Are the early 00s distant enough to be considered a bygone era? If so, journalist Paris Lees’s What It Feels Like for a Girl is a work of archaeology. She drags up the bones of cheesy garage tracks, green backlit Nokia phones, Bacardi Breezers, Gap jeans, retired slang, Nike Air Max trainers and Walkmans, pulling you into a world of pre-internet nostalgia. This ketamine-laced coming-of-age memoir, rife with nicked wigs and puppy love, fluctuates between the debauched and the humdrum; from gay bars to call centres, Debenhams to crown court, sex in toilet cubicles with “dirty old men” for a tenner to warming up treacle pudding and custard. The details of Lees’s formative years, when she lived life uncomfortably as a boy called Byron, is a rare portal into the British trans experience.

Written in a Midlands dialect and chatty tone, What It Feels Like for a Girl recounts Lees’s life in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, an “unbelievably borin’” town, where the “people are small-minded an’ the streets are paved wi’ dog shit”. Her relationship with her dad, Gaz, and her mum is profoundly strained. Gaz, the local hard man, is constantly testing her “masculinity”, while her mum, although more emotionally available, does a “Shirley Valentine” and moves to Turkey for three months to be with a guy. Lees eventually finds her true family with “the Fallen Divas”, a circle of queer people including Sticky Nikki, Fag Ash and Lady Die (who hasn’t been home since 1999).

What It Feels Like for a Girl recalls being in a nightclub where you can still smoke and euphoric music blares non-stop
This is where the real architectural plans of Lees’s future are drawn up, where she accepts that she isn’t just dressing in girls’ clothes, but is being herself. It’s the story of someone who wants to be extraordinary. “You bastards. I’m gonna be rich an’ famous one day,” she shouts at her bullies. As a teen, she dreams about being “the first transsexual on the moon”, and while Lees has accomplished great things (she was Vogue’s first transgender columnist), her ambition has come at a cost. She served a stint in a young offenders’ institution for robbery of a client, having emptied his bank account. Her time inside is mostly transformative though; she decides she wants to study for her A-levels and go to university, and survives pretty much unscathed because she entertains the prisoners with rude poems. “They love me in ’ere,” she smirks.

What It Feels Like for a Girl recalls being in a nightclub where you can still smoke and euphoric music blares non-stop. The title and chapters take their names from classic songs of the 00s, from Missy Elliott’s Get Ur Freak On to Modjo’s Lady (Hear Me Tonight), granting readers a tailor-made soundtrack. It does, however, ramble in places, while the racist slurs directed at Black and Asian people are glossed over in a way that makes you question why they were even mentioned.

But from Lees’s observations about her rough environment to her critiques of heteronormativity to her honest account of grooming and child abuse, What It Feels Like… is dark comedy from a little heard perspective. Even when there’s blood dripping on to the page as a result of bullying, Lees manages to make it read like a sketch. When her face is being smashed into glass and dog shit by kids who call her a “bender” and a “poof”, she humorously relays how the woman who came to her rescue noticed her Vengaboys pencil case and said: “And anyway, so what if you are.”

One of the most impressive things about the book is the way Lees evokes the memory of light – the square of sunlight on her mother’s leg on a bus ride that makes her feel safe; the brightness of daylight after a night out when her and Lady Die’s makeup is “rottin’ off”; the gloom of a soothing late-night drive with Gaz. “When ya go down those country lanes an’ look behind ya, everythin’ turns black. It’s like nothin’’s there.” Very powerful.