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Summary
Summary
The new novel from the best-selling author of I Don't Know How She Does It takes us on an unforgettable journey into first love, and--with the emotional intensity and penetrating wit that have made her beloved among readers all over the world--reminds us of how the ardor of our youth can ignite our adult lives.
Wales, 1974. Petra and Sharon, two thirteen-year-old girls, are obsessed with David Cassidy. His fan magazine is their Bible, and some days his letters are the only things that keep them going as they struggle through the humiliating daily rituals of adolescence--confronting their bewildering new bodies, fighting with mothers who don't understand them at all. Together they tackle the Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz, a contest whose winners will be flown to America to meet Cassidy in person.
London, 1998. Petra is pushing forty, on the brink of divorce, and fighting with her own thirteen-year-old daughter when she discovers a dusty letter in her mother's closet declaring her the winner of the contest she and Sharon had labored over with such hope and determination. More than twenty years later, twenty pounds heavier, bruised by grief and the disappointments of middle age, Petra reunites with Sharon for an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas to meet their teen idol at last, and finds her life utterly transformed.
Funny, moving, full of beautiful observations about the awakenings of both youth and middle age, Allison Pearson's long-awaited new novel will speak across generations to mothers and daughters and women of all ages.
Author Notes
Allison Pearson, an award-winning journalist and author, is a staff writer for the London Daily Telegraph. Her first novel, I Don't Know How She Does It, became an international best seller and was translated into thirty-two languages. She is a patron of Camfed, a charity that supports the education of thousands of African girls. Pearson lives in Cambridge with her husband and their two children.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With its internal character monologues and lively dialogue, this novel works particularly well on audio. Sian Thomas is marvelous in bringing to life 13-year-old Petra, a Welsh girl in 1974 with an obsessive crush on David Cassidy. Her voice perfectly evokes the complex mix of absurdity, yearning, and poignant insecurity of adolescence as Petra struggles to fit in with her female friends and negotiate shifting alliances. Thomas is equally adept as the older, wiser, more reflective adult Petra. In addition to bringing out every subtle nuance of emotion and character, Pearson expertly voices a variety of accents: the thick Welsh of young Petra, the guttural German of her mother, the educated as well as working-class British tones, the American voice of Cassidy himself, and most impressively, the accent of the adult Petra (who has lived in London for many years), a London accent with hints of her native Welsh. A must-listen audio for fans of smart and funny contemporary fiction-or just those looking for inspired audio narration. A Knopf hardcover. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
During the 1970s, Welsh teenager Petra and her best friend, Sharon, are wild for pop singer David Cassidy, along with millions of other fans the world over. They spend huge chunks of their leisure time perusing The Essential David Cassidy Magazine for clues to David's likes and dislikes, unaware that most of the material is being created out of whole cloth by ne'er-do-well English major William Finn, whose take on the cherubic singer is a good deal more acerbic than theirs. The novel's second half finds the characters 25 years later as Petra is grieving the death of her mother and the end of her marriage, while Bill is now running an empire of celebrity magazines though still unlucky in love. A lost letter brings them together for a David Cassidy reunion concert, which proves to be a turning point in both of their lives. Pearson is at her best in capturing the way teenage girls use their romantic obsessions with celebrities to work out their fears about real relationships with the opposite sex. An afterword includes Pearson's delightful 2004 interview with a 54-year-old Cassidy.