Seventeen by Joe Gibson

Published by Gallery UK and Simon and Schuster on 20 July

Available from all Good Bookshops

What They Say

It’s 1992. Like every other seventeen-year-old boy, Joe has one eye on his studies, the other on his social life – smoking, Britpop, girls. He’s looking ahead to a gap year full of travel and adventure before university when his teacher – attractive, mid-thirties – takes an interest in him. It seems like a fantasy come true.  

For his final two years at school, he is bound to her, a woman twice his age, in an increasingly tangled web of coercion, sex and lies. Their affair, a product of complex grooming and a shocking abuse of authority, is played out in the corridors of one of Britain’s major private schools, under the noses of people who suspected, even knew, but said nothing. 

Thirty years on, this is Joe’s gripping record of the illicit relationship that dominated his adolescence and dictated the course of his life. With a heady dose of nineties nostalgia and the perfectly captured mood of those final months at school, Joe charts the enduring legacy of deceit and the indelibility of decisions made at seventeen. 

What I Say

You may have seen on my Twitter feed that I talked about a book that had stopped me in my tracks, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I read it (you can possibly tell by the number of post its in my copy in the picture!)

Lots of people were curious to know, and so today, I can tell you that the book I am talking about is called Seventeen. It is a memoir written by Joe Gibson (this is a pseudonym), which tells the story of Joe, as a seventeen year old, who had an affair with his thirty five year old teacher called Miss P.

Joe was awarded a bursary to study at a private school which was 150 miles away from his parents. They sorted out accommodation for him with some family friends, who were caring people, but basically left Joe to do what he wanted to do. He finds a group of friends quite quickly, and settles into school life, but then discovers that his Dad is leaving and his mum and dad are getting divorced.

Understandably upset, and realising how far away from home he is, he goes to a pub to drown his sorrows. It is there he bumps into Miss P, who listens to and comforts him and Joe realises that he is attracted to his teacher.

One evening Miss P asks him to help her tidy up the classroom, and they eventually end up at her flat where they drink wine together and kiss. Very quickly, this turns into a fully blown affair, and Joe, although he knows this is his teacher, and this is not right, realises that he loves Miss P – or Ali, as she now becomes to him.

Joe’s seventeen year old voice comes through very clearly throughout the memoir. He at times seems almost proud of their relationship, their sex life, and relishing the time they spend together, desperate to see her again, yet also still having to be the person his friends know. He has to be the seventeen year old they know – half listening to his friends as they debate which girls in their classes they fancy, trying to maintain the facade of a normal student, but harbouring this secret that he knows would blow his whole world apart if it ever comes out. So he says nothing.

What becomes clear to the reader very quickly is that this is not an equal relationship. Miss P controls every aspect of it – she devises the most incredible plans, comes up with the complicated and seemingly safe logistics to make sure that they can see each other, but also making sure little by little that Joe is entirely under her control. Miss P decides when and where they can see each other, she ignores him for periods at school, and taunts him about being a school boy when it seems that he is trying to think for himself.

As they become more and more involved, Joe distances himself from his friends and family, his school work starts to suffer, and his hopes of going to Oxford slip from his grasp. At the same time, his relationship with Ali intensifies, and her insistence that they spend time together in increasingly dangerous ways are to be honest, jaw dropping to say the least. Joe is so far entrenched in this relationship that he can’t see what we all can – that he is powerless, and entirely under Miss P’s control.

Seventeen honestly reads like fiction -as if Joe and Miss P are characters in a novel that you read, talk about and put on a shelf. Of course this is a memoir, these are real people, and their lives still go on. One of the most incredible parts of Joe’s story is what happens to the relationship – and no, I’m not going to tell you what that is.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Seventeen when I read it because I have so many questions. Why Joe? Had she done it before? Why didn’t the friends she told report her? What was her motive for getting involved with Joe? Was Ali telling the truth about her past relationships at all?

Yet something else supersedes all that, because I keep thinking about my seventeen year old son and what it would be like for him if it happened to him, and that is what Joe illustrates so clearly. At the very heart of all this, we need to understand that Joe is a seventeen year old school boy, and Miss P is his thirty five year old teacher.

It should never have happened, but it did, and if Seventeen does one thing, it made me start a conversation with my own son about what had happened to Joe, and how that behaviour from an adult is never acceptable. We also learn that it wasn’t until 2000 that it became illegal for a teacher to have a sexual relationship with a 16 or 17 year old – which makes you wonder how many times this story played out in other schools, and what happened to those people whose stories we may never know.

This is why I think it’s such a thought provoking memoir, because it made me stop and think about how I communicate with my son – when Joe was seventeen, there wasn’t social media and mobile phones, you had to either use the home phone or find a pay phone to contact someone, or even go physically to see them. Here and now, our teenagers are so busy looking down, connected to a world we can’t access, it is harder and harder to really find out what is happening in their lives, and that is why Seventeen is such an important book.

Now more than ever we need to be present for teenagers, to make sure that Joe’s story is something that can’t happen again. Joe says in the acknowledgements that he hopes by finding his voice seventeen years later, and articulating his experience that he can encourage other people to do the same. I think Joe has also started a timely conversation about power and control and needing to make sure that in a time of digital communication where we aren’t party to everything that happens on a screen that we don’t forget about simply talking to and listening to our children too to make sure Joe’s story is not repeated.

I absolutely loved it.

Thank you so much to Sabah Khan at Simon and Schuster for my finished copy in exchange for an honest review.