For years when I was younger, I traded letters across the Atlantic with a British boy just a few years older than myself, writing back and forth about primary school and university, the 1996 Manchester bombing and the mysteries of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. But while I was writing to him, I was also reading dispatches from another fictional British teenager who was older than both of us. Adrian Mole was from the British Midlands, outraged by Margaret Thatcher, convinced of his potential literary greatness and mad for Pandora Braithwaite, his high school girlfriend and, ultimately, the love of his life. When I found out on Thursday that Sue Townsend, Adrian’s creator, had died, I felt as if I had lost an actual correspondent.