What an awful start to a Friday morning – to hear that Sue Townsend, beloved creator of Adrian Mole and one of the very very few authors who genuinely made me laugh out loud, has died.

I first came to Adrian when I was, very satisfyingly, 13 and three-quarters (my copy was like this – I loved the Noddy toothbrush) and I was enthralled. The spots, the languishing, the overthinking, the "just my lucks". I thought it was hilarious. Easter: "Poor Jesus, it must have been dead awful for him. I wouldn't have the guts to do it myself."

Of course it was extremely funny, even though most of it went entirely over my head – who was Malcolm Muggeridge? I didn't know, but I got the vague idea. What on earth was going on with Adrian's parents? Again, didn't really get it, but I didn't care. For a 13-year-old me, it was all about Adrian's quest to win Pandora. "Pandora! My lost love! Now I will never stroke your treacle hair!"

Looking back on it now, I see I was far too like Adrian to understand we were meant to laugh at him. I have my own collections of dire teenage poetry, although probably nothing as genius as The Tap - "Dad, fit a washer don't be a burk!" – and instead of laughing at Adrian's declaration that "Perhaps when I am famous and my diary is discovered people will understand the torment of being a 13¾ -year-old undiscovered intellectual", I think I felt sorry for him.

How I loved it. I even appeared as a sundry extra in a performance of a play of the book – the songs are ringing around my head this morning: "Oh Pandora, I adore ya, from the first day, that I saw ya. I felt destiny call..." Then Pandora (played by my best friend Fiona): "Haven't done my physics homework, there's that film I want to see on El Salvador. It must be Channel 4..."

I've reread it as an adult – although not for far too long – and was astonished to see how much more to it there was, the sophistication of Townsend's humour. How can anyone fail to be filled with joy at "I was racked with sexuality but it wore off when I helped my father put manure on our rose bed." Or Growing Pains' poem The Discontented Tuna: "I am a Tuna fish / Swimming in a sea of discontent. / Oh, when, when, / Will I find the spawning ground?", rounded off with: "I hope Pandora sees through my poem and realises the symbolism of 'spawning ground'."

I followed Adrian's adventures through Growing Pains, as I experienced my own, and I began to find Adrian funnier and funnier: "I have just realized I have never seen a dead body or a real female nipple. This is what comes of living in a cul-de-sac."

Reading The Wilderness Years and Cappucino Years as an adult was great fun, but they never seeped into my bones in the way of The Secret Diary and Growing Pains. Coming to those first two as I was stepping out of childhood has made them part of my literary history – lines from them, memories of reading them resounding in the way very few books do these days.

In many ways, The Secret Diary and Growing Pains shaped my literary life as a teenager. I hadn't read anything like Adrian Mole when I first picked it up. I think I still haven't. What a huge, huge loss.