This TED Talk features writer, composer, and musical comedian Eve Blake, recorded live at TEDx Sydney 2019.

Four years ago, a teenage girl changed my life in one conversation.

She was 13 years old. She was a friend's little cousin,

and she casually told me that she had met the man she was going to marry.

So I said, OK, tell me about him.

And she told me that his name was Harry Stiles.

So I laughed a little like you,

and then she said, I know you don't think I'm serious, but I'm actually going to be with him.

Because I love him so much that I would slit someone's throat to be with him.

And that was the moment that I became obsessed with fangirls. I didn't know it then, but that moment

would transform the course of my life and go on to change everything that I thought I knew

about being an adult, being a woman, and being truly happy. But before we get started,

what is a fan girl?

And what is a Harry Stiles?

Well, according to the dictionary,

the Miriam Webster dictionary,

a fan girl is a girl or woman

who is an extremely or overly enthusiastic fan of someone or something.

Technically, you can have fan girls of anything, but my specific

interest was in fan girls of boy bands because of their somewhat lethal reputation. I remember

my dad had told me this story of some Beatles fans in the 60s who apparently had torn a parked

BMW to literal pieces because the band had supposedly just been sat in it.

...