Inside The Mind Of A teenage Girl

During July and August I teach Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Students come from all over the world and they’re mostly pretty wealthy. Last week in a tutorial we were looking at a short story one of my students had written. In places her English was a bit shaky.

‘I didn’t know what word to use here,’ she said. ‘What do you call the person who is responsible for looking after the children and does some of the cleaning in the house?’ She didn’t mean the mother.

One of the things that I like about being a writer is that it’s a very democratic business. Being rich and powerful doesn’t necessarily help. My first published stories were based on my own life. One of them was about working in a pie factory. Another was about labourers on a construction site. I didn’t need to do any research because I’d done it already in real life.

In the middle part of my career I wrote a series of novels with teenage girls as the protagonists. People were always saying to me, ‘Mr Keaney, how do you, a man, manage to get inside the mind of a teenage girl so successfully?’

The answer was simple. As the father of two teenage girls I was exactly the person my wealthy student was trying to describe. I cooked for them, cleaned up after them and ferried them around. I was effectively their servant. And the servant always knows exactly what’s happening in the house.