If anyone ever tells you writing a memoir is easy they're lying. I should know. I've just finished writing one. You're reading it. You, my friend, got the easy part. The hardest part of writing a memoir? Personally I found the decision to actually write it the toughest thing I ever had to do in life, ever. A lot of questions went through my head. Why my story? Why now? Why would no one publish me? Why was there already no Lou Sanz story? Why did I have to do it?

It’s not very often in life that we get rectify such an obvious wrong. I was lucky enough to have that opportunity.

Now sure I could've sat at home and pondered that last comment for months. Beating myself up for not being famous enough, having not made any actual contribution to the world other than being a master of taking my jeans off without taking my shoes off first but I didn't. Instead I set about conducting market research, to find out why no salacious unsolicited biographies had been written about me. And like everything I do in life, I did with gusto. I signed up to Klout. Entered all my social media information, sat back and waited. Surely with my show press, appearances on youth radio and the odd TV spot I'd be knocking boots with at the very least Nikki Webster or Jackie O but my Klout score was 40, which roughly translated means my mother 'Liked' a lot my Facebook posts, often and almost exclusively it was just her. With the stats from my market research back it suddenly became very clear why no one had ever published the Lou Sanz story before, quite simply - no one was interested in who I was.

As you can imagine I felt that my hand had been forced and I spent the better part of this year penning my thoughts, compiling them in into my yet to be award winning, yet to be Booker shortlisted memoir titled Please Don’t Use My Flannel for That – a story about a simple girl who quite simply didn’t want someone to use her flannel for that.

But there was a problem you see. If I were to publish every story about my life to date it would come to over 1 billion pages. That's a lot of reading for you and more importantly time I would have to spend writing. So I've decided it would be best if I just started out with an extract of my life, a taster if you will.

I've chosen to tell you about the year 1998. I chose that year because it was the year Windows 98 was released and I think you all know where you were when that happened. I sure know where I was. In a little town, 18 years old, lying on my bed in Melbourne, Australia; dreaming.

I remember it so clearly. It was a late Sunday afternoon. August I think. Sun was filtering through the window the way it does sometimes. I was lying there, looking up my poster of Jonathan Brandis (before he was dead), with my elasticised tencel jeans on, thumb snuggled tightly in my waistband and I couldn't help but muse to myself that life didn't get much better than this, when all of a sudden, in she walked, my sister Odalie, 8 years younger than I and blonde as satan. She took one look at, elasticised trousers, thumbs protruding, Jonathan Brandis and went running from the room.

'Mum! Dad! Come quick! Lou's masturbating! To Seaquest DSV!'

I ran out after her, fearing for my reputation.

'No, no I'm not! My hands on the outside of pants. I'm just hooking my thumb in at the waistband. You understand dad right? You do it all the time! Trust me, there's been no palm to genital contact whatsoever! Here you can look!'

In an act of desperation I forced my hand into my dads face 'Look!!!'

Like a true gentlemen he softly brushed my hand aside. 'It's ok' he said kneeling down in front of my sister, who now lay, dismayed on the floor like a bullshit damsel lying about her distress. 'There's nothing to be afraid of' he told her 'your sister is a young woman and with that comes certain feelings, longings and desires and sometimes those yearnings become so overwhelming that they can only be sated by a rub and or a tug.' I stood there frozen, crying internally. Odalie tugged at her pig tails, taunting me with her tugging.

'But look' my dad continued' just so something like this doesn't happen again I think we should put some kind of roster in place.' It was an elegant solution, my father’s roster - stuck outside my sister and I's door -  'Lou's Wanking Roster' I knew it wasn't my father who was responsible for such clarification.

About a week after the incident I received a phone call, from America - Hollywood to be exact. I agreed to accept the reverse call charges and within minutes I was being promised a new life and a new identity as a Hollywood screenwriter. Sure there were some questions I should have asked like how did you get this number? Is this for real? Where is America?  But I was young, dumb and had never been filled with cum and still sharing a room with the pigtail tugger - this was my out.

In truth I’d received the invitation to come to the US after submitting my very first attempt at a screenplay ‘On Both Your Houses’ to a contest I’d seen advertised in Variety (a publication I had to purchase with cash monies from a newsagent) and while I hadn’t won, the script had managed to gain the attention of a guy who was pretty sure he could get Christina Ricci attached. In 1998 that was the equivalent to having Meryl Streep on board to make your movie.

The story of my script was simple enough. Imagine if you will - late afternoon, a deserted highway, cut to a young girl, imagine Christina Ricci - I am - walking along the highway, perhaps reflecting on the journey ahead of her (actual line from the script) - cut to - the same young girl urinating on a freshly covered grave looking to the skies for answers, but those answers will never come as she screams out ‘Why oh why mother did you never love me?!’