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE British journalist Allison Pearson's frothy, peachy smoothie of a first novel, "I Don't Know How She Does It," surged with a certain inevitability to best-seller glory when it was published in 2002. So-called chick lit, about shopping and dating and cocktails, was on the wane, and its natural successor, mommy lit, was rolling in, with madcap tales of botched baking experiments, wayward nannies and extramarital e-mail flirtations. Could a wave of divorce narratives (split lit?) be far behind? The protagonist of "I Think I Love You," Pearson's second novel, is a music therapist from South Wales named Petra who has indeed been abandoned by her husband, Marcus, a handsome cellist, in spectacularly caddish fashion. After moving out of their place in London and onto the houseboat of his much younger girlfriend, a violinist, he sheepishly brings stained sheets back for Petra to launder - which, sweet middle-aged masochist, she does. But "I Think I Love You" explores only superficially this disruption of domestic harmony. Its central concern is rather our heroine's, and Pearson's, onetime adolescent love object, David Cassidy: the 1970s pop star most memorable for singing the song from which the book's title is taken, as well as his hit covers of "Cherish" and "How Can I Be Sure"; starring on "The Partridge Family" with Susan Dey; and wearing his light brown hair in long, swooping wings. Under this famous coif, and above the broadly pointed and gaudily printed shirt collars of the era, were handsome but not too threateningly masculine features and a warbling tenor voice, to which teenage girls responded en masse with an occasionally terrifying ardor. "Each night, I spread my long dark hair out on the pillow and made sure to sleep on my back so my face was ready to receive a kiss in case he came in the night," intones the adolescent Petra, Ophelia-like, in the first portion of the book, which is written in a diaristic first-person voice that all but has bubbles over the I's. Part 1 further examines the spread of Cassidy fever through Petra's clique, whose members trade Mary Quant cosmetics like poker chips, compare their limited experience with boys and cruelly assess one another's physical flaws (breasts like "blancmanges wobbling," and so forth). Petra is cursed with dark under-eye shadows - maybe it's the backsleeping. Or perhaps it's the stress caused by her mother, Greta, an aesthetically and otherwise rigorous German who, disappointed by her mundane marriage, rules her only daughter ("you stupid girl") with an iron fist, not to mention the occasional alarming swipe with a cheesecake knife. Young Petra replicates this dynamic somewhat with a beautiful, rich and more sexually experienced classmate, Gillian, who lies somewhere between Lavinia Herbert and "Heathers" in the great alpha-girl continuum of the ages. "When it came to personality, I could see Gillian would not get top marks, not even close," Petra acknowledges. "But, as a keen student of multiple-choice quizzes, I knew full well that the personality category was a consolation prize, something left over for the girls no one wanted to snog." Solace comes from a puppyishly loyal sidekick, Sharon, and a music teacher, Miss Fairfax, who tries to get Petra, herself a cellist, jazzed about high culture by integrating the low, to somewhat cornball effect. In alternate chapters we meet Bill, self-loathing creator of these quizzes for the Tiger Beat-type popular magazines devoured by the girls, and ghostwriter of "David's" missives to his fan base, many of which have a thunderingly transparent British inflection - "I reckon," that kind of thing. Pearson's attachment to her Briticisms, like "cuppa" and "bollocks," feel amplified here to draw a contrast to the faraway dreamland of Southern California, which is charming if you suffer from advanced Anglophilia. "They're like peasants in 1321," Bill despairs of his junior readership (he is prone to despairing monologues). "You give them a bit of dead badger skull and tell them it's the funny bone of the Blessed Virgin Mary and they fall down in a dead faint and give you everything they own, including the cow." Bill's observations turn out to be sadly prophetic: the retro narrative climaxes during a crowded David Cassidy concert the girls attend at White City (imagined to be a castle of unearthly delights; revealed as a "gray concrete dump reeking of urine"), Petra having told her mother, without apparent irony, that she was going to see Handel's "Messiah." This was a real-life event at which a 14-year-old fan, Bernadette Whelan, died after being asphyxiated by her overeager peers (not for nothing do they call it a "crush"), an episode re-enacted to queasy effect here. The group's interest in Cassidy fizzles swiftly thereafter (as did his career), but Pearson is doggedly committed to the idea that young girls' fleeting worship of celebrity heroes Means Something about modern civilization, or at least is a kind of sympathetic gasp of first love that prepares them for the real deal. But one can't help feeling her energies might have been more productively applied to a nonfiction study of the phenomenon, one that included bobby-soxers and Beatlemaniacs. The trouble with "I Think I Love You" is, it's difficult to make a case that David Cassidy, unlike Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, is a cultural figure who has transcended the era of his popularity, even symbolically. Though he performs regularly and has avoided the embarrassing reality-show rounds made by his Partridge brother, Danny Bonaduce, Cassidy remains