Something Else I Can't Be Arsed with: Charlotte Roche: Ein Mädchen für Alles

Charlotte Roche, author of Wetlands and Wrecked (both tr. Tim Mohr), has a new book out. Mädchen für Alles (All-Round Girl) – it's about a frustrated woman, disturbed by her parents' divorce when she was a child, who seeks release through unconventional sex acts. In this case, a mother who gets it on with the babysitter.

I just thought I'd tell you, so you know. I don't want to read it. I read the first chapter via the link above, and I disliked the narrator and the style and the setting and the cynicism and the apparent misogyny posing as honesty (or perhaps it's just misanthropy posing as honesty). And I thought about writing a searing critique but then I'd really have to read it, and it might come out as misogyny (or misanthropy). And it felt like a rather easy target, because Charlotte Roche used to be famous for being a television presenter on yoof tv and now she's famous for writing scandalous novels about... see above. So I'm just going to say, hey, whatever pays the rent, Charlotte. Go for it.

A Titular Conundrum

So the news is Mr. Tim Mohr has finished his translation of the follow-up to Charlotte Roche's Wetlands and the English version will be out in spring of 2013. Hooray - a braver man than me. But this time the title's much trickier. Schoßgebete is a play on words (like Feuchtgebiete meaning, umm, moist areas and wetlands), and also echoes the previous title. The literal translation is something like lap or maybe crotch prayers but it's a pun on the word Stoßgebet, which – I kid you not – means a short prayer sent up to heaven, also referred to as an ejaculation.

Any bright ideas? You can read my disappointed, damning review here for inspiration. My best idea so far is Fifty Shades of Brown. Ha! Add your suggestions in the comments section.

Charlotte Roche: Schoßgebete

There was so much hype I felt I couldn't not read it. The broadsheets devoted huge amounts of space to the follow-up to the massive-selling Feuchtgebiete even before it came out, there were huge piles of books in all the shops, it has a huge headstart in the book charts, and a huge row seems to be brewing now that Germany's favourite feminist Alice Schwarzer has replied in kind to her treatment in the book. So, Schoßgebete had to be read.

This time around, Charlotte Roche has advertised the book as a "real emotional rollercoaster", advising us to fasten our seatbelts. It's much closer to her own life as a mother in her mid-thirties than Feuchtgebiete, she's told us, and deals with her own real trauma of losing three brothers in a car accident the day before her wedding. Plus with her feelings about maintaining a loving relationship, mainly through fulfilling all her partner's wishes on the sex front. It feels uncomfortably close to Roche's real life, as far as I can judge. Which makes it hard to trash the book - it feels like trashing an individual. But trashed it must be.

Because where Feuchtgebiete was provocative and genuinely shocking, likeable and funny and created a great anti-heroine, Schoßgebete is none of that. It deals with three days in the life of Elizabeth Kiehl, an English woman living in Germany and trying to be the perfect mother and lover. So nothing all that new there then. There are a few parallels to Feuchtgebiete, especially the scatalogical elements - here we're treated to a nice description of mother and daughter's worms infestation, some details on Elizabeth's nervous stomach and an unpleasant anal sex accident.

My main problem as a reader was that the narrator is perhaps one of the most irritating characters I've ever come across, and I suspect that's not deliberate. Roche puts us through the agonies of what reads like several verbatim therapy sessions clumsily condensed into one, in which Elizabeth spouts various theories and ideas about abandoning her parents, having to visit brothels with her husband to keep him happy and thereby maintain their relationship for eternity, what her awful mother did to harm her with her changing partners, and all her fears and phobias. Meanwhile her beloved therapist - who she calls Agnetha in a rare burst of Rochian humour - nods patiently and approves of everything she does.

