V!rg!n is a wry and squeamish look at today’s social and sexual pressures. Phoebe Luckhurst meets its 24 year-old author Radhika Sanghani
27 August 2014
Let’s play a game. It’s called Never Have I Ever. I’ll start. Never have I ever… done half the things I said I’d done between the ages of 16 and 21 in order to look one or more of the following: cool, experimental, up-for-anything, mad, bad, dangerous to know, normal.
The sing-song refrain of the opener will likely be familiar to anyone who attended a school and/or university in the past decade — as will that guilty thrill of lying to peers about supposed naughtiness. Usually students try to outdo each other with anecdotes of sexual iniquity. Ultimately, the game is driven by the fear that you aren’t doing the things that everyone else is doing (or say they are).
“I find it so funny when you think that people of a different generation would be asking, ‘Wait, so you’re cooler for having had sex outside in the park with someone watching you?’ and you’re like, ‘Yes, you are’,” muses 24-year-old author Radhika Sanghani, whose first novel, V!rg!n, is about to be released in the UK.
It’s a wry and squeamish look at today’s social and sexual pressures, conducted from the perspective of 21-year-old Ellie Kolstakis, a final-year UCL student and virgin. She is obsessed with losing said virginity — the book follows her progress, via drunken fumbles, botched bikini waxes, masturbation and games of Never Have I Ever.
Sanghani, who studied at UCL and City University, and also works as a journalist at the Telegraph, wrote the book in a month while recovering from a coach crash in Thailand in which a number of people died. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. She’d had the idea a year earlier, when TV series Girls exploded, but had sidelined it, wondering whether the issues had already been handled with naked zeal by Lena Dunham.
“It seems weird to think that I was going through something so intense and I decided to write about virginity and pubes, but it was exactly what I needed. I’d sit in a café every day, just writing and giggling to myself.”
At some point it struck her that what she was finding funny might have a broader audience and that programmes such as Girls might have started — rather than finished — the conversation about these issues.
Many of the graphic anecdotes in the book riff on the real-life experiences of her friends, though she insists that she is not Ellie — “People always ask me if it’s me and it’s driving me absolutely crazy!” — and refuses to be drawn on the topic of her own virginity.
She’s also used friends’ tales for the sequel — which she’s just finished — as well as those of strangers who have got in touch about V!rg!n: “Strangers have messaged me their stories and I’ve put loads of them in the sequel.”
Read More
Sponsored
Ultimately, however, the issue to which everything returns — aside from body hair (she dedicates the book to “anyone who has ever gone through the pain of a Brazilian”) — is the absence of realistic accounts of female experiences.
“Some people who have read it have been a bit like, ‘Wow — why did you feel the need to go into so much detail? That’s so intense’,” she tells me. “But I’m so bored with perfect heroines with perfect lives and never hearing anything about their sex lives, their body shape.” She is also sick of the narrative that dictates that women always want to lose their virginity to “the One”.
Has her boyfriend read it? “He completely freaked out and said, ‘I don’t want to know this much about girls!’” she laughs. “But I said, ‘No, you need to know this information about girls — it’s not fair: you don’t get to go through your entire life not knowing the stuff every girl goes through’.”
If there’s a message to be derived from V!rg!n, she thinks it’s, “when it comes to sex, it’s important for girls to get to a point where they make a choice based on their own decisions and feelings, not just what everyone around them is saying. And also about pubes. My message is I really want girls not to feel like they have to get a Brazilian or a Hollywood because that’s what everyone else is doing.”
V!rg!n is released on September 13