a token of the schlocky '70s, like an avocado-tinted kitchen appliance or a pair of Famolares. An entire novel devoted to him - and it contains plenty of biographical detail, including the 10-page transcript of an interview conducted by Pearson herself, with tremulous feeling, for The Daily Telegraph in 2004 - is bound to be somewhat tedious for those whose idol happens to be Elvis Presley or Donny Osmond or Justin Bieber. (Is it me or are standards plummeting with every passing decade?) Indeed, once readers are strapped into a fast-forward time machine and propelled into the adult Petra's life, we find her daughter, Molly, plastering bedroom walls with posters of Leonardo DiCaprio. "I love him so much, Mum." "Yes, my darling, I know." Does she ever! Meanwhile, Bill and Petra drift toward each other at the pace of Marmite oozing off a spoon. He is also afflicted with romantic malaise, though it's unclear whether it's because of the old cliché about the British not being good at love (practicing "sex not as mad urge," he theorizes, "as a pulse of something irrepressible and strong, but as something brought on by weather - bad weather, at that - to fill the time") or because he's a tad obsessive about organizing his music collection, like Rob Fleming in Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity." That novel, like "I Don't Know How She Does It" and Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones's Diary," helped define a subgenre, if not a generation. This one is a valiant attempt to transcend the hiccups of this or that "lit," of one-hit wonderdom. But it feels like a B-side. Pearson believes that girls' worship of celebrities is a sort-of love that prepares them for the real deal. Alexandra Jacobs is an editor for the Thursday and Sunday Styles sections of The Times.
Guardian Review
Allison Pearson's new novel has had a troubled gestation, to put it mildly. It's been seven years since the working-mother smash hit, I Don't Know How She Does It. There was talk of her being sued by Harvey Weinstein for non-delivery, and Pearson's touching confession of clinical depression in the pages of the Daily Mail. It is hard for writers not to worry about "second album syndrome", especially when you've already been the voice of a generation. It took Audrey Niffenegger, author of the similarly world-eating Time Traveler's Wife, six years to write the followup, during which time she couldn't figure out why her publishers kept taking her out to lunch and making pointed remarks about their share price. But finally, and literally wrapped up in a pretty bow, I Think I Love You, Pearson's ode to David Cassidy and adolescent dreams, has arrived. Petra Williams is 13, growing up in Wales with a demanding German mother, trying to get in with the right crowd at school and deep in the throes of her very first pop star crush. Bill Finn is the young writer of Cassidy's fan magazine, who sets a quiz that Petra wins. Twenty-four years later Petra goes to claim her prize, and Petra and Bill's paths cross once more. The book is half set in 1974, and half in 1998. Writing a coming-of-age novel set in the 1970s is difficult, because the bar is already so high - Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club did a wonderful job on school life then, while Phillip Hensher's The Northern Clemency feels like a 30-year-old found object. Mentioning cheesecloth shirts, Corona lemonade and Freeman Hardy Willis, as Pearson does, doesn't feel like much more than a checklist; nor is there much sense of how it felt to live through the 90s, which is so well evoked in David Nicholls's recent novel, One Day Cassidy-lovers will adore reliving their feather-cut youth; but fans of the passionate, funny, angry, heartbreaking Kate Reddy, of whom I am most assuredly one, may find the quiet Petra Williams a more muted proposition. The book is full of odd sections that feel stapled in - there is a music therapy write-up for a character we never encounter; and at one point Bill puzzlingly starts complaining about how men never read women's commercial fiction. More infuriatingly, Bill in the 1998 section starts typing up as a magazine article the story we have already read in the 1974 section - but this isn't the real problem, which is that the book is just a little slow. Pearson is normally the most engaging and readable of writers. In I Don't Know How She Does It, she was simply incapable of writing a dull sentence. Here, the school sections are far too long, and the romance too rushed. All the major events - deaths and divorces - take place offstage and are simply discussed or reflected on by the characters. The novel's most interesting people - Petra's mother, her husband, the school queen bee - vanish without warning. A wife is dispensed with so quickly neither the character nor I were quite sure they'd ever been married at all. Of course Pearson can still turn a phrase ("Motherhood was like being in a play and only ever having the