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What
is the book XY about?
It's a book about boys for boys and it aims to cover all
the issues that are relevant to your life when you're just
getting to grips with who you are, what you're about and
your place in the world. So it's everything from sex to
sexuality, families, friends, bullying to drugs and crime
and issues about mental health. It basically aims to provide
the facts, there's no agenda to it at all, it's there to
fill in holes in your knowledge and to give you a broad
introduction, or as a springboards into conversation with
your parents
Where
did the name for the book come from?
XY is the term that's given to the male chromosome.
We didn't want a book that said 'look, here's a book for
boys', and it was a book that we felt had to look good and
one that you'd want to keep around. XY is a simple,
punchy title and it's basically the shorthand for the male
gender.
Why
did you write a book aimed specifically at teenage boys?
I've been an agony uncle since the mid nineties when I started
working for teen magazines. I still write for Bliss magazine
as an agony uncle and when you write for a girls magazine
you mostly get questions from girls about boys, but even
then there's a trickle of questions from boys. I think that
in about 1996 a company called AOL phoned up and asked if
I'd like to do a one off agony web cast. I'd never heard
of AOL or barely even the Internet which was very much in
its infancy. I did this an hour webcast and was stunned
that at least half the audience were male. They were piling
on the questions, typically all the things you would worry
about in your own experiences but wouldn't dream of asking.
So I thought the Internet was a brilliant means of communicating
with boys and for boys to get their problems across. All
the reasons that parents are worried about, that they're
locked away up in their bedrooms, I thought is actually
a good thing. They're away from their mates, no one knows
who they are and boys have quite a good relationship with
machines. It's also cold and unemotional and straight to
the point, so rather than faffing around and dithering about
whether to visit the doctors, you can just type in your
concern and send it off and get an instant reply. As the
Internet exploded, AOL exploded and I carried on with it
and started doing some huge webcasts for teenagers, the
majority of whom were boys. After all this time writing
for girls about boys I felt it was just about time to write
a book for boys about boys because it was abundantly clear
that boys have problems that are rarely addressed.
How
did you become an agony uncle in the first place?
I've been an agony uncle since the mid nineties and it's
included columns in magazines but also books, radio and
television. I kind of fell into it really, there's no school
of agony or even any qualifications that are specific to
being an agony uncle. I began by working for an agony uncle
and my job was to go through the letters and select the
most appropriate ones and keep in touch with all the help
lines. At the time it was predominantly agony aunts, but
the teen magazines were getting a lot of questions about
boys from girls and they felt it would give more authenticity
to have a male answering so they tried me out. My first
agony column took three days to write, it was much harder
than I thought it was going to be, it takes a little while
to find your voice and once you've found your voice and
pick up experiences along the way it becomes second nature.
A lot of people think you need to be a councillor to be
an agony uncle, I'm not a councillor, I've got no counselling
qualifications and basically I'm a journalist, I have a
Media Production Degree and an MA in Creative Writing so
I get by in being able to communicate. The big difference
is that if, for example, you and I are sitting here and
you've got a problem you don't want to talk about then it
would require us to have a conversation around the problem
to try and find out what the issue is, it's a two way thing.
With agony you'll get a bit of paper with something like
'help, I'm 14 and I'm pregnant, does this mean I should
stop having sex?', it's anonymous and you have 70 words
to respond to it, so it's a question of communicating this
vital information to this person in a language that they
understand that offers encouragement and support as well
as advice, that breaks down the options for them. I've never
told anyone what to do because I don't think you can as
an agony uncle as you've got no idea about the context of
the problem. So it's a question of breaking down that problem,
giving them a balanced view of their options and, critically,
provide a helpline or source of counselling if it's required.
What
are the most common problems you encounter?
If you're asking what the most common questions from boys
are there isn't a great difference from the questions that
come in from girls. It's across the board and completely
reflects life at the start of this millennium; sex, sexuality,
drugs, family, everything. The big difference is that boys
tend to write in at the very last minute where girls are
very quick to open up if they've got something that's troubling
them.
Since
you started have you noticed a lot of differences in the
kinds of questions you are asked?
