The Anti-Cool Girl: The award-winning, bestselling brutal and hilarious memoir and the first Jennette McCurdy book club pick for 2023

Dedication

For Rhiannon, Tayla and Isabella.

She made each of us, and each of

us is an incredible woman.

Contents

Dedication

You will be fed up before you've even left the womb.

Your mum will be a sex worker, and you’ll have no idea.

You will be a Houso kid.

Your friends will find a dead body in the bush, and it will be your dad.

Jesus will propose to your sister, and not you. Dick.

You will be in rehab several times before you’re ten years old.

You will get caught masturbating while watching Rugrats.

Your dad will finally die, and you’ll be relieved.

Your mum will chase you with a butcher’s knife.

Your foster dad will stick his hands down your pants, and you will feel so, so lucky.

You will get your first period, and it won’t be the only blood you have to deal with that year.

Your mum will decide she is a lesbian, and she’ll pick her new lover over you.

You will try to fit in at a very exclusive private boarding school (and fail spectacularly).

You will lose your virginity, followed by your mind.

You will go to a very crappy drama school and do a very crappy naked scene.

Your second set of parents will abandon you. Damn.

You will end up in a mental institution.

You will watch your mum attempt suicide, and realise that she’s the only one who understands you.

You will gain ninety kilos, and it will be the best thing that has ever happened to you.

Someone will play Jenga with your face and their penis, and you will consider it a sexual revolution.

You will learn how to be a functioning adult, and realise you don’t care about being a functioning adult.

You will become an Anti-Cool Girl.

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

You will be fed up before you've even left the womb.

Oh Rosie. Not even born yet, and already on the run. How exhausting. At a time when you should be concentrating on not growing an extra thumb, you’re being tossed around in your mum’s belly while she tries to jump-start an overheated hatchback by pushing it down a hill.

I feel for you, I really do. I know that it’s 3am right now and all you want to do is sleep. But your parents are currently trying to escape the clutches of some violent bikie drug dealers, and they’re having a little trouble getting the car started, so you may be up for a while.

You see, your dad, Tony, recently decided to take control of the family’s financial future by securing a job in the petty drug-dealing industry. It makes sense – he already had extensive contacts from all the drugs that he and your mum, Lisa, had been, you know, taking. And with a three-year-old daughter at home (your older sister, Rhiannon), and another baby on the way (lucky you!), your parents needed to start bringing in some cash.

Now, I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea right up until the moment your dad took all the drugs instead of selling them. Not surprisingly, the whole endeavour stopped seeming like a good idea when your dad found himself in a scary amount of debt to some very scary people, and they got word to him that his legs would be broken if he didn’t pay back the cash. This is why you’ve now woken up at 3am to the muffled sounds of your parents trying to haul arse out of Balmain without being seen.

You truly are one lucky foetus.

You’re meant to be born in four weeks, and despite the looming due-date, I know that you’re still on the fence about whether or not you’d like to come out at all. I get it – even being a bun in a dangerous oven has to be better than whatever the hell is going on out there. Your instinct to bunker down in that womb and never come out is an understandable one.

But I’m afraid you have no choice, Rosie. Oh, you’re going to fight it: you’ll be three weeks late. You will rip your mum’s junk to pieces on your way out (to this day, whenever you mention your birth, she gives you a look of horrified disdain that suggests you came out wielding an acid-coated machete). And, as a last-ditch effort to avoid what you somehow know is a less than ideal situation, you’ll wrap the umbilical cord around your neck and stop breathing for over a minute.

You will make it abundantly clear; you’re not interested in whatever the outside world is offering you.

But a slap on your wrinkly blue back will force air into your lungs and it’ll be too late to go back in. You will be born, Rosie. Your mum will be screaming, your dad will be drunk out of his mind, and you will be born.

I wish I could tell you that things are going to be easy outside of that belly. I wish I could tell you that you aren’t about to face years of confusion and chaos. I wish I could tell you that your parents won’t abandon you, or that you’ll never wet your pants in a supermarket while drunk.

But I can’t tell you any of that. I can’t promise that your life will be surrounded by a white picket fence, when I know that isn’t true.

