Gerald Wedmore is an anti-hero. At the age of twenty-five, he's all washed up - his sex life is non-existent and his career as a TEFL teacher isn't going anywhere. On top of that, he has developed a series of platonic friendships with women that threaten to cast him into early middle age.
But Gerald is no ordinary, anxious twenty-something. As a teenager, his face was known to millions and the intimacies of his life were shared with a hungry audience as he fumbled his way through adolescence. For Gerald was the star of a reality TV show - ALL RIGHT NOW!
From child celebrity and recording angel to TEFL teacher - where did he go wrong? It's time to grow up, find a girl, change his sheets and get a life...
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In an era when nobodies are celebrities and every celebrity is getting in touch with their inner nobody, Gerald could be exhibit A. His book, he says, will not be the "usual story": there are "no serious problems with drink or drugs". Celebs, he argues, "fail to realise that the bits they think we're interested in (the debauchery) are, in fact, often the least compelling". What he's going to tell us about is whether he loved his co-star Perdita (yes); what he was thinking about when he was on screen (will anyone fancy me?) and whether any of those relationships were real (some were, some weren't).
His narrative, which shuffles dextrously between his teens and his emotionally troubled 20s with a handful of interjections from the present day, does just that. The minutiae of his parents' collapsing marriage and of auditions, rivalry among the cast and the development of the show itself at the hands of dramaturge Nicholas Pennington (a kind-of Alan Clarke Svengali figure) are recounted in what can feel dangerously close to real time. Thorne, a convincing advocate and practitioner of less-is-more prose, occasionally steers a thin line between simplicity and all out dullness but his precision with character and an impish understanding of familial relationships, modern dating mores and 80s pop culture keep this novel fizzing. --Travis Elborough
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