I Knew I Was Right: An Autobiography by Julie Burchill Heinemann £15.99 in UK
At moments when I might wish I were gay, I will in future be warned by the experience of Julie Burchill. She wasn't necessarily a lesbian when she switched horses mid-race, but she was in love - in love! - with Charlotte Raven, a young journo she met on the sad mag Modern Review, which Burchill founded. Being in love is all to our Julie. Love knows no boundaries, it fears no ills, so it whooshes you off into semiotic bliss no matter what your lover's gender, and damn the consequences. If you're in love, the world reads like a tabloid headline. If you're not, you get out. Fast. So this is how you do a Burchill when you fall for a woman. First you clean your girlfriend's toilet, then you buy her a sapphire necklace, and then - only then - you go down on her for two hours. Two hours! Burchill copped what most modern-day London print media were really about long before most other journalists, and invented herself to fit the bill. She started as a speed freak at New Musical Ex- press aged 17, fast learned that image was all, and instantly became the kind of celebrity journalist who always goes down well with - not on - bank managers. By age 20, she was earning £100,000 with the Sunday Times, and now, pushing 39, she's a Guardian columnist with a couple of novels behind her and a mustbuy biography of Princess Diana coming out as soon as it's been legalled. Nothing in her autobiography matters as does her fast, clean copy, stressed by screamers (!!!), italics, and lots of BLOCK CAPS, along with an awful "heh heh heh" which is really irritating. Her supposed-to-be-true life story zips over recyclable paper so easily you could read it in a sitting. You may well. But don't take it on trust. Truth or not, it really doesn't matter. Conflict is all, so Burchill packs a moral with every bite. Burchill writes a sometimes sentimental Victorian melodrama starring a working-class heroine born to noble communist parents in Bristol, whose love of literature eventually saved her from the Fate of the Cardboard Box Factory, and brought her Fame and Fortune in Fleet Street. It goes to show the virtues of self-education, the joy of getting up people's noses, and the fact that the love of a good woman will save yours just as you've snorted your last grand's worth of cocaine in your role as reported queen of London's Groucho Club. Names are dropped faster than drawers - Iggy Pop tried it on with her, bourgeois creeps hated her, but our heroine triumphed every time, as we knew she would. Burchill fights the heebie-jeebie plastic morality of Western capitalism like Joan of Arc in leathers. With a whip. That horizontallylateral mind gives her copy a twist no matter what the topic, and even if she does get sentimental, well, we always know she's on our side - the reader's, of course. Ultimately, opinion is all: Burchill's are usually interesting. Marriage sucks (except when you want it to), alliteration attracts, and if you know who she's talking about, the gossip is deadly. Like Tony Parsons, her first husband. Burchill was a teen bride, which, as she says, goes to show you can take the girl out of the dead end, but not the other way round. Or Cosmo Landesman, her second spice boy, also a journalist and allegedly, if anonymously, as satisfied in bed as she claims Parsons was. Gosh, the girl rides as well as she reads. Pity about the toilets. You could like her. Not for all the gunge posing about being "the cleverest woman in Britain", which claim she repeats, or for all her arrogance about writing like an angel, which she often does. Sounding off like an egotistic twat gets her work, as indeed it would here in the little patch she lazily calls "Eire".
This book is one long ad. What I like are her memories. Pretending to be 16 when she had hardly hit double figures; Miner's Lipstick (plum, of course); that awful 1970s music which made every decent chick cringe ("Fernando", "Disco Duck", "Silly Love Song"); the real aggression of teenage girls when they sock it to each other - and the absolute, soulsearing, never-to-be-forgotten bliss of shaping your dreams reading library books. She cries, too, at "Pet Rescue" on telly, always a good sign, and quite enjoys being pregnant, although Burchill's two sons live with their respective fathers, a fact not mentioned in the book, and tacitly explained away by her boast that she is a committed psychopath whose own pleasure matters more than anyone else's feelings. The mites, she claims to love anyway. Burchill is an insider who thinks she's an outsider but isn't, except in as much as the rest of the pack are waiting to see if she'll be the one to blink first. As if. But caveat emptor: reportage this is not. Always a sucker for stereotypes (like all titanic columnists), she sure flies low without a licence. I mean, Burchill's actually telling us that "inspirational maths-teachers are about as rare as a female orgasm in Eire". My dear, you must be kidding.
Medb Ruane is a journalist