I should have known they wouldn’t get it. As Rennison remembers in the piece, the conversation with her American editor went like this: But as Rennison herself noted in a piece for The Guardian in 2014, American readers had a slightly tougher time with such words. As Runcie describes it in The Telegraph, “It was difficult to switch out of it in your own brain after reading.”Īs a young teenager I remember first seeing the books in my school library and being shocked and delighted that words like thongs, knickers and snogging had made it onto the front covers of books. The books’ main character Georgia Nicolson was reportedly based on Rennison herself as a teenager and spoke in a delightfully idiosyncratic and incredibly infectious way. Rennison published the first title in the series, Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, in 1999 and went on to write a series of 10 books. In The Bookseller Melissa Cox, head of range at Waterstones described Rennison as a pioneer:Ĭompared to the perfect American teenagers that peopled so much of contemporary teenage fiction back then, Georgia Nicolson, Dave the Laugh and the gang all seemed to me to be supremely real and just like my own friends…The books also taught me that girls were funny, because, pre-internet and social media, you didn’t get a lot of young women quipping, making puns or generally being silly. This teenage girl who was funny above all else was a role model for any girl who has ever been told by a boy that “girls aren’t funny”. I devoured the books because they made me laugh, but also because they made me feel as though the horrors of teenage life in Britain were not something unique to me, and that things might turn out okay in the end. Writing in The Telegraph Charlotte Runcie remembered: Rennison was best known for her Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series written for teenagers, which included the titles Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging and Knocked Out By My Nunga-Nungas.īeloved by all who read her, Rennison’s books portrayed British teenage girls who were funny and silly and whose lives reflected those of real girls up and down the country. I went to a party dressed as a stuffed olive.The author Louise Rennison has died at the age of 63. I am very ugly and need to go into an ugly home.Ħ. In fourteen days the summer hols will be over and then it will be back to Stalag 14 and Oberführer Frau Simpson and her bunch of sadistic ‘teachers’.ĥ. I have a three-year-old sister who may have peed somewhere in my room.Ĥ. I have one of those under-the-skin spots that will never come to a head but lurk in a red way for the next two years.ģ. There are six things very wrong with my life:ġ. Brilliantly funny, teenage angst author Louise Rennison’s first book about the confessions of crazy but lovable Georgia Nicolson.

Angus full frontal snogging