lines for the scene you were in at any given moment. By the time you figured out how to play the part, the curtain dropped and it was on to the next act"). The friendship between metropolitan, sophisticated Petra, and Sharon, who stayed behind in Wales, is funny and endearing. But at times I found myself urging this novel on, waiting vainly for it to take to its wings and soar. Which it does, in fact, shortly after it ends. By far the best section of the novel is the afterword: the transcript of an interview Pearson did with the real David Cassidy in 2004, which set the idea for the book in motion. It is funny, touching, and incredibly insightful into the life of a young superstar. It reminds you just how good Pearson can be. Jenny Colgan's The Good, the Bad and the Dumped is published by Sphere. To order I Think I Love You for pounds 12.49 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop [David Cassidy]-lovers will adore reliving their feather-cut youth; but fans of the passionate, funny, angry, heartbreaking Kate Reddy, of whom I am most assuredly one, may find the quiet [Petra Williams] a more muted proposition. The book is full of odd sections that feel stapled in - there is a music therapy write-up for a character we never encounter; and at one point [Bill Finn] puzzlingly starts complaining about how men never read women's commercial fiction. More infuriatingly, Bill in the 1998 section starts typing up as a magazine article the story we have already read in the 1974 section - but this isn't the real problem, which is that the book is just a little slow. [Allison Pearson] is normally the most engaging and readable of writers. In I Don't Know How She Does It, she was simply incapable of writing a dull sentence. Here, the school sections are far too long, and the romance too rushed. All the major events - deaths and divorces - take place offstage and are simply discussed or reflected on by the characters. The novel's most interesting people - Petra's mother, her husband, the school queen bee - vanish without warning. A wife is dispensed with so quickly neither the character nor I were quite sure they'd ever been married at all. - AJenny Colgan.
Kirkus Review
Welsh teenager obsessed with pop star David Cassidy finally gets an opportunity to meet her idol, 24 years later than expected.In 1974, with his bell-bottom catsuits, shaggy hair and come-hither green eyes, Partridge Family star David Cassidy is everything to awkward 13-year-old Petra Williams. She loves him with the near-hysterical devotion shared by many of her contemporaries. A smart girl, Petra gets little emotional support from her strict, German-born mother Greta. She prefers the house of her best friend Sharon, a boisterous, sweet-natured classmate who is almost as besotted with David as she is. Their world, with its emotional highs and lows, is little understood by adults, with one exception. Bill Finn is a young editor at The Essential David Cassidy Magazine. Not only does his work make him privy to the secret world of teenage girls, he actually is David, at least in print. His ghostwritten monthly "letters" from the star stir the fans, while embarrassing the author, who does not have the heart to even tell his girlfriend what he does. Like Petra, he is present at the singer's notoriously crowded London "farewell" concert, during which 750 girls ended up needing medical treatment. After that, Petra starts to grow out of her infatuation, becoming an accomplished music therapist with a teenaged daughter of her own. But after separating from her husband, she goes through her late mother's things and discovers something Greta had long kept from her. Back in the '70s, Petra had won a contest giving her the chance to meet David. Overcome with conflicting emotions, she tries to claim her prize, and lucks out when Bill Finn gets wind of her story. Now the successful (and single) head of a magazine group, he arranges a dream trip to Las Vegas for Petra and Sharon to finally meet the singer. He tags along, nursing a crush of his own. Witty and engaging, Pearson's follow-up to the bestselling I Don't Know How She Does It (2002) skillfully captures the overwrought emotions of youth, as well as their more subtle but no less ardent adult counterparts.Big-hearted exploration of the bittersweet pleasures of unrequited love.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Arriving nine years after Pearson's best-selling debut, I Don't Know How She Does It, her second novel is a very different book. It begins in 1974 with Petra, a teenager in south Wales, who is pop star David Cassidy's biggest fan. As Petra and her best friend, Sharon, read The Essential David Cassidy Magazine, they moon over every song and outfit. Alternating chapters focus on Bill, a young journalist who pretends to be Cassidy as he writes the magazine. Petra and Sharon spend hours answering questions about their idol for a contest that could win them a chance to meet Cassidy. The novel's second half takes place in 1998; Petra is an adult with her own teenage daughter and a troubled marriage. After her mother dies, Petra discovers that her mother never told her she won the contest. She contacts the magazine publisher (now Bill, of course) and finds herself on the way to meet Cassidy. Verdict The Briticisms and cultural references can be hard for an American reader to understand at times. And while the second half is well paced, the first half drags a bit. If David Cassidy was your man back in the day, this is the book for you. [200,000-copy first printing; four-city tour.]-Beth Gibbs, Davidson, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