I can tell you this though, Rosie: although things are going to get much, much worse before they get better, they will get better. You’re not always going to be an almost-human on the run from drug dealers. Things are going to change for you, I promise. You’ll never learn to cook, but you will eventually grow into a semi-functional adult. So get comfortable (or at least try – the car is going to break down several more times tonight) and let me explain how this all goes down.

Your mum will be a sex worker, and you’ll have no idea.

There is nothing more profoundly irritating than being peppered with questions about the strange man who sleeps in your mum’s bed, when all you’re trying to do is have fun at your fourth birthday party.

‘But if he’s not your dad, then who is he?’

How could I explain to this idiot that I didn’t give a fuck who that man was? The more pressing issue was that this girl hurling questions in my face had decided to turn up at my fancy dress party in a costume that looked like some kind of unfortunate accident involving a fairy with sparkly diarrhoea.

I had tried to plan that damn party with an iron fist. If ever a four-year-old resembled a vicious and uncompromising dictator, it was me during the preparations for that celebration.

First of all, aside from mandatory family members, I wanted no females involved. Invitations would be offered only to the boys from my preschool (I was a proud early adopter of feminism). Second, only I could dress as my hero and the one true god, Michelangelo the orange Ninja Turtle. Any embarrassing double-ups on that costume would result in immediate dismissal. Third, any girls who did attend, almost certainly against my wishes, needed to do so without any kind of tulle and/or sparkly wing arrangement.

Yes, it could be argued that I was being a tad controlling about the party situation (and also that I took being a tomboy to the extreme), but a couple of unfortunate bathroom mishaps in the preceding weeks meant I had some serious reputation repairing to do. Basically, I had embarrassed myself with shit – twice – and this party was a PR emergency.

The poo towel had come first.

I had been in the bathroom, doing my business, when I realised there was no toilet paper left. A mildly irritating occurrence for the experienced toilet-goer, but for someone still relatively early in her solo toilet career, I was completely thrown off kilter. I sat on the toilet, perplexed, for at least ten minutes. I was honestly at a loss. Then Rhiannon started banging on the door, telling me to hurry up in that threatening yet somehow legal way older siblings tend to do. She had friends over, and wanted to get back to whatever cool thing they were doing that I was never invited to join.

In a panic, I spotted a towel hanging on the rack. I knew what had to be done.

But just as I was completing the final wipe (making sure to keep going until there were no brown bits left – an important lesson from Mum), my sister barged through the door wanting to know what the hell was taking me so long.

I froze, pants around my ankles, poo towel in hand. Obviously, Rhiannon immediately told everyone, all her friends barged through the door to get a good look, and what little cred I had with the cool kids disappeared instantly.

Now, the poo towel was bad (although I learned nothing – if I’ve ever been to your house and you failed to provide me with toilet paper, then I’d be washing all towels in your immediate vicinity), but to be honest, I probably could have lived with the shame of getting caught in the moment, if it hadn’t been for what happened a few days later.

Rhiannon’s friends were over again, and because of some miracle that must have come directly from my hero Michelangelo himself, they needed an extra person to make up the numbers for some game they were playing. I had no idea how it worked, but from what I could gather, it basically involved running around the house lots and lots of times. I was just thrilled that kids three years older than me were finally recognising my potential, despite the fact I had just days earlier been involved in the embarrassing poo-towel incident. This complex running-around-the-house game was my chance to make up for past mistakes, and I was not going to blow it. Despite my complete lack of understanding of the point of the game, I ran around that house like my life fucking depended on it.

Until I felt a fart coming.

It stopped me cold. You see, farting is a dangerous game when you’re still getting used to life without nappies. Each one can go either way, and while I had become fairly adept at recognising which ones would involve only air and which ones would need a toilet, I was still pretty inexperienced when it came to being in charge of my own bowel activities.

I needed a minute to concentrate and figure out exactly what was going on down there, but I could see the other kids ahead of me, and I wanted so badly to keep playing that I went for it.

I closed my eyes and pushed, praying that the gamble would pay off.

The shit that immediately started running down my leg was a fairly good indication that it hadn’t.

