Miranda Sawyer

Snooty is a good word.

So basically when she's at Harvard, the reason why she starts becoming a writer, because when she's at Harvard, she writes for a Harvard newspaper called the Harvard Crimson.

And she gets the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award for a piece about Lou Reed.

And that kind of launches her.

She goes to work for Dallas Morning News, loses that job.

She's briefly a kind of rock critic for New York Magazine.

And then she's at the New Yorker.

But then Tina Brown takes over the New Yorker and just lets her go.

She's not interested.

Tina Brown, not famously good with women writers, I would say.

So anyway, she then writes this book.

And it is a massive success.

She becomes, inverted commas, a poster girl for the Generation X, literary kind of genre.

She does, you know, something kind of amazing.

And what happens later on, so people in the 2000s, women in the 2000s and even now...

Will come to her book and it will change them and they'll think, OK, I can write in this way.

This is what one of them kind of somebody who came late to her said.

I'd never read a story about a woman engaging in some such rambunctious self-destruction that didn't turn into a morality tale.

Relate my experiences in honest ways rather than style them to appear more understandable or sympathetic.

And that's that thing of not trying to be likable or good, actually.