Geek Girl was a cathartic book to write, says Holly Smale

As the third Geek Girl novel, Picture Perfect, is published, author Holly Smale says that bullying was never going to stand in the way of her becoming a writer

Holly Smale, author of Geek Girl Photo: Clara Molden

By Martin Chilton, Culture Editor online

The Telegraph 05 Jun 2014

This is how Harriet Manners, the heroine of Holly Smale's award-winning series of YA novels, spends one of her afternoons in the new novel Geek Girl: Picture Perfect.

a) eating cake

b) lying flat on my back, trying not to be sick

c) attempting to get brown icing off my duvet.

The third book in the Geek Girl series, set in the state of New York, was published this week. Smale read out a chapter in her event at the Hay Festival (we all learned that New York has 3,492 clothing stores) and you could tell that the 32-year-old author from Welwyn Garden City has found the voice she was desperately looking for during a difficult spell before being published.

Smale is well placed to write about the awkwardness of being a teenager and the problems young people face. She talks openly about the bullying she suffered as a schoolgirl, saying that at times "it felt like being a lamb in the corner of a room full of tigers". The response to being bullied, she says, was that she blamed herself and tried to hide. "I let my hair become bigger and wore baggier clothes and supermarket-only brand trainers," she says. 
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