All hail the new queen of teen

Dawn O’Porter’s favourite novel when she was a teenager, and the novel that she says made her want to write, was Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Published in 1985 and set in a small, working class community, dealing with navigating first friendships and relationships while growing up inside a highly unusual family, Oranges is not too dissimilar from Dawn’s first novel, Paper Aeroplanes.

The book tells the story of 15-year-olds Renee and Flo, who forge a belated friendship in their last year of high school. Dawn (who took the O’ from husband Chris O’Dowd’s name) based the novel on her upbringing in Guernsey in the 1990s. For girls who went to school before modern day conveniences like texting, Whatsapping and social networking the book is a hark back to simpler days, with chip shop dinners, passing notes in class and the minefield that is teenage friendships. Not that it felt simple at the time, of course.

“I went to an all girls school,” Dawn says, “so if you took a day off sick you’d come back the next day and everyone hated you because they’d had the whole day to talk about you. It’s a really grim reality of what girls can be like.”

But on the other hand, Dawn remembers the sheer solidarity of teenage girls, with the definition and security friendship brings. “Women can be the most vicious to each other, but they can also be that total life-line that you can’t live without,” she adds. “Even now as a married adult my best friends are crucial to my life and my sanity; I tell them things I could never tell Chris about.”

Dawn’s teenage years got off to a tragic start. She lost her mother to cancer as a child, and she and her sister Jane had to move in with their grandparents – a storyline she recreates in the book with Renee.

Dawn and her sister “definitely struggled with each other”, she says. “She’s older by two years, and it was difficult because we were very different. Our mummy had died and we were living with our grandparents and she was maturing into puberty and I was still a bit younger – we were very much on different pages.” The sisters never talked about their mother’s death, living with their grandparents until Dawn was ten before moving in with their aunt and uncle. “We’re amazing friends now; we were always friends, but I think actually it’s about having that one person you can just take it out on that you know will always be there. I knew I could be as horrible to her as I liked and she could be as horrible to me as she liked because we knew we’d always be there for each other.”

Despite now being married to Bridesmaids and Girls-starring actor Chris O’Dowd, starring in a string of successful documentaries and carving out a career as a journalist, Dawn admits she wasn’t a very cool teenager. “I had no idea how to dress myself; I was very pale and quite fat, but I was never one of the geeks. I was always in the cool crowd,” she says. “Being a teenager back then was different because there wasn’t the pressure of the media – I think I was about a size 14 when I was a teenager, but I didn’t have a major problem with it.”

Paper Aeroplanes doesn’t hold back in detailing the grimmer aspects of growing up: drunken fumblings at house parties, jealousy, rivalry and back-stabbing are all there, but are in the expert hands of someone who appreciates how important those moments were when you were 15, as trivial as they seem now.

Fancying your mate’s older brother, borrowing clothes and skiving school to go to the chip shop provide light relief to some of the more hard-hitting storylines: Flo has to raise her younger sister practically alone in the absence of their workaholic single mother; Renee’s relationship with her explosive grandfather and frustratingly passive grandmother is particularly emotional, and there is a darker storyline about one school girl’s relationship with an older man.

But Dawn says it’s not in her nature to hold back, acknowledging that she was brutally honest because she had to be. “There’s no point brushing over subjects such as virginity and periods and heartache if you’re not really going to go into it, so it wasn’t that I made a decision – I just didn’t hold back.

“I wanted teenage girls to go ‘yeah, that’s how it feels’. There’s so much regulation in TV and film on what’s okay and what’s not okay – I didn’t want to think about that. That doesn’t mean you end up writing something crazily controversial, it’s that you just haven’t thought about what people might say. I just wanted to write about how I remember feeling.”

A sequel to Paper Aeroplanes is planned for next year called Goose. “It’s really difficult when you’ve written a book,” Dawn says. “You put your heart and soul into your first book, and to recreate that is hard.”

But with an authenticity that speaks directly to the youth of today, as well as the grown-up youth of the nineties, Paper Aeroplanes will no doubt be tucked under the blazer of every female high school student. Although they may never have heard of Blur and tinned chicken in white wine sauce, Dawn’s message of solidarity overcoming angst and friendship reigning supreme is a timeless concept that may just be today’s teenage girls’ saving grace.

So if Dawn could write her 15-year-old self a letter and impart some worldly wisdom on her younger counterpart, what would it be? “I would say relax, because I think I was frantically trying to find people, as in friends and boyfriends, and not just relaxing into the friendships and relationships that I had. I’d tell myself to focus on myself a bit more. Oh, and I’d tell myself to stop eating Wotsits”.

In what was probably the coolest launch party of 2013 so far, Dawn served cold pizza and champagne, guests were invited to graffiti the pink brick walls like they would their exercise books, and there was even a tuck shop serving UFOs, Whams, Freddos and, of course, Wotsits. Chris O’Dowd proudly toasted his wife and the couple’s celebrity friends, including Gizzi Erskine, Kate Nash and Gemma Cairney got stuck in with the Sharpies and the crisps. But we wouldn’t have expected anything less from the new queen of teen – Dawn O’Porter may just be the coolest thing to happen to teen fiction, and hopefully she’s here to stay.

Paper Aeroplanes is out now, published by Hot Key Books.