Sue Townsend, who got her start as a writer for the theater, penned a series of fictional diaries of a self-obsessed teenager that critics deemed one of the literary phenomena of the 1980s. A runaway bestseller in Great Britain, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 led not only to additional diaries but to a television program and a musical play as well as a computer game and other consumer items. In the United States, where the books first appeared as The Adrian Mole Diaries, reviewers wondered whether American youth would follow Adrian's use of British slang, and whether American readers would be as intensely moved as the British public by the books' detailed satire of the decay of living standards under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The nearly invariable conclusion was that Townsend's "funny, poignant, sardonic but also compassionate" fictional diaries, in the words of New York Times...