9781400042357|excerpt Pearson: I THINK I LOVE YOU 1 His favorite color was brown. Brown was such a sophisticated color, a quiet and modest sort of color. Not like purple, which was Donny's favorite. I wouldn't be seen dead in purple. Or in a Donny cap. How much would you have to like a boy before you went out wearing a stupid purple peaked cap? Honest, it's amazing the things you can know about someone you don't know. I knew the date of his birth--April 12, 1950. He was a typical Aries, but without the Arian's stub?bornness. I knew his height and his weight and his favorite drink, 7Up. I knew the names of his parents and his stepmother, the Broadway musical star. I knew all about his love of horses, which made perfect sense to me because when you're that famous it must be comforting to be around someone who doesn't know or care what famous is. I knew the instrument he learned to play when he was lonely. Drums. I knew the name of the dog he left behind when he had to move away from New Jersey. I knew that when he was a boy he was small for his age and he had a squint and had to wear an eye patch and corrective glasses, which must have been hard. Harder than for a girl even. I didn't wear my glasses if I could help it. Only in class for the blackboard, though I couldn't see well without them and it got me into trouble a few times when I smiled in the street at total strangers I mistook for members of my family. A few years later, when I got contact lenses, I was stunned by the trees. They had leaves, millions of leaves, with edges so sharp and defined they looked like God had made each one with a pastry cutter. Basically, before I was sixteen, the world was one big Impressionist painting, unless I screwed up my eyes really tight to bring it into focus. Some things, as I would discover, were best left a blur. Back then, I wasn't interested in the real world. Not really. I answered my parents' questions, I gave the appearance of doing homework, I lugged my cello into school on my back, I went downtown on Saturday afternoons with girls who sometimes felt like friends and sometimes didn't, but I was living for Him. Each night, I spread my long dark hair out on the pillow and made sure to sleep on my back so my face was ready to receive a kiss in case he came in the night. It wasn't that likely, obviously, because I lived in South Wales and he lived in California, which was five thousand miles away, and he didn't even have my address, although I had once sent a poem for him to a magazine. Choosing the right color paper took longer than writing the actual poem. I settled on yellow, because it seemed more mature than pink. I thought all the other girls would choose pink and part of loving him was finding better ways to please him so he would know how much more I cared. They didn't sell brown writing paper or I would have used brown, because that was his favorite color. Sometime later--three weeks and four days if you're counting, and I definitely was--a reply came in the post. It was seventeen words long, including my name. It didn't matter that the letter said they were sorry they couldn't publish my poem. In some crucial way, I felt as though I had made contact with him at long last. Someone important in London, someone who had been in the same room as him, had touched the yellow paper I had touched and then typed my name on an envelope and licked the stamp. No rejection slip has ever been more treasured. It took pride of place in my scrapbook. I knew exactly where he lived in California. In a canyon. A canyon was like one of our valleys, only much bigger. We said much bigger. David said way. Way bigger. Way was American for much . America was so big that Americans would drive one hundred miles just to have dinner with someone and they didn't think that was a long way to go. In America, way to go means you've done something well. Way to go, baby! And they have gas instead of petrol. Other words I had learned were cool , mad and bathroom . You have to be careful because a bathroom is not a bathroom in America, it's a toilet. "The Americans are a most polite people who are not standing for vulgarity," said my mother, who was German and beautiful and disapproved of many things. You might say that my mother's whole life was a battle to keep the vulgar and the ugly