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Anne Goodwin
a book bubble about
Sugar and Snails
Literature & Fiction
Author Insight
The drama and trauma of adolescence
Given the complexity of the developmental tasks of adolescence, I’m sometimes amazed so many people come through unscathed. But I’m particularly interested in the casualties: those who, despite maturing in years, remain psychologically stuck in that limbo between childhood and adulthood, too wounded by the experience to move on. In this novel, I explore the physical and psychological challenges of adolescence, and the interaction between them. As adults, we can underestimate how confusing puberty can be: your own body leaking menstrual blood or semen, and changing shape at an alarming rate. But those physical changes can also provide the catalyst for other changes more under the young person’s control as they experiment with hairstyles, tattoos and outrageous styles of dress. This playing around with different ways of being is part of the process through which the child creates his or her adult identity. But some adolescents, like my character Diana, don’t feel safe to play with who they are. Some parents and teachers can’t tolerate the adolescent’s inconsistency: needy and childish one moment, exaggeratedly independent the next. I believe this ambivalence lies at the heart of the process of becoming our adult selves, and what makes it so precarious. The failure to play with identity can stunt growth or lead to radical changes from which there’s no going back.
Book Excerpt
Sugar and Snails
Other rumours blew around the playground. If you were a girl, you were destined to get dreadful stomach cramps, severe enough to lead to bleeding between your legs and you’d have to go around with a mini-nappy in your knickers. If you were a boy, you were fated to get odd sensations in your cock, twitching and swelling till it forced its way out of your underpants. You’d start to dream of women’s breasts and a liquid, thick like sour milk, would leave a smelly white patch on the sheets that told your mother you’d been thinking dirty. Boy or girl, the indignity was unavoidable, as sure as the school bus and black woollen blazers with an embroidered badge on the breast pocket.
The female way seemed marginally preferable. All that blood and pain could be a secret wound, like a saint’s stigmata. I found where Patricia hid her Dr Whites in the airing cupboard and made my plan.
It was a Sunday afternoon. My dad was out hiking, Patricia doing her homework at her boyfriend’s, Trevor playing at being guerrillas with his mates, and my mother downstairs watching an Ealing comedy with her feet up on the pouffé. I took the bread knife from the kitchen and crept upstairs. In the bathroom, I bolted the door and changed into clean pyjamas, the closest I had to a surgical gown. I tore open a fresh packet of Dr Whites and laid them beside the knife. I removed my pyjama bottoms and draped them over the side of the bath.
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