It was a story that Hollywood wanted to make, no needed to make and so with my talent and their promise of money a mere one month later I found myself stepping out of LAX airport in cropped black ¾ length stretch pants and an ill fitting grey crop top, looking out a sea of taxis and fellow travellers bustling about before me and I took a deep breath, because I knew, at that very moment that my decision to move to Hollywood to become an internationally renowned screenwriter/movie maker - no - ‘creator of dreams’ was going to come true, and one day I would look back on this day as the first day of the rest of my life.

That morning at LAX I looked around the crowd for one face in particular; that of Yahoo internet chat friend Carol Stubins. I’d met Carol under my handle Volksie18, a name I chose because it highlighted the best aspects of my personality - that I was 18 and that I had been promised my uncles Volkswagen upon his death.  Also, because it was a time before people used their actual names for their email addresses - we weren’t fools, the Internet was a new frontier, and we had to tread with caution. Carol’s handle was SpitsandSwallows17 - which said to me that we both shared the same philosophy when it came to chewing gum. We met in a chat room dedicated to Seaquest DSV fans. Together all 18 of us believed that through intense message board discussion and Jonathan Brandis based fan fiction that we could convince NBC to reinstate the cancelled show. It gave us a purpose but more importantly it gave us friendship. When I told Carol that I’d sold one of screenplays to Hollywood and was moving there to become a bonefide star she insisted I come and stay with her. She would act as my personal assistant/ best friend as I navigated my new celebrity life. She would keep me humble and grounded, insistent I give to charities and volunteer my profile to star studded telethons but she would also remind me that I was deserving of my 10 million dollar property portfolio, the private jets, the Vogue front covers, the chocolate fountains, fridges filled with Evian water and the men, all the men.

Of course I had no idea what Carol looked like, but she sounded pretty but not prettier than me and that was what was important. We had a connection that went beyond mere appearance, like I mean we just had so much in common - we had both at one stage in our lives both been 15 years old. We had both attended high school. Carol liked ice cream and sure I was lactose intolerant but knew what it was to like something. Carol was going to be the sister I always wanted - the sister I never had.

Ok, so technically Odalie was my sister but only by force, not by choice but often you’ll find when writing your memoirs that through that process you start to identify people in your life who don’t drive your narrative, have no real influence in the over arching story of your life- my sister sadly is one of those people. I would have to leave her out.

It’s not that my sister and I didn’t get on, in fact when I announced to my family that I would be pursuing my dreams in a little place I like to call ‘the US of A’ she took the time to time to write me a little note just to let me know she cared *(need a note here).

As with any sort of sibling relationship we had our bumps in the road. She was blonde and slim, but like my mother said I too could be blonde and slim with a bit of bleach, a walk around the block and a slight attitude adjustment. She was also born the day before my birthday, something I spent a lot of time trying to forgive her for. If people asked me how I dealt with such an infringement on my life I would tell them that I was so over it that I had gone out and built a bridge and gotten over it, that in fact I had gone as far as to have designed that bridge myself, drawn up the schematics, consulted an engineer, got the necessary building permits and built that bridge and when it was built I cracked a bottle of expensive champagne over it, cut the ribbon and walked to the other side, cheered on by a crowd of a thousand well wishes screaming my name. And when I got to the other side, just to prove I was really over it I burnt it to the ground so as to never get over it again because I was so over it already.

But that said, if you were to strong arm me into pin pointing what I truly loathed about my sister, it wasn’t that her birthday was the day before mine, it was that her arrival into the world marked the cancellation of my 8th birthday party. I’d heard great things about turning 8 from my friends. It was an age that suggested a degree of life experience, an age of gentle wisdom, where bedtimes were extended to a more civilised 8.30pm, as opposed to the humiliation of a 7pm bedroom during the summer months of daylights savings.  It needed to be respected but above all, celebrated but as far as my parents and immediate family were concerned it couldn’t eclipse of the arrival of new life.  It was to have been a Fresh Prince of Bel Air themed spectacular and I was going dressed as Carlton complete with a sash I’d made in art class that simply read ‘Happy Birthday Me’, which thanks to Odelay I was now wearing in the maternity wing waiting room at the hospital. I did try and make the best of the situation by fashioning myself a birthday cake make from a vending machine Mars Bar and a used Paddle Pop stick and I even managed to rally a few guests together for the celebration. One guest was a young boy called Claude who had wandered down from the chemo ward that day to the maternity ward to get a glimpse of the promise of a new life.  From the moment we met he had found a mentor in me, and I; a student in him. Armed with a notepad and pen I’d given him I made him write down my pearls of wisdom as he followed me around the hospital, but over time his questions became less rhetorical and more specific to his own situation like What’s it like to turn 8? Is the air different there? The doctors say I’ll never live to see 8…

His questions made me think; perhaps my burden in life was to the know all the answers to everything and so I turned to him, knelt down so as to make reassuring eye contact with him and took him by the hand and scream ‘oh for fucks sake, it’s my birthday! Can’t you just let today be about me!!!’