The British playwright’s first novel is sweary and saucy but also tender and soulful once it reveals its true heart
Anoushka Warden’s debut novel bowls in from line one like a mixture of Adrian Mole, Victoria Wood, Kathy Lette and a vintage Just Seventeen article that encourages you to look at your undercarriage in a hand mirror: “By my mid-20s I thought I had my fanny and its workings all figured out… I just had this deep trust in it. That it was doing what it was supposed to be doing. Which, primarily, was finding orgasms from all the ways possible to it, ie fingerings, lickings and dry humping.” For the next 40 pages, it proceeds as an “autovagiography”, with the men this “fanny” encounters being ranked on an itemised “Top Humps” scoreboard: “Spanish Alan… always carried lube in a mini bumbag (for his bike).”
Warden is a writer for stage and screen – keeping up the sweary, self-deprecating theme, her debut play was the acclaimed My Mum’s a Twat – and she is skilled at maintaining her narrator’s breezy humour and heartbreakingly transparent facade of streetwise carelessness. But it’s exhausting for the reader, who may wonder why this adult tale is being told with kids’ fiction cadences: her boyfriend’s job “was the sort where he had to sound clever to do it and most of the people who worked in his office had all been to the same university, had very posh accents, were in cricket teams together and shortened their surnames to create nicknames like Diko (Dickens), Wilko (Wilkins), Hamo (Hammings) – which they always said like a football chant”.
I’m F*cking Amazing by Anoushka Warden is published by Trapeze (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
