Bad Behaviour (Rebecca Starford, A&U)

Being a 14-year-old girl can be brutal, and Bad Behaviour is Melbourne-based editor Rebecca Starford’s memoir of a harrowing year spent at a posh boarding school’s bush campus. Starford lived in a dorm with 15 other girls whose teenage insecurities were expressed either in ugly, vicious acts of bullying or introverted, socially scorned behaviour. Starford quickly perceives that she has a choice: bully or be bullied; be well-liked or get worn down. She forms a shaky alliance with the tyrannical Petra and begins to behave badly, risking her scholarship to order to impress her dangerous friends. Starford effectively captures the sense of fear that can often come with being a teenage girl and the sharp irony in the fact that the girls were left largely unsupervised to ‘develop their character’. More intriguingly, she touches on how difficult it is to ‘break character’ once typecast, and how to overcome traumatic childhood experiences as an adult. Starford is unflinchingly honest when it comes to describing how the psychological damage of her teens led to the destructive decisions of her 20s, and throws in a few neat observations about the sheer waste and privileged thinking at her school. Some plot threads aren’t as teased out as they could be, but this tale of schoolgirl tyrannies deserves to be told.

Hilary Simmons is the assistant editor at Books+Publishing and a freelance journalist