Southside teen pens novel for 'Generation Text'

"'Whatcha doin' dis wkend?' 'Dunno U?' 'Graham's havin' a party wanna cum? I've asked him lyk and he sed he wants U der. So do I.'"

It might not please English teachers up and down the land, but this is a sample of 18-year-old Ruth Gilligan's debut novel Forget, which will be launched tonight in the author's stomping ground of Blackrock, Co Dublin. "It's amazing, it sounds like an awful cliche but it really is a dream come true," Gilligan says.

Forget is a love story for Generation Text set deep in the teenage world of Dublin's affluent Southside, a place where a slap on the backside is deemed a friendly greeting and every second word uttered is "like", like.

The book began life as a transition year project at St Andrew's College in Booterstown, the fee-paying school which Gilligan has attended since she was five. "We were given eight months to complete a 50-page project and as I work well to a deadline I just decided to use the time to write a novel," she says.

"I wanted to write the kind of book that I would like to read myself. There are loads of great Irish authors around like Marian Keyes, but those books mainly have characters that are in their 30s. There aren't many books set in the teenage world that my friends and I live in. Maybe it was just laziness but I wanted to write about the world I knew."

A former actress on Fair City, a participant in the Model United Nations and a keen songwriter and pianist, Gilligan oozes confidence. "I bought a How to Write Your Novel book but I didn't really use it except to make a timetable. Although if I look back I was silly because I used a 14-sized font and single spacing which meant the book turned into a bit of a monster," she laughs.

She ended up with more than 500 pages which a friend of the family passed on to Patricia Scanlan, author and editor at Hodder Headline Ireland.

Scanlan was impressed and worked with the teenager on the manuscript, editing it down to a more manageable size. "She was amazing to me, she helped me so much," says Gilligan. "Having never done it before, I was kind of out of my depth so she took me through the process step by step." A two-book deal followed.

Born and raised in Blackrock, it is no surprise that Gilligan's characters go to either rugby-loving Blackrock College or hockey-playing St Andrew's although, deliberately, neither school is name checked. The book is full of references to "collars up" and "high fives", with lingo and scenes which will be familiar to readers of the best-selling Ross O'Carroll-Kelly books.

The influence of Paul Howard's satirical rugby jock creation on Forget is indicated in the Hodder Headline press release but not in the well-written book itself. Some of the scenes - a jock is rude to a waitress and gives "she's clearly lower class" as a reason for his behaviour - read like a bad case of art imitating art imitating life.

"The thing is this is how we all talk, this is how we behave," says Gilligan, who is a Ross O'Carroll-Kelly fan. "With Ross it's exaggerated and it's satire but with me I was just observing myself and my friends as we are." She feels teenagers of her social class get a raw deal in the way they are portrayed.

"All you ever hear about us is shocking stories about what goes on at discos like Wesley or about binge drinking or Primetime specials investigating the sixth-year holiday," she says.

In Forget two of the main characters are dealing with bereavement and parental abuse. "People do have a hard time," she says. "A lot of other stuff goes on that you might not expect. Just because you have a mansion in Foxrock doesn't mean you are happy."

Gilligan is on chapter three of her second book, and awaiting the Leaving Cert results and a holiday in Cyprus. She has already been accepted to study English at Cambridge - "having a book deal definitely helped in the interview" - but needs five As to be sure of a place. But considering she got eight As in the mocks, the chances are she will.

Forget is launched at Dubray Books in Blackrock at 6.30pm tonight.