In between we get a lot of preaching and proselytising about how we ought to be bringing up our children, running our households and generally leading our lives. Being human, of course, Elizabeth is a terrible hypocrite, using organic washing powder but going everywhere by car, repeating the mistakes she criticises in others, and so on. That doesn't make it easier to accept her prescriptions - we should all be in therapy or at least read parenting books (in my eyes one of the most foolish things parents can ever do), we should never dye our hair, we should never buy the BILD, we should go vegetarian, we should try and make our relationships last for ever.

Much of the book seems to be about Charlotte Roche killing her darlings, and I wouldn't like to be her mother or her ex-best friend and have to read this. Which is what Alice Schwarzer seems to be reacting to - one of her ex-darlings being feminism itself. An all-new recipe: sex will set us free, she seems to be telling us, and relying on a strong older man with plenty of money. But as various commentators have pointed out, sex-positive feminism is hardly a new phenomenon, and as Schwarzer's pointed out, our grandmothers too relied on strong older men with money. Only they had little choice in economic terms. Roche's recipe comes across as merely reactionary, in both the literal and figurative sense.

Three things make the book just about readable: the sex scenes, the open descriptions of life in a patchwork family, and the strand that deals with the car crash and its aftermath. Not strictly erotic for the most part, Roche's sex scenes are, however, terribly useful in the vein of a Cosmopolitan How To Pleasure Your Man feature. And of course they will shift units, what with taking up the first few pages in the book for potential buyers to blush at in bookshops. I found the descriptions of dealing with sharing a child with its father accurate - the strange contrast between absolute discipline when she's at home and a complete lack of structure when she's not, the sudden boredom, etc.

And then there's the car crash. This was the compelling thing about the novel, the raw emotions it reveals, the light it sheds on the functioning or non-functioning of a family, and Roche/Kiehl's anger at the tabloid press for exploiting her misery to sell newspapers. But while the narrator rightly rails at journalists for putting her suffering on the front page, I felt very uncomfortable about reading her own story of the events. It raised a moral dilemma I'm not sure she's aware of - because as readers, we too are voyeuristically wallowing in her pain in the same way as people watching a gossip piece on TV, where her severely injured and confused mother was tricked into giving an interview after the accident. Perhaps it's less objectionable for someone to make money out of their own account, but what with the less than flattering portrayal of the estranged mother, I can't help thinking the book may upset a number of people in a rather similar way.

At any rate, the car crash strand broke off at an unsatisfactory point, with the mother still under strong drugs and not yet realising her three sons had been killed. Possibly it was an attempt to uphold some dignity for the mother, although with this self-centred narrator it might just have been because that extremely emotional moment of realisation - which I'd have found fascinating - was not of so much interest for Elizabeth Kiehl as her enjoyment of the limelight as sympathy-recipient number one. And although I hadn't been expecting a literary masterpiece, the novel also peters out harmlessly over 70s porn where it could have gone out with a bang.

So, a daring emotional striptease that falls absolutely flat. If you really want to read MILF eroticism from a feminist perspective, go for Anna Blumberg's excellent Kurze Nächte (see my review).

I do realise, by the way, that this is more of an emotional response than a good review. But it's that kind of book, and I found reading it genuinely infuriating. To add a very minor literary criticism that explains why I read it all the way to the end - I had hoped the heroine might develop as a character. She didn't.

Schoßgebete - Gearing Up to the New Charlotte Roche

The follow-up to Charlotte Roche's gazillion-selling Feuchtgebiete/Wetlands is on its way, and it's called Schoßgebete. Apparently it's about that "last great taboo: marital sex". I'm looking forward to it, although I'm not entirely sure marital sex is really a taboo subject. But whatever, no doubt Charlotte Roche will give it the bestselling funny treatment one would expect.

I'm fascinated by the dodgy pun of the title. It's a play on the words "Schoß" - lap, womb, even bosom in certain contexts - and "Stoßgebet" - a short, sudden prayer known in English as an ejaculation. I kid you not.