at bay. In our town, she had found the perfect enemy. I just liked knowing American words because they brought me closer to Him. When we met, it would be important to retain my individ?uality, which was one of the top things David looked for in a girl. In every interview I had read, David said that he preferred a girl to just be herself. But to be honest with you, I was unsure of who myself was, or even if I had one, although I still maintained a touching faith that this unknown and as yet undiscovered me would be deeply appealing to David when we eventually met. How could I be sure? The understanding in his eyes told me so. (Oh, those eyes. They were deep green pools you could pour all your longing into.) Still, I reckoned that meeting David would be awkward enough without any unnecessary confusion, so I did my best to pick up American. It would be tricky to go to a bath?room in his house in Los Angeles, for example, and find there was no bath, wouldn't it? Or imagine saying someone was mad. David would think that I meant they were angry. Crazy means mad in America. Back then, I couldn't imagine David ever being angry, he was so gentle and sensitive. Sorry, do I sound mad? "Donny Osmond's a moron," Sharon said firmly. She was kneeling on the floor, picking at the staples in a centerfold with her thumbnail, trying to free a male torso. The slender, headless body was naked to the waist and practically hairless, except for a fine golden down just above the belt, which boasted a heavy bronze buckle. It looked like the door knocker to an Aztec temple. Sharon eased the poster off the frail metal pins until it rested on her hands, trembling a little in the hot air blowing from the small heater beside her. Sharon's bedroom was small, painted a sickly shade of ointment pink and reeked of burned hair, a bad cotton-candy smell that got in your nostrils and stayed there. Sharon had dried her hair in front of the heater and a few strands had gotten sucked into the back, but we didn't really notice the smell, so absorbed were we in our work. "I don't think Donny's a moron, to be honest with you," I said carefully. "All the Osmonds are morons. I read it in a mag," she insisted, without looking up from the poster. Sharon was an expert restorer. The best artist in our class. When she grew up she could probably get a job in a museum or an art gallery. I loved to watch her work. The way she rolled her tongue into a little tunnel when she was concentrating and applied her attention to the tiny puncture holes in David's stomach, soothing the torn paper with her fingertips until the flesh appeared to seal up. "There you go, lovely boy," she said, and placed a noisy smack?ing kiss on his belly button before adding the poster to the pile. There was a prickle in my throat like a piece of trapped wool. I badly wanted to correct Sharon about the Osmonds' being morons, but our friendship was still too new to risk disagree?ment. We liked each other because we agreed. We agreed because we both thought David Cassidy was the most wonderful boy currently alive and maybe in all of human history. At thirteen years of age, I couldn't imagine the luxury of having a friend you could disagree with. If you disagreed with her, you could fall out. Then, before you knew it, you'd be back out there in the playground by yourself, sighing and checking your watch every couple of seconds to indicate that you did have an arrangement to meet someone and were not, in fact, the kind of sad, friendless person who had to pretend they were waiting for friends who did not exist. Even worse, you could find yourself entering into anxious negotiations with some other borderline outcast to be your partner in PE so you didn't have to be in a pair with Susan Davies--Susan Smell, who had a disease of the skin no one could spell. Her face, her arms and her legs were all cratered, like the surface of the moon, only some days the holes were filled in with the chalky dust of calamine lotion. We knew exactly what it was because our mothers dabbed the lotion on us when we got chicken pox. The angry, itchy spots were like tiny volcanoes around which the soothing pink liquid hardened into a tempting lava crust. Mustn't pick it, mind, or it would leave a scar. The worst thing about Susan Davies, apart from the way you felt really sorry for her but still didn't do anything to help her, was the stink. Honest to God, Susan smelled so bad it made you retch in the corridor when she went past, even though she always walked on the side with the windows. "Donny's a Mormon . I think it's a religion they founded in Utah," I said cautiously, trying the sounds in my mouth. Ooh. Ta. I knew exactly what Mormons were. Donny Studies were part of my deep background research on David. I knew everything about the other Osmonds, too, just in case, even Wayne. At a pinch, I could have given you the star sign of every member of the Jackson 5, and details of their difficult upbringing, which was in such