Dear Me: A Letter To My Sixteen-Year-Old Self

Being sixteen is as much fun as Gordon Brown: the pustules, the impossible infatuation with Anna Davies in 5B, the awful poetry. Dear Me: A Letter To My Sixteen-Year-Old Self combines our memories of adolescent embarrassment alongside contemporary obsessions with celebrity to create a book destined for Christmas stockings.

The book's premise is simple. What would you say to your sixteen year-old self? Stephen Fry, Annie Lennox, Fay Weldon, Debbie Harry, Brenda Blethyn, Jonathan Ross, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Yoko Ono and Emma Thompson have all contributed a letter, and if you're the sort of person that can't get out of bed until you've read the tweets of the great and the good, this is the book for you. £1 from every copy sold will go to the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

In the interests of the pretence that we ordinary members of the public are as interesting as the celebrity gods that rule us, the Dear Me blog invites you to submit your own letters, which will then be posted on the site. You can include pictures and do not have to give your real name. The melancholic tone that runs through many of the letters already posted on the site is enough to make you weep. We were young once. We had hopes, we had dreams, damn it ... what the hell happened? www.amazon.co.uk

November 27 09