Comedian Jon Richardson has turned his teenage diaries into a memoir that charts his emotional spiral from childhood contentment into teenage despair. The book, titled "The Teenage Diaries of a Stand-Up Comedian," opens with an entry from Christmas Day 1996 where the young Richardson wrote about his love for his family. It closes with an entry from three years later: "I'm lying on the floor in floods of tears and all I want to do is die."
Richardson, from Lancashire, spent two years writing the project. He described the teenage years it documents as "a storm of shit," according to the Guardian. The comedian wrote the book during a difficult period in his own life. He experienced bereavement, serious illness among family and friends, and the breakdown of his marriage to fellow comic Lucy Beaumont. The couple's split received significant tabloid coverage after their relationship had played out publicly through their mockumentary series "Meet the Richardsons."
Richardson said he could not "sugarcoat" the darker entries from his adolescence. The project was reportedly inspired by a Nobel laureate, though the source does not specify which one. Richardson approached his teenage self's words with honesty rather than sentimentality, preserving both the despair and the voice of the boy who wrote them.
The comedian reflected on the fortuitous timing of his diary entries, telling the Guardian that had he known as a teenager he would one day write a book about those years, he "couldn't have bookended" them "with better quotes" to illustrate the turbulence of adolescence. The resulting memoir balances the frank documentation of teenage depression with humour drawn from Richardson's experience as a stand-up comic.