Anyway, die Zeit's literary lady Ursula März writes about all the marketing kerfuffle going on right now, with an initial print-run of half a million copies and a book trailer and a multitude of internet promotions and 200-packs of books for retailers. She also interviewed Roche's publisher Marcel Hartges a while back, which makes very entertaining reading. Lots of passive-aggressive dispute about what makes proper literature and whether it's a bad thing that people who don't normally read books read Charlotte Roche. The most bizarre bit is when Hartges compares Roche with Thomas Bernhard.

So roll on 15 August, is all I can say.

Anna Blumbach: Kurze Nächte

The Anais imprint does literary jazz mags for girls. I looked at the Amazon reviews for Anna Blumbach’s Kurze Nächte and realised that nobody wants to admit that. They all talk about the character development and the language – which is very much a factor, and I’ll come to it, don’t get me wrong – but what they don’t say is: “This book turned me on.” So to get it over with, yes, this is an effective piece of erotica. It does what it says on the tin.

I was given the book by the author (Anna Blumbach is a pseudonym) because I’d been talking about translating sex scenes. It makes me feel awkward, and I’ve written about it before I think, because in order to translate sex you do have to visualise what’s going on very precisely. If it’s not well written that’s difficult, and if it is it’s titillating and distracts you from translating. I work in a large open office space, and always have to translate sex scenes at home. The sex scenes in Kurze Nächte – and there are many – mean you probably shouldn’t read it in public. I even felt slightly exposed reading it on my balcony. I wouldn't want to translate it.

What worried me to begin with was that the narrator Eva is in exactly the same position as me: what’s called a “semi-single parent” in her late 30s in Berlin. Reading about her life in between her sexual exploits was disturbing because I recognised so many of her emotions. The maternal guilt, the comfort and love a child can give, the frustration, missing your child when it’s not there and resenting it when it is. The fear of aging, the body-related insecurities, all that stuff about having had a child and what it does to you. And that made it hard not to identify with Eva to an extent I didn’t want to go to. On the other hand, it felt so true that the rest of the book seemed searingly honest too. I don’t know whether it is or not.

Plot? Yes, it has a plot, to go along with that cliché about women and porn. But it’s the kind of rambling Berlin-novel plot about bohemians and creative types getting drunk that I don’t particularly enjoy, as a rule. Only with more sex scenes to make up for it. Eva loves Wolf (poet) but he doesn’t love her back, or not properly, not the way she wants him to. So she leaves him but she’s heartbroken. She starts a thing with Tom (DJ), becoming a sort of permanent bit on the side. And then there’s Kolja (Russian artist), an infatuation and one-night-stand who keeps popping up again and rubbing her up the wrong way. In between, Eva struggles with the benefits office and philosophises about how crap life is when you’re expected to combine full-time work with bringing up a child but refuse to do so.

As the Amazon reviewers point out in their own sweet way, Kurze Nächte is a Bildungsroman of sorts. Eva starts off insecure and unhappy but by finding a passion of her own (a miniature architectural project), she grows more confident and finds it easier to deal with the men in her life too. It’s work, then, which ultimately sets her free, to put it cynically. Anna Blumbach seems to have tried to add a political dimension to the lit-jazz-mag format. The message appears to be that a self-determined work life makes for a fulfilling life all round, including sexually. But her narrator Eva veers between describing her own inadequacies and raging against the system – a credible enough character trait – which dilutes that message somewhat. And I’m not sure it doesn’t get lost entirely along the way.

It’s certainly literary enough. I loved the language. I loved the occasional Berlinerisms and sillinesses, interrupting what’s otherwise a plain enough style common to a lot of contemporary German writing. I loved the sex scenes, the feelings of inadequacy gradually making way for more relaxed encounters. I loved the laugh-out-loud “What the…?” moments when the narrator gets up to even more nonsense than usual. It’s very much a novel of now – Eva is not a put-upon ex-housewife or a young girl just discovering her sexuality, she knows very well what she’s doing. I loved the way Blumbach often uses the phrase “as best I can” in the saucier moments, summing up her Eva very nicely.

