Dear Agony Aunt: What Should I Do?

The business of giving advice is booming, but who is qualified to offer guidance?

- LAURA CRAIK

No teenager is in a hurry to talk about sex with their mother. But, there being no Google to advise my 16-year-old self in the ’80s, my mother it had to be. All my friends were as clueless as I was and, since my mother had given birth to me, I deduced that she must have—gross—at least done the deed at some point.

Pre-internet, if you wanted advice on boyfriends, girlfriends, acne or period pains, you had two options: Asking your mum (cringe) or your peer group (cringe, and also fairly useless). Or, you could write to an agony aunt, who might eventually sift through her bloated postbag and answer your query within the pages of whichever esteemed oracle you read. For me, it was Jackie magazine, and while its agony aunts, Cathy and Claire, never did respond to my question, “Why is one breast bigger than the other, and how can I ever let a boy see me naked?”, they did respond to myriad other problems submitted by nameless girls whose issues, I soon deduced, were uniformly similar to mine.

Many years later, I’d discover that Cathy and Claire weren’t real, a betrayal akin to finding out the truth about Santa. “They” were Gayle Anderson—a woman, yes, but not an agony aunt by trade, a fact that did nothing to stem the steady stream of 500 letters a week she received, alongside the occasional scab or urine sample.