Back in the 1970s when I celebrated my 18th in my parents’ garage, it was all so much more innocent. I did my level best to create an unforgettable event by inviting every bad lad of my acquaintance. But Sandy L. (tipple of choice rum and black) was absent on the night in question, serving a short custodial sentence for setting fire to a police cell after being arrested as drunk and disorderly. His brother Gavin, who could be relied on to supply mind-altering substances of your choice, and on whom I had an immense crush, was also otherwise occupied, fortunately for my father’s blood pressure.

The real difference is of course not so much innocence as communications. When Rachael Bell’s gatecrashers arrived, alerted to the event by a hacked and doctored MySpace site inviting them to a “trash the average-sized family home disco party”, they came from all over the country in their own cars. My guests could muster one battered blue Bedford van and a motorbike between them. Everyone else was reliant on their parents driving them ten miles out of Birmingham to the village where we lived. You can bet your life that my mate Di’s mum frisked her for stolen sherry and cigarettes before she left the house, and breathalysed her on the way home.

A year or two ago, the fourteen-year old daughter of a friend of mine told me about the party from hell she’d been invited to. The parents were divorced. Party Girl was living with her mum in a small, cramped flat, while Dad was shacked up in a rather more luxurious pad decorated to the new girlfriend’s taste with white walls, ivory carpet and cream leather sofas. Dad and girlfriend went away for the weekend, foolishly forgetting that Party Girl had her own door key. She told her mum she was staying with a friend for the weekend, and sent a general invitation round the school for a get-together at Dad’s.

At this point, several dozen teenagers knew about the party. Some, my friend’s daughter told me, could work out what was likely to happen and were not happy about it. But the price of informing would have been social isolation. I am also willing to bet that one or two parents knew about it too, but decided it was not their business to tell Party Girl’s mother or father. The party went ahead. Predictably, there were gatecrashers. The cream leather sofa and the ivory carpet took the brunt of their attentions. I am sure Party Girl got the sharp end of her mum’s tongue, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there might have also been secret, smug glee that the new girlfriend and her swanky furniture had got their come-uppance.

At the time I was writing my novel Crow Stone, a thriller partly about the terrible events that occur during her fourteenth summer and determine the course of the heroine’s adult life. The novel is set both in the 1970s and in the present day, with two intertwining, edge-of-your-seat narratives. But as I wrote about Katie growing up in 1976, and heard the story of Party Girl, it occurred to me that what really scars teenage girls is the stuff of everyday jealousies and friendships, rivalries at school, being ostracised for being different or for telling on your friends. What seems like a comedy to an adult audience is often a tragedy for its intense, adolescent actors, and the people around them.

So in the novel, I wrote as farce the episode in which Katie’s best friend Trish — an appalling bossy-boots who trails disaster in her wake, both as a fourteen year old and as an adult — decides they will celebrate Katie’s birthday at the home of another friend, whose parents are away. Katie doesn’t want to go along with the plan, but daren’t tell anyone. What happens that night, traumatic enough at the time, is also the catalyst for the dreadful experience that later unfolds in an underground quarry on the outskirts of Bath.

Rachael Bell will not be marked in the same way as Katie. But she will never forget that Easter Monday night when she bolted the front door then saw gatecrashers come crawling through the windows, like zombies from Night Of the Living Dead, vomiting on the carpet. My heart goes out to her mother too, her memories trashed along with her possessions, and no doubt also aware that every other parent in Britain is smiling wryly and thanking God that there but fortune…

As for my own eighteenth, alas, I will never forget the humiliation. In the garage and garden, all was going splendidly. I looked amazing in my Laura Ashley dress, the stars were out and I was on the point of snogging Dave Miller, on whom I had another immense crush. Meanwhile my parents, who had promised not to interfere, were sequestered in the living room on the other side of the house. My mother happened to glance out of the window. “Ooh, look,” she remarked, “there’s someone sitting in the swimming pool.” It was Dave’s friend Brian, using the splendid acoustics of an empty pool to serenade his girlfriend with his guitar.

Unfortunately my father misheard. “Someone being SICK in the swimming pool?” he roared and marched round the house to throw everybody out. The party ended abruptly before midnight, and I was the social failure of the season. I have never felt entirely happy holding a party since.

