They say celebrities get arrested in their development at the age at which they became famous. Coleen Rooney is deeply invested in her own childhood, filling the first half of her autobiography with her pre-tabloid life, in which she thrives on control and adores her community. She celebrates working class Liverpool, with a strong sense that she wishes her own kids, who live in a gated mansion in the countryside, could have the same. As a teenager she doesn’t just babysit for the neighbours, she cleans their whole house (uninvited) and rearranges their furniture too. Putting on a Christmas show with her brothers and cousins gets complicated when she has to play every single role herself, as the others aren’t doing it right.
She’s ambitious at school; her teachers are upset when she quits during A-Levels. But she and Wayne Rooney, who has followed her around everywhere until she agrees to go out with him, are getting very famous, and the opportunities are harder to resist. He proposes to her in a petrol station because they’ve had a row on their way to a Chinese restaurant and Coleen doesn’t fancy going now. “He couldn’t get down on one knee of course — there’s not really the room in a car.” The book is full of droll put-downs like this one; it’s Coleen’s turn to tell it now. And you can’t help but admire her steel, like the time she rings up the Daily Mail switchboard and asks to be put through to the journalist who has just published a hatchet job on her. She gives him a piece of her mind. She is 18 years old.
