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trying to live her teens in her 40s.
Left behind by her hard-nosed friend “Saint”, Kim
falls under the thrall of the head hard-bitch at the new
comp, Maria Sweet, aka “Sugar”. Sugar is rough as hell
and live as wires, and drags the prissy yet uncomplaining
Kim into her world of ecstasy, vodka, dance music
and sarky-faced rebellion, offering her a tang of freedom
she’s never tasted before. Doubt-ridden, fucked up
Kim falls for her sexually as well as spiritually. Their
relationship crashes up and down, side-to-side on the
winds of teenage abandon. But can such a bliss-ridden
union of opposites last?
What strikes you while reading this is that Julie can
only write one way, and that every word in Sugar Rush,
no matter who’s speaking it, is very much her own.
Indeed the three main characters are a split triumvirate
of Jules herself, every bit as cute as the ones in the
Catholicism and Freudianism she so loathes (actually I
don’t know she hates Freud, I’m just guessing).
Kim is the shy, intelligent, doubting, deep, wry
side; Sugar the spirit of wild working class abandon
that Julie so admires; while mum Stella is the shallow,
formerly working-class but lavish spending strumpet
who thinks of no-one but herself and has abandoned
her kids, the very demonic caricature of Julie herself
the Daily Mail laid on her. Believe me, I’m not playing
slap-dash Raj Persaud here (that being a tautology
anyway); it’s pretty damn plain.
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
All the familiar themes from her columns crop up,
sometimes down to the same wording. The sanctimonious
futility of well-meaning liberalism (the
private school and the comp come together in farcical
‘exchange’ sessions, a pseudy drama troupe resonant
of the one from The League Of Gentleman displaying
to braying teens the evils of homophobia); the sad
atavism of ‘the family dinner-table’ and its depressing
middle-class accoutrements (the means by which her
sad dad tries to hold the family together); the hypocrisy
of anti-racists who hate the poor (ex-best friend Saint
is a bourgeois black who despises “white-trash” Sugar
with a passion); the joys and contradictions of lesbianism,
higher education being for losers, the fetish for
Soviet-Army uniforms (an art project of Kim’s gone
wrong) … Christ, she even manages to shoe-horn in
her newfound passion for Lutheranism (don’t ask…)
The result, is, I’m afraid to say, a lot of fun. Yes it’s
tacky and obvious at times, and yes both the dialogue
and thoughts in the book really do stretch credulity
occasionally too, ringing pretty false as realism. This
is Julie talking, and no-one talks like that, not even
Julie in real life. The over-excitable metaphors are
endearing and evocative at times, but sometimes they
really make you cringe.
But you know, much to my regret, I’m not a teenage
girl; and that’s the audience for this book. And I really
do think they’ll love it, like the young mum I saw
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