In order to maintain a secure phone connection with Rae on the other side of the world, I’ve had to scour my entire college for the best signal. I have settled, at 10 on a Friday morning, in a lonely, unfurnished prayer room- myself now anxiously praying that no one intends to use it for the next hour.
As soon as I’m put through to Rae, though, my worries pretty much evaporate. As she answers the phone, she informs me between hysterical laughter and audible wretches that I’ve caught her in the middle of a “potato related catastrophe”. In the sweltering Tasmanian heat, a tin of potatoes has split and started rotting from the bottom up.
We get down to business despite this, and in the heat of the moment, I admit to her that I started writing to Channel 4 when the series first aired. I wanted to thank them for showing the teenage audience a funny, likeable character whose mental illness did not define them. Ironically enough, I tell Rae, I didn’t send it for fear of people thinking I was being obsessive or overly keen.
“When I hear that I think, ‘Yes!’. That’s exactly what we wanted to achieve.” Rae practically beams at me down the phone, apparently not judging my enthusiasm. “It gives me so much real pleasure that that’s been my contribution to the cannon, as it were, that people felt they could say ‘I felt a bit like that’.”
“I get it from all generations.” She continues, “Up until recently, my mum worked at the lottery counter at Morrison’s. She had a really old woman as a regular, who once day came up to her saying ‘Your daughter’s series…’ My mum immediately thought- Oh shit! Given that the series is about masturbation, drugs, raving, self harm and all that. And then the old lady says, ‘It’s brilliant, it happened in our day and nobody talked about it! We need to talk about it!’”
Clearly Rae appreciates that people can identify with her work. I ask why she thinks her story is so relatable. An anorexic person feels the same kind of thing as someone who is very overweight- the emotions are very similar. Someone with OCD can relate to somebody with depression. The point is they are living with something that eats into their joy, eats into their lives, and eats into their time.”
Witty and very much with it, despite it being pretty late where she is, Rae jokingly points out her Freudian repetition of the word “eat”, saying that if she noticed it, I definitely should have.
The book My Mad Fat Teenage Diary is, ultimately, nonfiction, and its sequel My Madder, Fatter Diary has just been released, with the second TV series to air on Channel 4 this month. Readers can expect a different feel from this book however, Rae tells me.
“I underestimated the task in hand emotionally in writing this one. It’s a lot, lot darker, but still very funny. I talk about quite deep serious stuff and go into detail more, things that are only alluded to in the first book. Non fictional characters that are still in my life, I have to think about quite deeply. Ones that are not in my life but I still care about quite dearly are also a task.”
The TV series, however, is generally a more fictionalised version of events.
“Apart from me and my mum, all characters in TV series are fictional- you can’t stick to reality. If the real Battered Sausage [a character’s nickname in the book] did something in TV that he didn’t do in real life, he’d be very angry at me!” Rae tells me. “The fictional TV Rae does stuff that I’ve done and stuff that I haven’t done, but never anything that wouldn’t do.”
One of the more notable inventions of the series compared to the books is the addition of a closeted gay character, Archie.
“I gave Tom Bidwell [TV series writer] the bare bones and he ran with it,” Rae explains. “Archie was important, because it’s less difficult to be gay these days, but you still need to come out to your friends. It’s about exploring labels, exploring how we see people after we have information about them that we didn’t previously know. Does it change what we think about them? Should it?”
Speaking of the stigma faced by people who, for whatever reason, have ever had trouble “fitting in”, Rae bursts out, “I just want to throw a bomb into everything and say ‘Fuck this! Fuck your labels!’”
Among other things to be bombed in Rae’s world is body prejudice. Discussing the story of an overweight teenage girl, Rae states, “Let’s not delude ourselves that people aren’t nasty to fat people- they bloody are. There are different standards of beauty around the world. And if you don’t ‘fit in’, you’re not ‘healthy’ in the mind. Actually, not fitting in can be an absolute sign of your absolute mental health.”
The issue of fitting in was a big enough one during Rae’s 20th century teenage years – but how has that changed since the arrival of technology?
“I think the internet is one of these insane things that can be an enormous comfort and a dreadful curse. Bullies can follow you everywhere. I knew physically where my bullies were, I could work out routes to avoid them. I knew where they were, most of the time. These days, that’s gone.”
We soon divulge from such serious considerations, and end up bonding about how medieval literature makes us both feel sad inside and a mutual love of Caitlin Moran. Rae’s been incredibly warm and welcoming, and I can certainly see consistencies in her humour and that of her on-screen persona.
At the end of our conversation, Rae confirms beyond any doubt her awesomeness as a person. “My mum always said I wasn’t allowed to try for Cambridge… But Oxford, that’d be fine. After this, I can see why she said it!”
Naww, how sweet. After having such an entertaining hour with Rae and getting stuck into the new book, I can’t wait to see what her new series will bring.
