by Kathy Lette
About the Book
Now an adult on L-plates, Debbie and her girlfriends reveal what women talk about when there are no men around. Prepare yourself for full-frontal comedic camaraderie.
After breaking off with both her best friend and boyfriend, Debbie runs away to the inner-city world of punk rock, dodgy jobs, new mates and R-rated adventures.
It’s the kaleidoscopic 1980s, a time of perms, shoulder pads, Blondie and Bowie, prawn cocktails, fondue parties and mistaking promiscuity for feminism. The blokes are laughing all the way to the sperm bank – of course they’re for ‘free love’ as they don’t have to pay for it.
Preyed upon by married men and misogynistic bosses, girlfriends are the only people you can rely on. Debbie’s female pals are her human Wonderbras – uplifting and supportive. But it’s not until the Girls’ Night Out that these friends really peel off to their emotional undies … And it’s a psychological striptease that reveals some jaw-dropping truths.
With equal parts humour and pathos, Kathy Lette, one of the pioneering voices of contemporary feminism, exposes all the fun and foolish things we do when scrabbling to find our high-heeled feet in the world.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Prologue: A note to mums about to read this book
The tsunami
You’ve got mail
THE PUNK PHASE …
The Sushi Sisters
You’ve got mail
THE HIPPIE PHASE …
Vegetable magnetism
You’ve got mail
BROADENING THE HETEROSEXUAL HORIZONS
Good vibrations
Married men – The Kangarucci Cowboy
More married men – The glory box
He’s coming at seven
More or less married men – Girls’ talk
Plutonium in the porridge
The Ned Kelly complex
BACK TO SUBURBIA
The car
You’ve got mail
Free kick
A melanoma called Bruce
Girls’ night out
Epilogue: Letter to my teenage self
Acknowledgements
About the author
Also by Kathy Lette
Copyright Notice
For the most important girls in my life – my dearest sisters, Jenny, Liz and Cara, my beloved mum Val, and darling daughter Georgie.
Introduction
The boys I grew up with disproved the theory of evolution – they were devolving into apes. They thought ‘sex drive’ meant doing it in the car – no doubt because of that little sign on the rear-vision mirror which says ‘OBJECTS IN THIS MIRROR MAY APPEAR LARGER THAN THEY ARE’.
Yep. Surviving one puberty is difficult enough, but I’ve now endured four. First there was my actual puberty, then the book about it called Puberty Blues, (a slim creation that speaks volumes – it’s like straight literary Vegemite, no butter) followed by the Bruce Beresford film of the book and then, in my fifties, mid-menopause, I relived it all again in the twenty-hour TV miniseries – which proved very hormonally confusing, as I’m now sporting wrinkles instead of pimples.
Watching the series, which is like a home movie, I was torn between experiencing side-splitting hilarity and nausea to the point of projectile vomiting. It brought back, in a raw rush, what it was like to be treated as little more than just life support to a pair of breasts. We surfie girls were runners-up in the human race. We weren’t allowed to ride surfboards. Our only role was to fetch the boys’ Chiko Rolls, massage male egos and mind the towels. Basically we just lay on the beach all day in teeny-weeny bikinis, nervously glancing downwards in case our G-strings had slipped. Believe me, it gave ‘bad hair day’ a whole new meaning.
Yes, the surfie boys had serious pecs appeal and twinkly eyes, but they were also emotional bonsai – you had to whack on the fertiliser to get any feelings out of them.
Although the most famous feminist in the world at the time was Australian, ‘women’s lib’ had not trickled down to suburbia. I remember being with the boys in the beer garden of a beachside pub as they argued over whose turn it was to order a round of ‘germs’. When I pressed them for clarification, they expounded, ‘Germaine Greers – beers’. They had no idea that Germaine was the leading intellectual of the age. This iconic feminist was merely rhyming slang for a schooner.
