1979: A Big Year in a Small Town

(Paperback)

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Description

1979 takes place in a small fishing town called Musselburgh, situated on the east coast of Scotland. It's about a young girl who is very naive yet incredibly self-aware in the year that changed her life forever - an evocative, moving and at times hilarious true-life story about growing up gay in a small town, finding out you're adopted, and losing your father at the age of 14. Always an outsider, the Rhona of 1979 was desperate to fit in at any cost, and here lies the bittersweet humour. At the heart of the book is the Clubhouse, a place that symbolises all that is normal, happy, and secure. Sons with their fathers; 15 year-old boys with their girlfriends for their first underage drink. Wives with their husbands for the Christmas disco. And behind the club, outside, Rhona and her friends are smoking, fighting, kissing and drinking. In this darkly funny and deeply biographical first book, Rhona Cameron takes us back to a year when everything seemed to change. A new British government came to power, the Eighties were approaching and at times life felt so precarious that it really looked like she and her family might never make it through the next year, let alone the next decade-

Reviews

A candid, open-hearted memoir...startling * The Observer *
Wickedly amusing * The Times *
Utterly absorbing * The Mirror *
Funny, painful, sad and true, this wistful teenage testimony isn't just a memoir of a particular time and place, it's also a universal elegy about how it really feels to be a young outsider of any and every sort. * The Guardian *
Eccentric, feisty and very funny * Jenny Eclair, The Guardian *

Author Bio

One of the best stand up comedians in the UK, Rhona made an impact on the comedy scene in 1992, winning Channel 4's new comedy award. A decade of sell-out Edinburgh Fringe shows and tours in the UK, and A/NZ followed. TV includes Have I Got News For You, Never Mind The Buzzcocks and The Frank Skinner Show; hosting 4 series of BBC2's pioneering Gaytime TV and in 2000 her first BBC sitcom series, Rhona. In March 2002 she joined the West End cast of The Vagina Monologues, before heading off to the Australian jungle for the massive ITV hit, I'm A Celebrity-Get Me Out Of Here. Her much-repeated "Sometimes we're all like that" speech is now part of television folklore.