Yes and that maybe something to do with the Internet in
that the number of Internet related relationship issues
that come about. The way we communicate has changed a lot
in the last few years, it used to be just letters, someone
might send in a question to do with the fact that they think
they're pregnant to the magazine and the magazine might
have sent it on three weeks later and then I'd turn the
answer round and send it back. There's about a three month
lead in, by which time the answer is redundant for that
person, but then agony is about universal information rather
than trying to help one particular person. Now, though,
you'll get an E-mail today and it'll be on the advice board
tomorrow. The new ways we communicate has created its own
problems as well as possibilities, for example, you'll get
a message from a girl saying she's been dumped by E-mail
or a boy who's asked a girl out by text message but hasn't
had a reply. Technology has become the equivalent of your
mate, where you would have got a mate to ask someone out,
people are hiding behind technology instead. There also
used to be this fear that the Internet was this predatory
environment, that all teenagers were going to go to a chat
room and chat to a perverted old man, it is critical that
people recognise that danger and they stay aware of that,
but for every seedy old man on the Internet there are thousands
of teenagers who genuinely want to enjoy themselves by talking
to each other. A lot of advice about three years ago was
about Internet awareness, and I think that if you're going
to meet someone, meet in a public place, go with a friend
and tell someone where you're going and now that has started
to slip into young people's consciousness. So now the problems
aren't about meeting a trucker from Alabama who claimed
to be the boy next door, it is the boy next door and they
are talking on-line and have genuinely hit it off, but they
meet in the real world and it's very different, the intimacy
in the real world is very different.
I
noticed one statistic in your book Wise Guide To Drinking
that said alcohol consumption amongst teenagers doubled
in the nineties. What do you attribute this rise to?
It's the same as if we were talking about drugs or sex or
pregnancy, it's very difficult to put your finger on one
thing because the reasons are often very complex and a mixture
of social changes, family attitudes, moral issues. So you
could pick off things at random and say that, for example,
the advertising industry has become much more sophisticated,
the drinks industry have to maintain their customer basis
which they would claim is not aimed at under 18 year olds
but you could argue otherwise. So there's a number of reasons
why these things changed and it's really a question of making
sure that kids have access to information so that they can
make up their own minds so that they're aware of not just
the effects but the risks and the law. Just saying drinking
is bad for you doesn't work, we know that, but to credit
them with the intelligence to make up their own minds is
better way forward. Knowledge is power and the more they
know that the information they've got is correct then the
more likely they are to make informed decisions.
XY
is very much based on fact and written in a very direct
style. Why did you write XY in this way?
A lot of people have commented on the writing style, but
I really consciously avoided writing something that was
aimed at 'yoof culture', and it's really my agony voice
with a little bit more humour. I think that I approached
this book crediting the reader with a lot of intelligence
and if you start patronising them in any way, or start saying
'when I was a kid' it's the last thing they'd want to read,
so it's about being quite chatty and being informative as
well as entertaining. I tried to be crucially honest and
I think this builds up trust. We went through the book with
a fine tooth comb to try and rid the book of any kind of
agenda.
How
do you research the medical evidence in your books?
A number of ways really. I think medical evidence is good
to reinforce a point and I think statistics are good for
boys. First port of call would be the helplines, like alcohol
concern for the drinking book, Brook Advisory for sex. Part
of the job of being an agony uncle is to make sure that
you're on all the right mailing lists so that as soon as
someone presents a new leaflet you get hold of it. It can
come from a range of places, but it's always checked, we
had a doctor for XY check out all of the medical facts.
How
different is it writing for more traditional mediums such
as newspapers or magazines compared to the Internet?
I write for AOL and TheSite.org and I think that for the
Internet if you have to scroll the page then you're in trouble,
it has to be really bite size. So for me an answer on AOL
has to be 70 words, just a few sentences, but it seems to
work really well, although it seems brutal. I think that
with magazines you can talk around the problem a bit more.
The Internet is just very immediate and the way I wrote
XY in that way, if you look at the drug factfiles at the
back of XY it has the name of the drug, the likely
effects, the risks, the law and all the things you need
to know, where's in a newspaper or magazine it wouldn't
be so formatted and would be more discursive.
What
are you working on at the moment?
I'm actually writing a teen novel at the moment which is
a bit of a departure. It's about a thirteen year old boy
going through puberty who had an absent father when he was
a younger lad, the father was an alcoholic and would disappear
at night, stumble in in the mornings and spin the boy a
story that he was actually a superhero saving the city from
evil forces. As he begins puberty he goes through all the
standard changes and all the standard confusions that you
go through as a teenager including not knowing who to talk
to. So he begins to wonder if some of the changes he is
going through might suggest that perhaps his father wasn't
lying and he really was a superhero that had all these special
powers. So it goes from there, it's got lots of skateboarding
in it and lots of graffiti, it'll be called Superhuman
and should be out around March next year.
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