When I tell people overseas that I grew up in ‘The Shire’ they think I’m some kind of hobbit. Much of my family still lives in the ‘insular peninsula’ and I go back, often. It’s a beautiful part of the world, flanked by the Royal National Park and Port Hacking River on one side, and the sandhills of Kurnell and Botany Bay on the other. Living in London now, under that oppressive grey duvet of rain clouds, I miss being drenched in a wash of syrupy sunlight as you lie supine on the golden sands of Greenhills. I miss the huge azure sky with its curlicues of creamy clouds. I miss the wattle-scented winds warm as an embrace. Whenever I come home my sisters and I frolic on our boogie boards at Cronulla; four aged Gidgets, holding hands as we hurtle shoreward like human hydrofoils.
And I’m pleased to report that nobody orders us to go fetch the Chiko Rolls. Cronulla surfie boys have finally flopped onto the shore and evolved. When I was a beach babe, our self-esteem was lower than Kim Kardashian’s bikini line, but young surfie girls today are determined to be treated as equals instead of sequels. Now it’s my nieces out the back carving up the waves while the boys fetch the milkshakes and ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over the girls’ aquatic manoeuvres.
Southern Star, the producers of the recent TV series, were incredibly inclusive, taking up my suggestions on storylines and personality traits and allowing me to tweak dialogue, bringing back such Aussie classics as ‘titting off’, ‘deadest spunkrat’ and ‘rack off ya fish-faced moll’. (I know. It’s practically Shakespearean.)
Each witty and pithy episode captured the casual racism and sexism of the time in hilarious but heart-wrenching detail. It also reminded us of the extraordinary mix of optimism, naivety, brutality, larrikinism, mateship, politically incorrect humour and rough-and-ready hedonism which characterised Australia in the 1970s. The 70s was a time of great social upheaval. Gough Whitlam had just been elected, dragging us out of the beige, 1950s mentality of Menzies and conservative Co. Cleo magazine scandalised the Aussie male population by publishing nude male centrefolds. And Helen Reddy’s single ‘I Am Woman’ was encouraging females to stop being tethered to the kitchen by their apron- and heartstrings and to stand on our own two stilettos.
I’d presumed that the miniseries would be a raunchy romp down memory lane for my generation and also perhaps provide some clarification for our bewildered parents as to why their garden hoses were always shrinking (because we kids were cutting off the ends to make bongs – sorry Mum). But to my surprise, the TV series proved particularly popular with teenagers. They marvelled at the freedom we enjoyed in the 70s – no mobile phones to track our every movement, nor PC police constantly lecturing us on the dangers of smoking, alcohol, sunbathing and sugar. The success of the series amongst this demographic reminded me that navigating adult life while still being treated like a child is always going to be confronting and confusing, and the issues faced by the girls in Puberty Blues – that is, drugs, drinking, addiction, parental disputes, divorce, differentiating between love and lust, unwanted pregnancies, peer-group pressure, gang inclusion, bullying exclusion, misogyny and the sex wars, are, sadly, as achingly relevant as ever.
When Puberty Blues was first published (and it was very scary to go from teenage anonymity to overnight notoriety. Surely a case of mistaken nonentity?, I panicked, a
t the time) the book achieved cult infamy. I’ve lived predominantly in London for the last twenty-eight years, and Aussies my age are always dashing up to me in the street, laughing, ‘Go get me a Chiko Roll and DON’T TAKE A BITE OUT OF IT ON THE WAY OR YOU’RE DROPPED!!’ So it was exciting to have the book reinterpreted for a younger audience.
But the question I am asked constantly by young women is – what happened next? Well, the 80s was just as sexist and confusing as the 70s, only with much worse outfits. We girls sported perms which looked as though we’d sutured our pubic hair to our craniums, wore shoulder pads so huge they could double as sanitary towels and dangly earrings that could easily be mistaken for elephants’ IUDs. We also wore our hearts on our sleeves, something older men took full advantage of.
