I have always been fascinated by friendships, in particular female friendships. One of my favourite films is Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, which is about the notorious 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case in Christchurch, New Zealand. This true-life story of two young girls who, after a series of events, end up murdering one of their mothers is not something I can quite relate to, and yet their intense relationship and obsessive admiration for one another – filled with love, jealousy and even the creation of a mutual fantasy world – is something I completely recognise in my own life, and that of the girls I grew up with.
I went to an all-girls school in north London founded by Frances Mary Buss, a pioneer of female education. This relatively small school taught us to celebrate all that comes with being a woman, and the absence of boys meant that “gender roles” were not something I was ever aware of. Don’t get me wrong, I was devastated by the fact that my only contact with boys for five years was the occasional wave, duck and hide at the skaters in the park opposite the school, but, in hindsight, I’m eternally grateful: it is these experiences, surrounded exclusively by hormonal teenage girls, that have continued to inspire me in both my life and my work. If I have ever known what it means to be loyal; to be jealous; to admire and to obsess; to feel love and to feel hate, it never was as intense as with my girlfriends.
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