Louise Rennison

She deployed self-deprecating humour to make people laugh — a skill honed as a stand-up comedian. Her 14-year-old heroine, Georgia, frets about her bra size, fantasises about the school “god” and is frequently humiliated by her father in his pyjamas. Her scrapes (based on Rennison’s) include shaving off her eyebrows with her father’s razor, a younger sister who announces “Georgia did a big poo this morning” and going to a fancy-dress party as a stuffed olive.

However, Rennison’s writing also tackled lesbians and teenage sex. After teachers protested that it was too explicit, she said: “Show me a girl of nine, ten and 11 who hasn’t discussed lips, breasts and bums with girls of the same age.”

It was Rennison’s column for the London Evening Standard on her adult exploits — dating when you’re over 35 (“Where have we gone wrong? Even Deirdre Barlow gets dates”) — that had first attracted a publisher’s attention. “She rang me and said that she thought I could write a sort of teenage Bridget Jones because the kind of thing I wrote was so self-obsessed. She had me spot on.” Rennison initially dismissed the idea because it would involve sitting alone in a room. In the event she wrote her first book in a month, dishing out each chapter to friends as she went along.

If some of her stories were embellished it did not seem to matter. She was entertaining, if raucous, company. Seemingly disaster prone, she regaled friends — in the Leeds’ accent that she retained along with a love of Yorkshire — with escapades such as buying a pair of shoes a size too small that had to be surgically removed after a night out. She listed dancing as a hobby.

Alternately sunny, bossy and argumentative, she lived life fully — and drank enthusiastically. She “will not stop and you do have to keep an eye on how you’re going to get home”, recalled the comedian Alan Davies. She was once cautioned by the police after a particularly noisy domestic argument had spilled on to the streets.

Louise Rennison was born in 1951 in Leeds. She grew up in a three-bedroomed house with her parents (Jack and Pauline), sister, grandparents, aunt, uncle and a cousin. Her mother, who survives her, had Irish Catholic roots, which Rennison blamed for her wayward nature. She went to Parklands Grammar in Leeds but, like her teen heroine, used to go for “snogging lessons” with an older boy. “It was quite formal, you had to knock on the door and he’d teach you how to snog and where to put your hands,” she recalled.

When Rennison was 15 her parents emigrated to Wairakei in New Zealand. She refused to get off the ship at Wellington and spent the next six weeks telling her parents they had ruined her life. She briefly returned to England to live with her grandmother but, after she started dating a boy in a band, was shipped back to her parents.

She promptly became pregnant. This was out of boredom, she later said; Wairakei was known mainly for its geothermal energy. Her parents were horrified and her mother offered to raise the baby. Instead Rennison gave it up for adoption, insisting that the agency find a father who owned a ranch and a mother who was a ballerina — “the most stupid things I could think of”.

In her twenties she moved to London and frequented parties in Notting Hill. “I knew Pink Floyd and whoever. We used to follow Bryan Ferry into a Holland Park chemist to see what make-up he’d bought — it was spot cream.” She also knew the former Welsh drug smuggler Howard Marks — although on that subject she remained quieter.

Jobs included a stint as a dental nurse and a playleader in an adventure playground in Brixton; she lived “in a one-bedroomed flat owned by Roxy Music which was quite cheap . . . because five of us were sharing it.”

She went travelling and then moved to Brighton, where she settled. She won a place at a “sub-Fame” performing arts school. She recalled an audition in which she was asked to be an embryo: “One tutor said I must never go on the stage again as my performing made her physically sick.” Graduating in 1987, she joined a female cabaret group called Women with Beards and wrote comedy material.

Dressing mostly in black and preferring vivid lipstick, she lived a frugal existence. She had her first commercial success with her own one-woman show “Stevie Wonder Felt My Face” — the title was based on a meeting with the famous blind singer in America during which, she said, he had recoiled after he had got round to her prominent nose. She later wrote for John Peel’s Home Truths and Woman’s Hour on Radio 4. She struggled on a script for the Spice Girl’s film SpiceWorld — “The girls weren’t very interesting, to be honest . . . The worst thing they said about Scary Spice was that she always made them go to the loo with her, but when they wanted to go to the loo, she wouldn’t bother coming.”

Her first Georgia novel was well-received in Britain — although one critic did note “Adrian Mole and Bridget Jones can sleep soundly in their beds” — and sold to the US for a six-figure sum. On her first trip she sailed out on the QE2 (her phobias included flying). She enjoyed whirls of champagne and travel to book signings by limousine.

However, she had to provide her American readers with a glossary to make sense of “Y-fronts” (“underwear not worn by any boy you’d want to know”) and “duff” (“useless”). In one interview Rennison mentioned “lighting a fag”; the journalist was shocked: “Don’t you think that’s kind of cruel?” When the idea of a film was proposed she refused to allow US scriptwriters to marry Georgia off or give her plastic surgery on her nose. Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008) was eventually made in Britain.

In 1993 Rennison, who never married, was reunited with her daughter, Kim, who made contact via an agency. Kim, who moved to London in her twenties and worked in financial services, had grown up in New Zealand with the wealthy middle-class parents Rennison had wished for.

At first mother and daughter “got drunk a lot” but later developed a close relationship. “I call her my little sister,” Kim once said. “But that’s okay, because what I need at my age is a really good sounding board. When I want advice from someone who knows me better than I know myself, I phone Lou and, whatever it is, she’s usually just been through it.”

Louise Rennison, novelist, was born on October 11, 1951. She died on February 29, 2016, aged 64