I just bought this book a month or so ago, in Edinburgh, I didn’t even realise that Michele Hanson had written this book so it was sheer luck that I spotted it in a second hand bookshop.

What the Grown-Ups Were Doing is about Michele’s experiences growing up in a Jewish family in suburban Ruislip, south of England in the 1950s. If you read her weekly column in the Guardian you’ll know that she writes with humour and as mothers never seem to get the type of daughter that they want it was inevitable that she would grow up an awkward tomboy, not the sort of daughter that her mother could boast about. Here’s a taster:

Bosoms were the last thing I wanted. There was something terrifying about them. They had to be strapped into brassieres or they wobbled about. They stuck out and boys stared at them – which only led to sex, marriage and having babies. And I didn’t like to think about the awful meeting of bottoms required for that business. I think a lot of us can probably relate to that!

I’ve been reading Michele Hanson’s column in the Guardian for years now and I must admit that my favourite era was when she was writing about her elderly mother who lived with her and her daughter, it was great to find out what her mother was like as a young woman and get to know the details and background of her life. Since her mother’s death the column tends to be more about Michele’s friends, her dogs, the general mess of London or our ghastly government and I must say that part of the reason that I read the column now is that I always seem to be agreeing with whatever it is that she is griping about and over the years she seems more like a friend than anything else, the sort of friend that you could solve the problems of the world with – if only THEY would listen to you.

There are quite a lot of Jewish/Yiddish words in the book but thankfully they are translated. If you would like to have a peek at her weekly Guardian columns you can see them here.