It’s the birthday of British author Sue Townsend (1946-2014), best known for her wildly popular comic novels about Adrian Mole. The novels, written as diaries, begin with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ (1982) and continue through a total of eight novels, ending with Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009).

Susan Lillian Townsend was born in Leicester, England, the oldest of five girls. She had an elementary school teacher who would slap the children and force them to do handstands. (If just one of my kids’ teachers did that today, we’d be rich. RICH.) She didn’t learn to read until she was eight but then became a voracious reader; she left school at 15 and was mostly self-educated. As a teenager, Townsend lost her job at a clothing store for reading Oscar Wilde in the changing rooms. She married at 18, had three children under five by 22, was divorced by 25, and struggled as a single mother to support her children with part-time jobs.

Eventually Townsend met Colin Broadway, who became the father of her fourth child and eventually her second husband, and he encouraged her to join a writers’ group where she wrote a comic play, Womberang (1979), about a gynecology clinic. The play won the Thames Television Playwright Award, and Townsend went on to write many more plays. She also began writing about Adrian Mole, who first appeared in a radio play, then a novel. The first book sold a million copies in a year, and the series made Townsend the bestselling British author of fiction of the 1980s.

Townsend had terrible health issues for most of her adult life: TB peritonitis—which is probably exactly as much fun as it sounds—in her early 20s, a heart attack in her 30s, degenerative arthritis that put her in a wheelchair, and diabetes that eventually led to blindness and kidney failure. She underwent a kidney transplant in 2009, thanks to a kidney donated by her older son. (Now that’s a good kid. I am definitely working this into the conversation at dinner tonight, just for future use.) She wrote in spite of her health problems, including the serious novel, Ghost Children (1997), about abortion, love, loss, and an actual ghost; Townsend herself had had two abortions that she regretted. Her final novel was The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (2012), which is an awesome concept and I totally want to read it but first I want to take a nap.

Have a temperatures-looking-up sort of Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.