It made me think about how men and women write about sex in German literary fiction, actually. Maybe it’s just my choice of reading matter, but I’ve a feeling that women writers tend not to bother, or if they do venture an attempt it’s almost always about bad sex, traumatic experiences. In fact I’m struggling to come up with a single example of genuinely erotic writing by women in the genre. A while back I bought a women’s magazine solely because it claimed to feature erotica by biggish names, including Sibylle Berg and Alina Bronsky. It was a big disappointment. Whereas men seem happy to include explicit descriptions of good and bad sex and average sex and frustrating sex and just plain sex sex in their literary novels. Ralf Rothmann, Peter Stamm, Rainer Merkel, Thomas Pletzinger, Selim Özdogan, Finn-Ole Heinrich, Michael Lentz, Jan Böttcher, Helmut Krausser – they all get taken seriously nonetheless.

So are women writers shy about it? Would we… would we still really think they were sluts? Is that why the few exceptions cause such a fuss? Think Charlotte Roche of course, but also Helene Hegemann, although you could argue that in both cases the sex they describe has a traumatic edge to it. Anna Blumbach takes what seems like a more open and honest approach. Although the last sex bit (actually incredibly well done) would fit well into the traumatic category, her protagonist usually enjoys sex, but looks too at what she wants from it, often confirmation and comfort and – oh yes – love.

If there’s one thing I always find fascinating and infinitely puzzling, it’s how on earth other people in a similar situation to me lead their lives. You know the way everyone else seems to be having much, much more fun, no matter how much fun you yourself may or may not be having? I took this fictional example with a pinch of salt, but it was a genuine pleasure to read. And it does for Kaffee Burger what Axolotl Roadkill does for Berghain.

Dirty Words, Picture Dictionaries and Wetlands

Jessa Crispin and I discuss the above at Bookslut. The picture dictionary, just in case it gets you wondering, is the Duden-Oxford Bildwörterbuch (Mannheim, 1994) and is a very useful tool for translators with some fascinating illustrations of car engines, church architecture and the human body, all painstakingly labelled in two languages.

If you own a copy, I recommend a look at pp. 552-553 for the most hilarious drawings of a nightclub you'll ever see. My, how we laughed.

Dear Charlotte Roche,

How's things? I hear Wetlands is doing pretty well in the UK, if not quite matching up to the huge German sales figures. But still not bad for a translation. And coming out in the US in a couple of weeks, eh? That should be exciting. Will you be going over to promote the launch?

Anyway, I thought I'd call your attention to a couple of reviews from North America. The first is by a Canadian sex columnist, who likes the book. The best thing about it, though, is that the reviewer's name is Josey Vogels and it's published in the National Post's "Afterword" column - now I know you're giggling at that.

And I really recommend you read this, the most rambling and entertaining and philosophical review I have yet read of the book (by Justin E. H. Smith in N1BR). I think you'll find it funny and revealing, if not particularly flattering. And cheaper than a shrink. You'll be especially tickled by the guy's bemusement at the downright (or upright) healthiness of young Germans' sexuality and his comments on the proto-Germanic nature of English swearwords.

And you probably know the Complete Review's review, which has been out there a while now. But just in case, it's a good one too. And they keep comparing it to The Kindly Ones, funnily enough.

Anyway, keep your pecker up and carry on camping.

All the best,

Katy

Charlotte Roche in the Guardian

Decca Aitkenhead interviews La Roche in today's Guardian. In case you'd forgotten, Charlotte Roche is the British-German TV presenter who wrote last year's runaway bestseller Wetlands, a cross between pornography, proctology and preaching. The piece is well worth reading, and Aitkenhead seems very taken by the book as well as her interview partner. She writes:

Wetlands publishes in the UK next month, and Roche looks forward to seeing how it will be received by a public who have not heard of her. "In Germany the critics can say, 'It's a famous woman talking about vaginas - of course it's going to sell.'"