contrast to their carefree, joyful music. Twiddly diddly dee, twiddly diddly dee. Twiddly diddly dee. Dee dee! You know, I can never hear the opening chorus of "Rockin' Robin" without a spasm of regret for what became of that remarkable little boy and all his sweetness. Even as a child, I had this overdeveloped taste for tragic biographical information, a sort of twitching inner radar for distress. I may have been the only one not to be in the least bit surprised when Michael Jackson began to take leave of his adorable black face in painful cosmetic stages. You see, I understood all about hating the way you looked and wanting to magic away the child who made a parent feel angry or disap?pointed. When you grow up, they call this empathy. When you're thirteen, it just makes you feel like you're not so horribly alone. "D'you reckon Mormons all have to wear purple because it's Donny's favorite color?" I asked. Sharon giggled. "Get away with you, Petra, you're a case, you are!" We thought we were hysterically funny. We laughed at anything, but lately boys had become a particular target for our witticisms. We laughed at them before they could laugh at us, or ignore us, which curiously felt even more wounding than being teased or insulted. You know, I always liked Sharon's laugh better than mine. My laugh sounded like a nervous cough that only starts to let itself go too late, when the joke has passed. Sharon made that happy, hiccupy sound you hear when you pull a cord in a doll's back. She looked a bit like a doll, did my new maybe friend. She was round and dimpled and her eyes were an astonishing bluebell blue beneath the palest barely there lashes. Her hair was that bone-dry flaxen kind that bursts out of a person's head like a dandelion clock. When we sat next to each other in Chemistry, her hair would float sideways on an invisible current of hot air from the Bunsen burner and stick to my jumper. If I tried to sweep it off, the static gave me a shock that made my arm swarm. Sharon was pretty in a way everyone in our group could agree was pretty without feeling bad about it. It was a mystery. Her weight seemed to act as a sort of protective jacket against jealousy. When she lost her puppy fat I think we all sensed it might be a different story. In the meantime, Sharon posed no threat to Gillian, who had gotten the two of us together in the first place and who was the star of our group. No, that's not right. Gillian was our sun. We all revolved around her and you would do anything, anything at all, really humiliating and shameful things, just in the hope she might shine on you for a few minutes because the warmth of Gillian's attention made you instantly prettier and more fascinating. As for me, the jury was still out on my looks. I was so skinny that next to Sharon I looked like a Victorian matchgirl. And don't go thinking, "Oh, get her, she's proud of her figure." Skinny is not the same as slim, no way. Skinny is the last-girl-but-one-to-get-a-training-bra be- cause you've got nothing up top. God, I hate that expression. Up top. "Hasn't got much up top, has she?" Where we lived, girls had Up Top and Down There. You don't want to let a boy go Down There, but sometimes he was allowed Up Top, if you'd got anything there, like. Skinny is always being late for hockey and being made to run five times round the games field because you keep your blouse on until the others have left the changing room so they don't see your sad little girl's vest. A vest with a single shaming rosebud on the front. The magazines told us to identify our good points. Mine was eyes. Large and gray-blue, but sometimes green-blue flecked with amber, like a rock pool when the sun is shining on it. But my eyes also had these liver-colored smudges under them that no cucumber slices or beauty sleep could ever cure. I never stopped trying though. "Petra's dark circles are so bad she could go to a masked ball and she wouldn't need a mask," Gillian said, and everyone laughed, even me. Especially me. Be careful not to show her what really hurts or she'll know exactly where to put the knife in next time. My worst feature was everything else, really. I hated my knees, my nose and my ears--basically anything that stuck out. And I had pale skin that seemed even paler because of my dark hair. On a good day, I looked like Snow White in her glass coffin. Expertly, my mother took my face in one hand, chin pinched between thumb and forefinger and tilted it sharply toward the bathroom light. She squeezed so tight my jaw ached. "You are not unattractive, Petra," my mother said coolly. "Bones really quite good. If you pluck the brows when you are older, here and here, like szo, revealing the eyes more. You know, you are really not szo bad." "It's too bad, Mum, not so bad. I don't look too bad." "That is exactly what I am saying to you, Petra. Relax, please. You are not szo bad for a girl at her age." Excerpted from I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
