The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾

Living in South Korea in a time before Kindles, I was always on the look out for fresh reading material, which meant that books I would normally avoid I grabbed eagerly and read. One such book was "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole".

By happy providence Adrian Mole was a character I warmed to far more than I thought I would. As I read his diary entries I would laugh and think "what a git" but in the back of my mind I knew that somehow Townsend was channelling my 13 year old thoughts. I liked "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole" so much I read more of the Adrian Mole series, even though I was living in an English speaking nation by then, and that's as high a compliment I can give.

Like many before him, pimply, priggish, pretentious 13-year-old Adrian Mole — well, 13 and three-fourths, to be precise — begins a diary on New Year’s Day. Well, he Leicester had me from the very start. Adrian’s the sort of boy who imagines a future in which his parents, his teachers, school bully Barry Kent, and just about everyone will be sorry that they weren’t nicer to him. My favorite quote? “Perhaps when I am famous and my diary is discovered, people will understand the torment of being a 13¾-year-old undiscovered intellectual.”

His entries over two years detail his frustrations with his parents, his infatuation with the popular Pandora, his pompous posing as an intellectual “artiste,” his snobbery and show more self-dramatization, his dreadful poems, and the awkward obsessions with acne and being cool endemic to all teens in every age. His obliviousness and the usual teen self-absorption, while amusing, brings back memories of my own 13th year, when I locked myself in my room after school every day, wrote book reviews, and cried about my hard, hard life as the pampered daughter who never lifted a finger about the house. Leicester, UK, in the 1980s clearly wasn’t that different from Miami in 1970s, another, more innocent age. Like Adrian with Pandora (“my treacle-haired love”), I was in love with red-headed Darryl McNair, my lab partner, who never gave me a second thought. And like the overly sensitive Adrian, I would have died if Darryl had ever known. At the same time, my heart went out to Adrian over Barry Kent’s bullying him, his parents’ squabbling, and his teen angst and utter cluelessness.

You’ll laugh out loud — right before you catch yourself thanking God that those days are behind you. Despite his priggishness and cluelessness, it’s impossible not to love Adrian Mole.

Merged review:

Like many before him, pimply, priggish, pretentious 13-year-old Adrian Mole — well, 13 and three-fourths, to be precise — begins a diary on New Year’s Day. Well, he Leicester had me from the very start. Adrian’s the sort of boy who imagines a future in which his parents, his teachers, school bully Barry Kent, and just about everyone will be sorry that they weren’t nicer to him. My favorite quote? “Perhaps when I am famous and my diary is discovered, people will understand the torment of being a 13¾-year-old undiscovered intellectual.”

His entries over two years detail his frustrations with his parents, his infatuation with the popular Pandora, his pompous posing as an intellectual “artiste,” his snobbery and self-dramatization, his dreadful poems, and the awkward obsessions with acne and being cool endemic to all teens in every age. His obliviousness and the usual teen self-absorption, while amusing, brings back memories of my own 13th year, when I locked myself in my room after school every day, wrote book reviews, and cried about my hard, hard life as the pampered daughter who never lifted a finger about the house. Leicester, UK, in the 1980s clearly wasn’t that different from Miami in 1970s, another, more innocent age. Like Adrian with Pandora (“my treacle-haired love”), I was in love with red-headed Darryl McNair, my lab partner, who never gave me a second thought. And like the overly sensitive Adrian, I would have died if Darryl had ever known. At the same time, my heart went out to Adrian over Barry Kent’s bullying him, his parents’ squabbling, and his teen angst and utter cluelessness.

You’ll laugh out loud — right before you catch yourself thanking God that those days are behind you. Despite his priggishness and cluelessness, it’s impossible not to love Adrian Mole. show less

A re-read from my youth in honour of the author's recent death. Adrian is fact was in the same school year as me and during this book starts his O level courses when I did. The humour is timeless, though some of the social attitudes are different and it is interesting to see what has changed over the past thirty years (the book covers January 1981 to the beginning of the Falklands War in April 1982). Great stuff and I will download the sequel Growing Pains which I also read at the time, though I never bothered with any of the several later sequels.

cute and funny and very very 80s and british. i appreciated the digs on thatcher and while the "14-year-old intellectual" thing is a bit on the nose, i enjoyed reading from the pov of a parentified child (as my therapist calls it)

Adrian has declared himself to be a misunderstood intellectual who has fallen in love with his classmate, Pandora. He is pretentious and irritable and a bit slow on the uptake - in other words, a pretty typical teenager. I found much of this book quite funny, but mostly because I was reading from an adult's point of view. I have no idea how many of the jokes I would have understood had I been reading this at Adrian's age (which is generally the audience to which the book is marketed). I also don't see many adolescents reading this because it's so very dated: for example, there are several references to Margaret Thatcher and a big party to celebrate the marriage of Charles and Diana. That said, I could see it appealing to us adults show more familiar with British culture from that time period. I don't know that I'll seek out any other Adrian Mole books in the future, but this was a quick and amusing read. show less

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 reminded me of the excellent Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole in the best way possible -buffoon forces us to relate by way of academic and societal realization of place. Mole is a fairly bog-standard Midlands kid growing up in Thatcher's England. His life is upset by the adults around him, and the seeming disorder of this fellow adolescents. Mole considers himself an intellectual, an untapped mind that nobody but himself understands. The format of the diary is perfect for this story in that it really gives the reader an insight into the secret thoughts that we've all had, but most of us fear sharing or admitting to. The idea that we alone (in the sense of Mole and the little show more relationship formed by our role as the reader) 'get it' really stand out as the critical factor in this book. We don't really pity Adrian throughout, nor do we really see him as pathetic despite some of the rather silly situations that are handled appallingly. The reader is struck with the fact that this teenage boy is able, despite his own delusions to lay himself out with more honesty than many of us would be able to muster; even to ourselves. show less

I loved this book and at the same time I did not like it at all. That is a very strange feeling.
I admire the writer for being able to get into the brain of a 13-year old boy and describe his thoughts and feelings so accurately. (At least: I think it is accurate, because a lot of what Adrian says, does and thinks sounds VERY familiar having a 13-year old boy in the house...)

And that just brings me to the point why I did not like it: this Adrian character got me totally crazy by his complaining, whining, nagging, worrying, his 'being an intellectual', his very limited view on the world around him.
I guess that's how a teenages looks at the world, but as an adult it makes me want to poke him, get him on his two feet and put the world right show more under his nose so he can't NOT see.

That's why the book still got 4 stars: despite Adrian I kept on reading, wanting to find out what would happen next. show less