If we girls thought that surfie boys were Neanderthal in their attitudes to the female of the species, entering the workforce taught us that dinosaurs really did still roam the Earth. I remember my job interview at a major Australian television station. Five male executives sat across the desk from me. The most high-ranking of them slapped ten dollars on the table and bragged, ‘I bet I can make your tits move without touching them.’ I shrugged, a little bewildered. He then lunged forward, mauled my breasts and shoved the money at me, guffawing ‘You won.’ As the men smacked their thighs with matey mirth, I slapped twenty dollars on the table and announced, ‘I bet you twenty bucks I can make your balls move without touching them,’ and kicked the man who’d mauled me hard between the legs. Yes, I got the job, but what an initiation. Today you’d file a sexual harassment suit, but in the 1980s, young women just had to strap on a bulletproof bra and get the hell on with it.
(Note to young women entering the workforce: If your boss comes on to you I suggest you use a woman’s most lethal weapon and shoot from the lip. Simply point at his appendage and say, ‘What do you want me to do, floss?’ Or point out that if he’d prefer to avoid the inconvenience of being separated from his scrotum then he’d better stop now.)
But getting back on topic, I think that the best way to answer the question of ‘what happened next’ is to revisit the book I wrote after co-writing Puberty Blues with Gabrielle Carey, called Girls’ Night Out. The novel was a bestseller in Australia and Britain and was banned in New Zealand – a point used to maximum publicity on the American edition, guaranteeing great coverage in the New York Times book pages and launching my career in Britain. The novel was optioned by various movie directors, including Harvey Weinstein. But, be warned – its sometimes derogatory and racist lingo and sexist vernacular are cringe-worthy by today’s standards. This foreword is to teach the reader to look backward. Rough and ready as it is, the book did punch way above its weight and definitely hit a nerve at the time.
I was only in my early twenties when I wrote it, so the prose is raw and raunchy. But it does capture the flavour of the early 1980s and the dilemmas and dramas young women faced as we found our place in the world.
Basically, After the Blues imagines what happened to Debbie in the next stage of her life, and follows Debbie and a gang of her girlfriends through their various adventures – the hippie phase, the punk years, flat-sharing in the inner city, sowing whole plantations of wild oats in the name of ‘sexual equality’, being preyed upon by married men, broadening sexual horizons with visiting English poets and playwrights, joining various political causes, slumming it with ex-cons, and finally, eventually, taking on the old sexist surfie gang back at Greenhills. The stories culminate in a girls’ night out, where we see our characters peeling off to their emotional underwear in a psychological striptease which reveals all.
The narrative is discontinuous, but the message of the book is clear – that no matter what life throws at you, your female friends are your human Wonderbras: uplifting, supportive and making you look bigger and better.
So, whack on your shoulder pads, pour yourself a Bacardi and Coke, slather on some pink lippy, metallic eye shadow, clumpy mascara, masses of blusher and wide-leg, high-waisted trousers, put some Pink Floyd, Johnny Rotten, Carole King, Lou Reed, Donna Summer or ABBA on the record player, go get a battered sav and slip between my covers. Nostalgic, occasionally toe-curling amusement guaranteed.
Prologue: A note to mums about to read this book
Living with a teenage daughter is like living with the Taliban. Mothers are not allowed to dance, sing, flirt, laugh loudly or wear short skirts. The tyranny began when my daughter turned thirteen. I was sashaying towards the front door in my high heels when she suddenly stormed after me, shouting, ‘What are you wearing, Mum? You are not going out dressed like that. Go back to your room and change immediately!’
I glanced down in abject humiliation at my pink leopard-skin mini. ‘But … I can still wear short skirts, can’t I? I mean, my legs are still okay.’
‘It’s not the legs, Mother. It’s just that skirt doesn’t go with your face.’
I wilted like day-old salad. Low self-esteem is hereditary – you get it from your kids. Basically, teenage daughters will only be happy if their mums become Amish and wear cloth caps while churning our own butter.