We shall see.

Wetlands... I Was So Right!

Remember my hot tip on who I suspected was translating Wetlands? Well, I was right. BILD broke the story on Tuesday but I didn't notice. Now you can admire the translator Tim Mohr alongside Charlotte Roche, plus read his draft versions of Roche's rude words. According to BILD, it'll be "the most difficult translation of the year". Yeah, right.

Wetlands on Stage

A brief virtual flick through Bild (not a newspaper, it's official) shows three new "stories" about their favourite bugbear, Charlotte Roche's Wetlands. First off, it's going to be adapted for the stage in Halle. The director is quoted: "If it's sex you're after don't go to the theatre. You're better off having it at home." A wise woman. I'd adapt that slightly to "If it's novels you're after..." after seeing a very dull adaptation of Raul Zelik's Berliner Verhältnisse on stage. At one point I amused myself by pulling faces at the actors.

Next, readers have voted for who could play the leading role. I don't know who the "scandal noodle" is who won this dubious honour, though.

And finally, Roger Willemsen has slagged Charlotte Roche off - apparently. The author, whose book An Afghan Journey comes out in paperback in September (trans. Stefan Tobler), calls Wetlands "the most disgusting book by a long way" that he knows. He doesn't find it erotic at all.

I suspect Bild might be twisting the guy's words ever so slightly, not that they'd do that kind of thing on purpose, of course. Why do I think this? Well, it's just the small fact that Willemsen is quoted on the back of the actual book in question. Here's what he says:

Radical, drastic and just as tender. I can't recall having a debut manuscript in my hands as self-assured, as courageous and as full of the present day as this.

Someone is getting a wee bit muddled, I suspect.

Wetlands Conquers the UK

Just in case you hadn't noticed, British publishers Fourth Estate have bought Charlotte Roche's Feuchtgebiete for "a decent sum". I'll bet. Thanks to Bowlserised for pointing it out.

Punk Rock Book Circle

Those musicians, eh? They all know each other, and once one of them starts off a trend, that's it. They're all at it.

I read in the latest Zitty magazine (don't you love that name?) that Bela B. of the big big German (pop-)punk band Die Ärzte likes nothing better after a gig than a good read. I was surprised. None of the punk bands I've ever seen live sat down with a book afterwards (unless it was a book of matches - boom, boom!). I was interested in what kind of books literate punk rockers read to wind down from a sweaty gig, so I looked into it. The result was a bizarre never-ending circle of collaborations between musicians who write.

Bela B. (actually Dirk) Felsenheimer wrote a couple of vampire books in the 1990s, which now seem to be out of print. But one of his first projects after Die Ärzte split was to produce an album for the great white hope Rocko Schamoni. And his book Dorfpunks was a pretty big hit in 2004. I haven't read it - but it's about punks in a West German village in the early 80s. He's written three other books but I suspect they're not as interesting.

Now Schamoni had already collaborated on the musical front with Christiane Rösinger's old band the Lassie Singers. And now she's written her own book, Das schöne Leben, with a recommendation by Rocko on the back. I haven't read it - but it's about a rural youth abandoned for life as a musician in 1980s West Berlin.

And who else was in the Lassie Singers, if only briefly? That's right, Funny van Dannen. And he's written an incredible seven books. I haven't read any of them - but they're mostly bizarre short stories and poems.

From Funny van Dannen we move on to Farin Urlaub and thus back to Die Ärzte. As that Wikipedia entry tells us in typical stilted English, "It is a never confired guess, but most people think, that he is the secret singer of the Funny van Dannen cover-song "Unbekanntes Pferd" (Unknown Horse) on the "Köpfer"-EP of the band Rantanplan." Farin Urlaub has only produced one book, a coffee-table photo book on India and Bhutan. Apparently it's sold out. I haven't read it.

