"In my early teens, skinny ribs daily rent asunder by the explosive emotions within - oh golly gosh how I hate that spotty, mingy Mildred and will Rock Hudson ever ever clasp me in his steely arms - I burst upon a diary with a great gold lock. But the Moroccan leather binding, the milky expanse within, instantly transformed me into Baroness Munchausen. My very handwriting spiked into the serious trembly copperplate I deemed more suitable for the consumptive heroine I wished to be than the thick round letters of the large schoolgirl I was (if experts today are right and handwriting shapes the fortunes of the writer, I should have died elegantly at the end of the diary). Even the contents were bastard - I found it beneath my dignity to write of anything but the most searing Brontë-esque passions and now, far from being a record of day-to-day events, each entry requires a simultaneous translation: "Today I think I shall go mad, I shiver, I groan, I sob" (Myron Fickelburger didn’t sit next to me in Chemistry); "Wild gales sweep across the moors, I run and howl, my eyes stream tears" (it’s windy in the playground and I’ve got this bit of asphalt in my eye). Discovered long hence, that diary would provide historians with a vivid and haunting picture of youthful stress in the fifties - vivid and haunting and deeply untrue."