Refusing to give in to orthopaedic sandals and support hose means that modern mothers and their teenage daughters have more wars breaking out per day than in the Middle East.
‘Thanks for the advice,’ I told my daughter. ‘If only I were young enough to know everything.’
The contemptuous look she gave me said, ‘Can we just be friends? I’d like to start seeing other mothers now.’
Gutted, I thought of all the trays of food I’d run up to her bedroom thirty times a day for nothing more serious than a stubbed toe; the times I’d stuck out my hand in restaurants so she could spit out some offending vegetable; the pee-stained shoelaces I’d unknotted with my teeth … and just took it on the chin. Okay, the double chin.
‘Hey, I might drive you mad,’ I retorted, ‘but I also drive you everywhere.’
In a rush of nostalgia, I thought back to the time my little girl adored me. It was all hot hugs, fierce kisses, her face a warm smudge against my neck, her little fingers coiled tightly around my own as I rocked her with lullabies in the enclosing dark. But the second she hit her teens, it was nothing but disdain, contempt and third-degree sarcasm.
Teenagers are obviously God’s punishment for having sex in the first place. Having always preferred the natural look, my daughter suddenly began guarding her eyeliner and mascaras more closely than a Columbian drug lord. Her once-pristine bedroom became so dirty and unkempt that guests wiped their feet before leaving her room. When she got up before lunchtime one Saturday, I dialled emergency services presuming that her mattress must be on fire. When she started bringing home a succession of boys who smelled of dead rodents, had entire ecosystems under each fingernail and looked underdressed without a ski mask, I was momentarily tempted to shove her back into the condom vending machine for a refund.
Mothers of teenage despots must just fasten their psychological seatbelts for a bumpy ride. But I do have one top survival tip. If your daughter screams ‘I hate you! I wish you’d just die!’, take a big swig of wine, draw back on a cigarette and reply jauntily, ‘I’m doing my best, darling.’
It also helps to remember that you too once turned into Attila the Teenager and drove your own mother mad. Clearly the definition of a ‘juvenile delinquent’ is a child who starts acting as badly as his or her parents.
When I truanted school and drank all Dad’s Brandivino and hitchhiked to rock concerts or ran away from school to live on hippie communes, my bewildered parents no doubt also had to remind themselves that a child is for life and not just for Christmas. When I moved into an inner-city squat and took to wearing punk outfits that needed only one accessory – a crack addiction – I can recall my poor, perplexed mum looking at me as if wishing there were a loophole in my birth certificate. Mothering my own teens, I finally understood how my parents must have felt when their daughter shapeshifted into a growling, disgruntled, surly heap of ho
rmones, constantly embarrassed by them.
The reason I hate animals is because I went out with so many as a teenager. Which is why, when my daughter reached puberty, I wanted to ground her until she hit the menopause. But you have to let your kids make their own mistakes, much as we did – as these stories will attest.
I know the book will strike a comedic and occasionally sentimental chord with women my own age, but hope it will also help our daughters to understand who we are and what shaped us after the Blues.
Hooroo for now, Kathy
P.S. And mums, do rest assured that the teen tyranny does come to an end. My own darling daughter is now the most charming, compassionate, diligent, hardworking and inspirational young woman, full of wit, wisdom, love and laughter. The only trouble is she no longer needs me at all. So, treasure the tantrums and tears of the teenage stage, as it’s awfully quiet when they go …
The tsunami
‘By the time you find yourself, there’ll be nobody home!’
That was my father’s verdict when I rang home from Central Station to let my parents know that I’d run away and was catching the train up north. ‘I mean, is that what this is all about? “Finding yourself” on some commune or something?’
I was nearly sixteen and with my bestie. Sarah and I had been best pals all through school and we had saved each other’s sanity on a daily basis. We laughed at the same things, loved the same things, we finished each other’s sentences – hell, we knew what each other was thinking before we’d even thought it.