Mr Urlaub made a guest appearence on the 1995 album Der Mettwurstpapst of a certain Heinz Strunk. And much, much later, Strunk wrote the "fairly autobiographical" novel Fleisch ist mein Gemüse. First published in 2004, it's just been made into a film. I haven't read it - but it's about a sad suburban kid who plays in bands in the 1980s.

In between those two points, Strunk worked for the German music channel VIVA. And gosh, so did Charlotte Roche. I don't have to tell you about her book. I have read it - and it's not about a kid who joins a band in the 1980s. Roche and Strunk even went on a reading tour together a couple of years ago, reading extracts from a dissertation on Penis Injuries Resulting from Masturbation with Vacuum Cleaners. Apparently, they made men in the audience faint.

And Charlotte completes our little circle for tonight. Because she recorded a single (1., 2., 3.) with none other than - Bela B. Watch the video - I hope you like it.

Incidentally, those six degrees of separation link to me, too. Because one of Die Ärzte walked into a pub in Berlin in 1993 and asked my (not fascist) young man and his (not fascist) mates to play Nazis in the video for their song Schrei nach Liebe. They refused - impolitely.

A Message from School Holidays Limbo

Actually, as you may have noticed, I'm not posting this week. It's the school holidays so I have no time for blogging unless I plonk my darling offspring in front of the box for hours on end. Unfortunately from that point of view, the weather is very nice.

Anyway, I have to interrupt my self-imposed silence to tell you (completely stolen from the Literary Saloon) that Granta has an interview online with Charlotte Roche. Ha ha! (That's a joyful laugh, by the way, not a cynical snicker)

Two interesting points: firstly, the interviewer Philip Oltermann notes that "publishers are currently bidding for UK and US rights for Feuchtgebiete". So all those people wondering whether they'll ever be able to read Wetlands in English can heave a sigh of relief - or apprehension. Or excitement.
And secondly, Ms Roche claims she's had no time to read since she had her daughter. Poppycock, I say!

Otherwise, Charlotte Roche is her usual refreshingly low-brow self. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but either her English seems rather German at points or the interview was held in German and translated. Whatever, it's an interesting read. Having spawned only Howard Jones in the celebrity stakes, perhaps High Wycombe will have a new celebrity daughter to boast about in the UK before too long. How exciting.

Zickenkrieg

I was going to provide something very sensible for your weekend delectation, but then this came along. It's from Germany's most-read "newspaper" - although they're not allowed to call themselves that as they don't run enough news stories - Bild. And it's a piece about the ubiquitous Feuchtgebiete/Wetlands author Charlotte Roche and her book. Usually, I suspect, the literary section is small to non-existent. But this story is filed under "Star-News".

One of my least favourite German actresses/lecturers/provocative she-rappers, Lady Bitch Ray, has apparently slagged old Charlotte off. She says: "If anyone's allowed to talk about fucking in Germany, then it has to be me! She just wants to hitch a ride on my vagina style with her book. She's just a bad copy of me."

Now then, obviously LBR is not quite as stupid as she pretends to be, seeing as she is currently writing her PhD (the semiotics of the clothes in the Bild photos are fairly clear, I'd say). But surely she realises that writing a book and making a film are two different things. And I would like to hope that more than one person in Germany is allowed to talk about fucking, actually.

Anyway, I had a good laugh at this piece, especially the moralising video that bleeps out all sorts of words in various red-faced readings from the book - the first one, in case you were wondering, is "tampon".

Zickenkrieg, by the way, translates literally as "war of the nanny goats". Alas, German is no better than English when it comes to referring to women by animal names. But that presumably doesn't worry someone who calls herself a dog.

Ms Roche declined to comment.

Wetlands Conquers the World

According to the Bookseller, Charlotte Roche's Feuchtgebiete has outsold all other novels on Amazon in the USA, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Japan. If you see what I mean.

