I've never experienced a greater sense of recognition than when reading The Secret Diary
I've never experienced a greater sense of recognition than when reading The Secret Diary
Townsend's writing is still a delight, Adrian's poetry is still dreadful, and his sense of self-importance is still hilariousI not only wept, I howled and hooted and had to get up and walk around the room and wipe my eyes so that I could go on reading
Very funny indeed
Townsend has held a mirror up to the nation and made us happy to laugh at what we see in it
Every sentence is witty and well thought out, and the whole has reverberations beyond itself
One of the great comic creations
A classic. The Adrian Mole diaries are thoroughly subversive. A true hero for our time
Adrian Mole is one of literature's great underachievers; his tragedy is that he knows it and the sadness of this undercuts the humour and makes us laugh not until, but while, it hurts
The funniest person in the world
Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946. Despite not learning to read until the age of eight, leaving school at fifteen with no qualifications and having three children by the time she was in her mid-twenties, she always found time to read widely. She also wrote secretly for twenty years. After joining a writers' group at The Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, she won a Thames Television award for her first play,
Womberang, and became a professional playwright and novelist. After the publication of
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, Sue continued to make the nation laugh and prick its conscience. She wrote seven further volumes of Adrian's diaries and five other popular novels - including
The Queen and I,
Number Ten and
The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year - and numerous well received plays. Sue passed away in 2014 at the age of sixty-eight. She remains widely regarded as Britain's favourite comic writer.