex and drugs, albeit through a cloud of bathos, which was, and probably still is, how most teenagers experience them. Mole ends the book hospitalised after attempting to sniff glue ("nothing spiritual happened but my nose stuck to the model aeroplane"). Almost uniquely, it pulled off the trick of appearing to speak to teenagers unmediated.

Speaking to Townsend 30 years later, I am struck by the fact that she sounds exactly like I had thought the author of Adrian Mole would sound when I was 12, like a kind of dream auntie, with an innate understanding of teenagers, a propensity for hooting with laughter and telling funny stories: about her friendship with the late Jeffrey Bernard, her time working in youth clubs and a South American tribe she once read about who banished their children at age 12. "Imagine the meeting where they decided on it! 'God, what can we do about this? Why won't they come out of their hut? If they kick that football into the fire again…'" And occasionally, she sounds remarkably like Adrian Mole. When I tell her about my school banning the book, she laughs again. "That's so ridiculous. I can remember being sent out of class for reading Madame Bovary under the desk when I was about 14, instead of listening to some crappy thing about British fishing methods, dredging as opposed to trawling. Thrown out for reading a classic!" Just my luck! No one notices I'm an intellectual! But perhaps we all sound remarkably like Adrian Mole sometimes.

Townsend kept writing about him: eight books in total, all brilliantly funny, dragging him from the height of Thatcherism to the dying days of New Labour, from acne to prostate cancer. In some ways, that first book reads like a period piece now, perfectly capturing a Britain that I can just about remember, a grimmer, greyer, more earnest country than the popular image of the early 80s as a riot of shoulder pads, dayglow legwarmers and New Romantics would have you believe: a country where everybody smoked indoors all the time, the only thing open on Sundays was the garden centre, Channel 4's idea of prime-time programming was In The Pink ("a feminist cabaret celebrating women's lives through poetry, dance and music") and the letters page of Smash Hits hosted what editor David Hepworth memorably described as "letters from schoolgirls about the miners' strike, written on Holly Hobby notepaper". Yet something about the central character transcends his era and even his age. After all, his default position is that his is the solitary voice of sanity in a world gone mad. Who can honestly say they don't feel like that on a regular basis?

Novelist achieved worldwide success with publication of her best-known work The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4 Published: 10 Apr 2014 Comic writer who created the diaries of Adrian Mole Published: 10 Apr 2014 As Sue Townsend's archetypal teen turns 30, it's a good moment to look back and see how much you remember Published: 17 Jan 2012 Anna Trench welcomes a 30th anniversary edition for Sue Townsend's enduring comic creation Published: 14 Jan 2012 Boekverslag Engels The secret diary of Adrian Mole door Sue Townsend | Scholieren.com The secret diary of adrian mole, aged 133/4 Author 'The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, Aged 133/4' is written by Sue Townsend. Townsend was born in The United Kingdom. She grew up in a working-class family and she left school when she was fifteen. Even after leaving school she read every book that she could lay her hands on. During her childhood she practised writing without anybody knowing it.

Sue Townsend started writing with the Phoenix Theatre Writing Group and after six plays the diary entries of Adrian Mole were read by one of the actors, who sent them to the BBC. There the diary was used for a radio-play. When the book was published it was an extraordinary success. It was followed by the sequel 'The Growing Pains Of Adrian Mole'. Story 'The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, Aged 133/4' was first published in 1982 and the copyright is by Sue Townsend. It contains 187 pages. The story takes place in a working-class community in an English town in 1982. The story is told chronologically. The book is written in diary form and it is Adrian who tells what happens, but he is only a young boy and does not understand the implications of everything that goes on about him Characters There are three main characters in 'The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, Aged 133/4'. #Adrian Mole: He is thirteen years and nine months old and he is dogged by illness. He is also a worrier.

The problems of existence hit him hard, things like spots, bits of him that won't seem to keep still and the relationship between his parents. Adrian strongly believes that he is an intellectual. He buys a lot of stationary on which he can write his poems. #Pandora: She is a new girl at Adrian his school. Adrian immediately falls in love with her. He isn't pleased with the facts that Pandora is dating his best friend and that she creates scandals at school. But after a while Adrian and Pandora get together. #Bert Baxter: He is a dirty old man who lives in a house which is in a disgusting state. Adrian has to look after him, because he joins a group called 'The Good Samaritans'. They do all sorts of social work and Adrian gets 89-year-old Bert Baxter, who often makes a nuisance of himself. Summary Adrian starts his diary on January 1, when his 133/4 years old. He makes some resolutions for the new year and is worried about a spot on his face. Adrian's parents quarrel between themselves about the flowers his mother has received from their neighbour.

After a while he decides to become an intellectual, so he writes a letter to the BBC to ask what to do about this. He also writes his first poem and joins the library. At school Adrian meets Pandora. Now he is even more worried about his spots. He joins a group called 'The Good Samaritans'. They do social work for old people. Adrian looks after Bert Baxter. Adrian's first visits to Bert Baxter are disappointments, because he is a dirty old man and his house is in a disgusting state. Moreover, he complains about Adrian to the headmaster and Adrian is unjustly reprimanded. When, on top of this, he discovers that his best friend is going out with Pandora. In March his father tells him that he and mother are splitting up. At the end of the month his mother leaves for Sheffield with the neighbour after his father and the neighbour have had a fight. On June 1 Adrian's father is made redundant and starts smoking and drinking heavily. At school Adrian gets into trouble for wearing red socks, which he has put on because he feels rebellious. Pandora organises a sock protest committee and all the members put on red socks, but they are all sent home by the headmaster.

In October Bert Baxter is taken to an old age pensioner's home because of leg trouble. He hates it there and only one month later, after Adrian has been in hospital to have his tonsils out, he hears Bert has befriended a woman called Queenie. In the meantime Adrian's father is still without a job and he does nothing all day. Adrian's relationship with Pandora isn't very harmonious anymore. When Pandora finds out that another girl is in love with Adrian she fights her. Adrian has a three-day friendship with a girl called Barbara. On April 2, Adrian's birthday, Pandora ignores him. But the next day they make it up. This day happens to be the day that the Falklands War begins. Reading experience The book was recommended to me by a friend. I decided to read the book because he said it was a very funny book. I expected nothing because it wasn't attracting my attention at all. My expectation came true, because the story doesn't interest me. I didn't feel anything while reading the book and finishing it. The book can be realistic, because it can happen anywhere. You can compare it with other books that Sue Townsend has written.

There wasn't any part in the book that impressed me because I don't like reading diaries. All the aspects of the book are unsuccessful. I would advise others to read the book, because it is a very easy one. Let op De verslagen op Scholieren.com zijn gemaakt door middelbare scholieren en bedoeld als naslagwerk. Gebruik je hoofd en plagieer niet: je leraar weet ook dat Scholieren.com bestaat. Heb je een aanvulling op dit verslag? Laat hem hier achter. voeg reactie toe

Question: """The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole"", was written by which English authoress?"
Answer: SUE TOWNSEND