Why? Just about every photograph through my career as a broadcaster has revealed that I am in the wrong profession. Instead of a sensitive but tough-minded journalist, the face beaming back at me from the picture is unmistakeably that of a jolly barmaid.

She often seems a bit tired — I think she probably owns the pub and works long hours — and these days she’s definitely worn around the edges, but you can tell she likes nothing better than downing a couple of babychams and having a laugh over a naughty joke. On a very jolly evening, she might even jump on the bartop and lead the company in a chorus of Down at The Old Bull and Bush, because there’s something just a bit Ealing Comedy about her and her pub, one of those hostelries where the ceiling is nicotine yellow and the soles of your shoes leave the floor with a slight sucking sensation.

Lately she’s had her hair highlighted in that shade known to us Bristolians as Bedminster Blonde, and her bosom requires roughly the same amount of engineering genius to support it as the Clifton Suspension Bridge. She’s a lot of fun and she doesn’t put up with troublemakers — but I’m not sure she’s ever read a book.

The trouble is that regardless of the evidence in the mirror every day, I persist in thinking of myself as a thin, dark-eyed, soulful type. I know I’m not, in fact never have been — at no time in the history of the known universe did the Mills bum squeeze itself into anything smaller than a size 14 pair of jeans, and to be truthful it doesn’t even manage that now. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t particularly want to be thin, certainly not enough anyway to suffer to become so — but actual jeans size is irrelevant because I know my soul is that of a thin woman. Until I look at a photo, that is, and find the Changeling Pint-Puller grinning back.

Jolly Barmaid was, surprisingly, an asset in my broadcasting career. I would turn up to do an interview and people would be lulled into a false sense of security. I’m sure that’s why so many were prepared to pour their hearts out. (“How do you do it?” asked a friend when I came back from recording a rather moving chat with the actor George Lazenby. “Dammit, you even made James Bond cry.”)

But to return to the question of the Author Photograph — clearly we needed to call time, gentlemen, please, on Jolly Barmaid. No way could I allow her on the cover of Crow Stone for strangers to say: blimey, how did she write this? Although the narrator Kit can find humour in the grimmest circumstances, it does end up very dark indeed.

No, I had to find a photographer so brilliant he would allow my Inner Soulfulness to emerge, instead of carelessly snapping away and catching me giggling at all the wrong moments. Besides, I had my Instructions. “Mysterious,” said Annabel, my editor. “Moody. Atmospheric. Remember, the book jacket will be black and gold.”

So earlier this week a very nice man called Charlie Hopkinson turned up. “Black leather coat, I think,” he said. “Smile? Of course you don’t have to smile. Writers don’t, usually.”

Not smiling is harder than you think. The very first photo Charlie took, I was grinning like a hyena, Jolly Barmaid yo-ho-hoing from my eyes in spite of a trip to the hairdressers to tone down the highlights and give me a more sober, writerly appearance. It didn’t help that in the middle of autumn’s rainiest week, Charlie had somehow brought the sunshine with him. We spotted some abandoned railway tracks and a looming, black brick warehouse. Charlie led me through mud and knee high brambles — that took the smile off my face as I realised what it was doing to my suede boots. In the next few pictures, Jolly Barmaid metamorphosed into Rosa Klebb, part-time concentration camp guard, with tight lips and a mad hostile stare. “You’re scaring me,” said Charlie.

The problem, as Frances Wilson wrote last year in a Guardian article about author photographs, and why they should be abolished altogether, is that women have no clear role models in this department. “Male authors, like dentists, should be both trusted and feared…the face is crevassed with shadow, propped up on a fist, the brow furled…We have almost no idea what a generic female author should look like, short of wearing a mob cap like Jane Austen.”

Oh how true. I knew what I didn’t want to look like — J.B. — but who to aspire to? I’ve worked in television and I know that what a woman looks like there is, depressingly, a factor in her eventual success. You don’t actually have to be young — witness how many articles the Daily Mail runs on icons like Felicity Kendal at sixty — but you’d damn well better look well-preserved.