Having said I wouldn't like to translate it, I expect British publishers won't find an established translator to touch it with a bargepole. If you fall into this category, feel free to contact me. I'd be quite happy to go back on my word for the lovely Ms Roche and her blockbuster anti-hygiene novel. We'd have to change the title though.

Everybody's Talking About...

...Martin Walser's new book, so I read Charlotte Roche's Feuchtgebiete instead. You can see the author's naked bum on a record cover here. Sadly, I can't find any English-language coverage as yet, so see this interview with nice photos in Blond mag.

Yes, it's a celebrity book. I'm actually quite a fan of celebrity books, I have to admit. My fave is Jade Goody (before the racialism incident), because it combines your bog-standard ghost-written autobiography with a misery memoir. The Germans haven't gone with the whole I'm a Celebrity, Give Me a Book Contract thing yet. That's probably a good thing really... Just imagine - Heidi Klum and Seal's joint autobiography. David Hasselhoff's favourite recipes. Boris Becker's sex tips. Doris Schröder-Köpf's book of lullabies. But I have no intention of comparing Charlotte Roche with Jade Goody - they have nothing whatsoever in common and would no doubt hate each other if they were ever unlucky enough to meet.

Roche's book is a novel. She's famous for presenting music TV, which I never watch. I did make an exception once, and saw her interviewing Mike Skinner and managing to manipulate him into saying "Don't take drugs, kids" as I recall. Very amusing. Anyway, the title translates as "Wetlands" or "Moist Areas". Can you guess what it's about yet?

It's about an 18-year-old girl called Helen who is in hospital for an anal fissure. And it's about masturbation, haemerrhoids, anal sex, body hair, avocados and, er, they fuck you up, your mum and dad. Basically. Apparently the original publisher decided not to bring it out after all, as they thought it was pornographic. It is a bit titillating at points, but it seems to be about other things too. I get the feeling Roche might have read Helen Walsh's Brass (published as Millie in German) before she wrote it. It's about a fucked-up kid who consumes her own body fluids and is too embarrassed to leave the cubicle after she's done a shit in case someone sees her face. But she'll go to a strange man's house to get her pubes shaved off, and much more besides. And she narrates her really quite shocking stories in the language of the primary school playground - it's all poo-poo and wee-wee, bum-bum and, well, what would we say? Fanny? Noo-noo? Front bottom? Down there?

And that's part of Roche's point, I think. That women do all these strange things to ourselves, yet we don't even have a proper word for our own genitals. The advantage to being a celebrity is that lots of people want to interview you about your début novel. And Charlotte Roche has been talking left right and centre about kicking over the statues of sexual taboos, about how women shouldn't feel compelled to shave their fannies (there, I managed it), about the cheek of the cosmetics industry to sell women perfumed panty liners, about how body fluids are good.

I haven't managed to finish the book, I have to admit. It upset me too much, reading about such a fucked-up kid. Plus I kept having to be careful my daughter wasn't reading over my shoulder - she was quite intruiged by the bright pink cover with a raised sticking plaster on it. But I think Roche has made her point. It may not have the strongest plot in the world, but the book makes you think. She has a daughter too, and that does make you worry about bringing up another repressed individual. So when my lovely little girl said to me yesterday, "Mama, lass mich in Ruhe mit deinem dirty, dirty, dirty" I just let her go ahead and eat that piece of cake with her brown sandy fingers. Hah!

Oh, did I mention it's funny? Here's my favourite non-disgusting bit:

"We were really great at talking in bad codes on the phone. When you take drugs you get paranoid and think you're Scarface and you're being bugged the whole time and any time now there'll be a major bust, arrest and trial, where the judge will ask you: 'Oh yes, Helen Memel, what are 'washing powder', 'pizza' and 'painting' actually supposed to mean? You didn't do any washing in the period in question, nor did you eat pizza or paint. We weren't just tapping your phone, you see, we were watching you too.'"

Not sure I'd want to translate it though. Might be rather gruelling, and the terminology research might take you to strange places you don't really want to go to.