At this point, I had two choices. I could go back inside before anybody saw, have my mum clean me up, and pretend like none of this had ever happened. But that would mean walking out on a game with the cool kids that I had been desperate to play since I first saw them running nonsensically around the house.

Alternatively, I could try and cover the mess as best I could, and keep playing until they realised I was the lame poo-towel girl and start to question why they had invited me out there in the first place. I was certain I was playing against the clock anyway, so it made sense to try and squeeze in as much time with these guys as I could.

I decided to go with option number two. Playing with my older sister and her friends was just too good an opportunity to walk out on, no matter what had just taken place in my underpants.

So I went into emergency clean-up mode. I figured if I could keep the situation contained to my undies, nobody would ever have to know. I used some leaves to wipe what had escaped down my leg, I scraped my hand on a tree to get rid of any evidence and I continued running around the house like nothing had happened.

It was Rhiannon who noticed first.

‘What’s that smell?’ she said, looking at me suspiciously. Everybody came to a halt. ‘Did you fart?’

‘No!’ I screamed, way too defensively for someone who currently had a massive shit smeared between her bum cheeks.

‘Is that poo?’ my sister asked, pointing at my leg.

I looked down. Damn. It was, in fact, poo. My emergency clean-up and containment plan had not yielded successful results.

So that’s how I found myself, for the second time in three days, standing in the bathroom while being laughed at by the cool kids. I couldn’t understand why Mum had left the door wide open, but I was so paralysed by embarrassment that I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I will say this now, though: if ever there’s a time for privacy, it’s when you’re bent over the sink while your mum wipes shit from your arse with a wet rag from the kitchen.

So, given the unfortunate and embarrassing poo-related events of the preceding weeks, you can understand why I considered this birthday party my opportunity to show Rhiannon’s friends that I was back on track, you know, life-wise.

That’s why I had organised the party with a miniature iron fist, and that’s why I was so pissed off that I was now face-to-face with a pink human pastry puff, asking me to explain my mother’s sleeping arrangements.

I knew Scott was my mum’s friend. I knew he was a taxi driver. I knew that when we moved into his house, there weren’t enough rooms for everybody, so he and my mum had to share. I knew that when I sometimes saw them naked it was just because sometimes grown-ups sleep naked. I couldn’t understand why it was so damn hard for this idiot standing in front of me to comprehend.

Doesn’t everybody’s mum sleep naked with her friend Scott the Taxi Driver?

It was perfectly acceptable to me that theirs was a friends-only arrangement. But I guess you don’t question that stuff when you’re just trying to get through life without shitting your pants more than twice in a week.

How could I possibly have known that Mum and Scott met when he used to drive her home after her long shifts as a sex worker? How could I possibly have known that on those 3am taxi rides, he had fallen in love with her ridiculous beauty and decided he could save her? How could I possibly have known that he moved us into his house, and that’s why we didn’t live with the girls near the brothel anymore? (Come to think of it, how could I have possibly known that was a brothel?) How could I possibly have known that when my mum accepted his offer of a boob job, she also accepted his offer of a cheap home for her children so she could stop selling her body and go back to the far less lucrative profession of nursing?

All I knew was that we lived with my mum’s friend Scott, and they shared a room because there wasn’t enough space.

Had I been faced with this human tulle-diarrhoea explosion later in life, I would have been able to give her cake-smeared face a far more detailed answer. But in that moment, dressed as Michelangelo the orange Ninja Turtle at my fourth birthday party, trying desperately to make up for some embarrassing toilet mishaps from my recent past, I was in no position to tell that girl anything.

It was only much later that I was able to piece together some of the details, but it’s still difficult to understand how a girl went from an exclusive private school on the North Shore to the parking lot of a brothel in Wagga Wagga.

My mum was abandoned the moment she was born. Her mother was sixteen, terrified and sent away to another state to give birth in secret. The moment my mum came into the world, she was wrapped in a blanket and ushered out of the room, the exhausted teenage girl who had just delivered her not even allowed to see her face. She did name her, though: Katherine.