I really wanted the smooth sculpted loveliness (alas, unattainable) of a Zadie Smith, but should I aim towards a UK version of Patricia Cornwell’s groomed, ageless gloss? Unattainable as well, I decided, unless I employed the services of an image consultant and a TV make-up artist. Interestingly, one of my television friends tried to persuade me to do exactly that, and I really was tempted, but then I realised it might be seen as a bit sad. Besides, he worked for Casualty, so I could have ended up with a bleeding wound and a bruise or two — appropriate, but not flattering.

Luckily Charlie proved to be rather clever at his job, and by Location 3 I had stopped worrying so much what I looked like, and was concentrating instead on what he told me to do. “Turn your head to the right, collar up, sweep that strand of hair off your face — now hold the position but let your eyes look into the lens…” If I thought at all about anything, I remembered what Kit in the novel says about looking at Gary: “There are miles of tunnels in that look.”

As Annabel remarked when she saw the pictures: “Not a jolly barmaid in sight.” Vanity is served, my best friends will still recognise me, and the Author will gaze intensely at her readers from the back flap, not hostile, not mad, not grinning inanely, but looking as if she might actually have written the book.

So why did I get so het up? Does it really matter? Afterwards, Mally in Publicity came up with the Guardian article — not a hint, I hope, that everyone at HC thinks I’m a pain in the ass about having my picture taken — and I found myself wondering whether Frances Wilson is right to call for the abolition of author pictures.

Are we moving into an era where the way a writer looks really will determine her ability to sell? (Not, I think, his ability, but then I am an old-fashioned feminist — that’s Ms. Mills, please – and therefore historically jaundiced in my view.)

I do hope not. It’s bad enough for female authors to know Posh and Jordan can outsell us, admitting to have read nothing much heavier than Hello magazine since they left school.

But one of the cheering things about publishing — unless I am being very unperceptive — is that nobody seems to give a toss about age. In television, you are effectively dead once you reach 35, and I have grown used to being treated like a walking corpse. It was a breath of fresh air to realise I certainly wouldn’t be the oldest first-timer ever published, by at least a couple of decades, and even if I can never aspire to join the Best of British Young Novelists, some of those who do are close to if not past their TV sell-by-date. Anyway, didn’t I hear they’ve got a Best of British Wrinkly Novelists list now?

Charlie, trying to make me feel better, I think, or at least prepare me for the fact that he wasn’t going to be bribed to retouch the photos, said: “I’d much rather photograph an older woman. There’s so much more in the face.” He must have seen that didn’t quite do the trick. So he added, bravely: “And read a book by an older writer, too.”

Actually, for me the point is that in writing, age doesn’t matter. It’s the book that counts. I admit I couldn’t have written Crow Stone at twenty, or thirty, but that’s me — late developer in the writing department. Some authors do their best work when young, others grow into it.

But there is still a curiosity to know something more about an author than the book gives away — background, married, kids? Are they like us? Might they even be twin souls? (The answer is probably not on your nelly, but I always hope my favourite authors are the kind of people I’d feel comfortable having a coffee with.) So I can’t quite bring myself to agree with Frances Wilson. I want to know what the writer looks like, though it would never be a determining factor in whether to buy the book.

By the way, anyone who has visited this site before might notice that a certain Jolly Barmaid has done (or is about to do) a vanishing trick. Kate, get that photo of me replaced pronto.

Ed: Righty-ho Jenni, it’s done. Unfortunately, and this is perhaps a worse crime than even the make-up artist on Casualty could enact, it has to be square, so I’ve chopped the top of your head off. Publishers: harsh.
In the interests of doing your photo justice, and for those fans who can’t wait for Crow Stone to appear, here it is, in full:

Last week I came in to visit everyone who is going to be working on my book at Press Books. You can listen to an interview with me here, and also hear how to get sent one of ten free advance reading copies of Crow Stone.

Listen to interview with Jenni Mills: The Filing Cupboard presents an interview with author Jenni Mills

The book is currently in manuscript form, and will hit the shelves in hardback in Spring 2007. In the meantime, we recorded me reading the first chapter for you to sample…

Listen to Crow Stone: The Filing Cupboard presents the first chapter of Crow Stone, read by the author Jenni Mills [MP3, 8.13MB]