Not something I thought anyone gave a damn about, until someone left a pile of shit on our doorstep. The place she is native to, built in the late seventies when the naive utopianism of the urban planners who held sway in the post-war years had already been cynically kneecapped by the underfunding of successive governments:Īt most, we, being my mother, sister and I, were one of four Black families there. She describes growing up in the overlooked housing estates of London’s city centre. This book is partly about those events, but it is also an origin story, a way of locating Coel and her preoccupations (work, the creative spirit, moths). What Coel is now more readily known for is her incendiary and award-garnering BBC drama I May Destroy You, a recasting of the events surrounding Coel’s sexual assault while she was working on the second series of Chewing Gum. That show, with its depiction of Black British life on a dour estate, is a television high-point. Woven from her 2018 Edinburgh International Television Festival MacTaggart Lecture (a series that for the forty-odd years before Coel’s lecture was given over to mansplaining panjandrums and corporation devotees), Misfits is a punchy refutation of the cultural prescription that only certain kinds of people (white, middle-class) will ever belong, and that the rest of us are there by the good graces of the establishment.Ĭoel is a public figure who came to notice with her sour-sweet indie comedy series Chewing Gum. I was ready to consign Michaela Coel’s new tome Misfits: a Personal Manifesto to the same pile, but for one reason: turns out, it is startlingly good. Harvested tweets, transcribed TikToks, collected Instagram natterings: there is nothing that cannot be rendered for consumption. Our abiding fascination with these gilded people-who are often, gallingly, to be heard referring to themselves as ‘creatives’, a debased designation-may be seen in publishers’ willingness to scrape together every paltry utterance that spills from them. They have a tendency to pop up in saccharine TED Talks, po-faced consultancies, and the guest-staff lists of neophiliac colleges and universities.

These elevated subjects of idolatry can be found in every genre-the Phoebes (Waller-Bridge or Bridgers, take your pick), the Zadies and Sallys (main acts and many pale imitators)-and they all have as their unifying characteristic a giddying youthful cleverness and a zesty magazine-friendly aesthetic that expresses itself in witty don’t-you-wish-they-were-your-friend banter. This anointing takes advantage of the common faith, a faith without proof, that everything exceptional can be taught or made relatable. The vast ugly machinery of celebrity conspires with regularity to anoint a new set of celebrities who, we are told, are the faces of intelligent feelings.

Michaela coel misfits