Within days, Katherine was adopted by an upper-middle-class couple that couldn’t have children of their own. They already had two adopted sons, but desperately wanted a girl. They renamed their new daughter Lisa, and just like that, Katherine had been erased.

But even in her ‘new’ life, her ‘better’ life, mum was always filled with so much sorrow. It’s almost like something in her knew she had been Katherine before she had been Lisa, and she couldn’t handle the pain that came with knowing her birth mother hadn’t wanted her.

As long as I’ve known her, my mum has felt abandoned and alone, and from what I can tell, she always did.

Raised on Sydney’s leafy and affluent North Shore, my mum, along with her two adopted brothers, attended some of the best private schools in the country. Every opportunity was afforded to her, but she just couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. She was a ‘bad girl’. At least, as bad as you can be when you’re a privileged white kid from Turramurra. I think there was a bit of smoking behind the toilets and kissing boys and sneaking out after 8pm. That sort of scandalous thing.

She was moved to a country boarding school, but after she was expelled, her parents grew increasingly frustrated. This was not the girl they had signed up for. She was fiercely intelligent, popular and creatively gifted, but she was also incredibly self-destructive. She spent some time at secretarial school, some time at nursing school, but mostly she just wanted to party with her friends. She would later be diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, but at the time, everyone just considered her an insufferable, rebellious teen.

Her parents kicked her out of the house, and she immediately went on to make a series of ridiculously bad life decisions. The first of which was my dad, Tony.

After meeting in a share-house, they quickly became inseparable. He was eleven years older than her, and married at the time they met. He had no job, drank heavily and did a lot of drugs. All qualities that clearly scream ‘good catch’. After leaving his wife to be with Mum, he started controlling and abusing her almost immediately. My mum worked as a nursing assistant to support them both, then became pregnant with Rhiannon. I’m assuming at that point, she was the only twenty-year-old alumna from Ravenswood School for Girls living in a share-house bedroom and pregnant with an abusive junkie’s baby.

Things got worse when she finally connected with her birth mother. Theirs is an incredible story – the kind that should have ended like a quirky Nora Ephron film, but instead ended like Requiem for a Dream, except with Darth Vader telling Luke he’s his father instead of the double-dildo scene.

My mum had always known she was adopted; it wasn’t kept secret in her family. So as soon as she could put her name on a list to try and connect with her birth mother, she did it. She had been following the work of a woman called Kate, an academic who worked with local adoption support groups and had written a book about women who had given up their children during the fifties, sixties and seventies. My mum had the book in her nightstand, and fantasised about her own mother being one of the women featured in it. How incredible would it be to find out your adoption was coerced, and your mother had actually wanted you all along?

Just a few weeks after registering her name, my mum got the call. Her birth mother had been located, and she had been in Mum’s nightstand the entire time. Kate, the academic and adoption rights advocate whose work my mum had been following, was in actual fact her birth mother.

And it turns out, though they may have tried, my adopted grandparents hadn’t managed to erase all trace of Katherine the day they renamed my mother Lisa. There, on the front page of Kate’s book, was a dedication:

‘For Katherine.’

My mum immediately assumed that her adoption had been forced. This woman had dedicated her life’s work to sharing the stories of those who had been heartbreakingly affected by the adoption process – her book was dedicated to the daughter she had lost. To her! The part inside of my mum that had always felt abandoned was desperate to know that it hadn’t been her mother’s choice.

But it had been her choice.

Kate, a straightforward and often harsh woman, told my mum that while she had struggled with the loss of her daughter, she still knew it was the best thing for both of them at the time.

Their relationship was strained from that point, disappointment on both sides simmering tensions.

My mum had hoped for a warm and loving woman who had always been desperately looking for the baby that was stolen from her. Instead, she found a woman who was cold, overly academic and very open about the fact she had wanted the adoption.

Kate had hoped for a strong, independent and driven feminist, hopefully at university and on her way to incredible things. Instead she found an unmarried twenty-year-old with a kid, a woman who liked to drink and do drugs and was living with an abusive alcoholic eleven years her senior.

Neither of them was particularly impressed with the other.

They tried having a relationship. Kate even found