No, Cathy and Claire didn't actually exist by name. The dual role was always taken by a wise staff writer on the magazine. But yes, the letters were real. With nowhere else to turn, each week hundreds of girls went to the considerable effort of putting pen to paper and finding a stamp, and would then turn to the Cathy and Claire page to find solutions to their problems. And in this book, reproduced from the original magazine, are the most resonant of those letters. Here are the distant voices of young girls from a different age pouring out their hearts, ranging right across the emotional spectrum from two confused sisters whose mother had died, through to an irate 15-year-old at her wit's end because she can't get her boyfriend to cut his hair. Some heartbreaking, some hilarious, and together a fascinating and compulsive chronicle of growing up in Britain in the 1970s.