True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (#3) & Adrian Mole and the Small Amphibians (#3.5) by Sue Townsend

Format: Print
Read: April 2026

True Confessions breaks the daily diary format, and it is a bit jarring. Instead of Adrian’s daily thoughts, it is mostly a collection of letters between Adrian and others (Barry Keny, Hamish Mancini, John Tydeman etc), the occasional long journal entry and imagined transcripts for a BBC Radio Show, that act as a bridge for what he was doing between Growing Pains and The Wilderness Years. It spans more years (1984-89) than the previous books, and without the daily updates, it consequently does feel a bit disjointed.

The theme of reality colliding with Adrian’s lofty ‘intellectual’ ambitions is continued from the previous books. After all his trouble studying in Growing Pains, now 19-year-old Adrian didn’t do well in his A Levels. While Pandora leaves for Oxford, he has a job as a library assistant in the local library. This is not as intellectually stimulating as he had hoped; there is a lack of any literary conversation, and he soon gets himself fired for moving Jane Austen out of Classics and into the Romance section! (Honestly, how dare he!)

His mother also kicks him out of the house because she can make more money by renting his room to local students. He also has a brief sexual relationship with Sharon Botts, a larger girl whom he also sees as a social class below him. Once homeless and unemployed, he ends up following Pandora to Oxford and moving into her box room. There, it turns out she has married her gay housemate (to get her first marriage “over and done with”), because of course she has. In Oxford, he gets an admin  job in the Department for the Environment, which is where the Small Amphibians come in.

Adrian Mole and the Small Amphibians is a short 46-page add-on found only in the Minor to Major omnibus edition (books 1-3), which is what I have. It immediately follows from True Confessions, with a letter from his father revealing that his mother has been having an affair with Martin Muffet, one of the 23-year-old engineering student lodgers. She then marries him! There is also more tumult with Pandora and her relationships with any man who is not Adrian, and a question over whether Adrian had impregnated Sharon Botts.

Dear Adrian Mole,

Have you gone off your head, boy? You clogged my fax machine up for eight solid hours. You do not fax 739 pages of manuscript. You parcel it up nicely and send it through the post.

Either you or my fax seems to have gobbled up the vowels of your novel, Lo! the Flat Hills of My Homeland. Your manuscript is awash with consonants, but vowels are very thin on the ground, thin to the point of non-existence. You expect a thousand pounds! This made me laugh quite a lot.

I do not adapt plays, my role at the BBC is Head of Drama. I dictate policy and encourage new writing etc. If you wantyour voweless novel adapting, you must do it yourself.

Yours (but only just)

John Tydeman

PS I am going to Australia. I shall be gone for some time.

The best part of this short story is Adrian faxing 730-odd pages of his experimental poetry novel Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, to John Tydman at the BBC and blocking up his machine for 8 hours. Also, there are only consonants in it, no vowels! This really made me laugh!

Another major development is that Barry Kent, his old illiterate bully, turned friend, and local poetry award winner, is released from prison (in for damaging a privet hedge) and also moves in with Pandora. Adrian had encouraged him to work on his poetry while in prison, and now Barry starts to get in with the Oxford literary set, and gains acclaim and fame as a working-class writer. Poor Adrian!

In Small Amphibians, Adrian does go back to dated dairy entries and attempts to write every day again, mostly with failure. This was very relatable for the state of my own journal at the moment! (Somehow I only get to it on Tuesday?!). It is also mentioned that he subscribes to The London Review of Books, which cracked me up. Now I’m also being an intellectual it seems Adrian and I have lots in common!

Mr Patel left, but not before I had cancelled the majority of our magazines and papers: the Spectator, the Economist, the Listener, Body Builder, The Stage, Punch, Vogue, Elle, Fast Car, the Guardian, the Sun, the Daily Mail, Interiors. They have all gone. We are left with the Independent, the Mirror, the London Review of Books, Viz and Private Eye. Pandora agreed to read Marxism Today, Interiors and Vogue in W. H. Smith.

I didn’t love True Confessions as much as the previous book, but it’s still Adrian and brilliantly funny, even as life is so far bringing him nothing but disappointment; it all remains very relatable.

For Law of Fives (I won’t count Small Amphibians (1991) unless I need it!): published in 1989, under 200 pages (163), and a re-read.