Different For Girls by Louise Wener

Louise Wener, a Britpop sensation (with her band, Sleeper) turned novelist relates her first career, which lasted through the 1990s, to a "one night stand", albeit it, a great one.

Starting in the 1980s Essex of her youth, Wener conjures up the decade's sublime and ridiculous elements, from Moon Boots to Bananarama. Given her second career, this is more than a bland pop memoir, with great bathetic moments such as losing her virginity to a sex therapist ("I wonder why I didn't have an orgasm") and moving ones, such as losing her father to cancer ("How he lived on lemon sherbets towards the end.") One of her most joyous statements relates to the Eighties: "In the midst of personal tragedy, there is always Flashdance."