The Diary of a Debut | 20th and 22nd January

Look at me! Plus major hiccups.

Hopes and Doubts — The Diary of a Debut

My first book, Before I Go to Sleep, first came out in April 2011. I’d completely forgotten that in the January of that year I started keeping a journal to chronicle things as they happened.

My entries were sporadic, and some intensely personal. (The next few for example). I’ve tried to edit it as little as possible, however.

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20th January 2011

Up early working on Nine Lives. Got to the end of a section, and feel unprepared for the next. I’m feeling totally lost, actually. Very depressed. I have to try and remember that I felt exactly like this on numerous occasions during the writing of Before I Go to Sleep. It feels different, now, though. I am ‘a promising author’. This novel has been paid for. Very powerful people are expecting it to be good. So that feeling of ‘What if I can’t do it?’ is suddenly magnified a hundred-fold because if I fail my failure will be public, and total and humiliating. These are exactly the wrong conditions in which to create anything worthwhile.

I took Lola out. Carol there, chattering away, but I can’t remember what about, as I was too busy worrying about Nine Lives. I read and then had a sleep (I felt exhausted), then after lunch went over to the new flat to work there. Spent hours plotting, or trying to, but nothing felt as though it was really coming together. I think I actually need to read what I’ve got, to see where I’m up to and how to develop it. I hate that though, because in the frame of mind I’m in at the moment I’m likely to read it and hate it and scrap it.

In the evening we went to see David Hoyle again, this time with SG. Even better than last time - very funny, very sharp.

Saturday 22nd January

SW and P’s civil partnership day. The deed was done in the council chamber at Islington Town Hall - very grand, we all sat in leather-covered chairs arranged in a semicircle around the centre - and then went to the pub over the road. Taxis to Bacchus. We shared with two Finns - one, the woman (they weren’t a couple, but housemates) was lovely but very loud, over the top, past the point where gregarious turns into something else, something dangerously close to ‘annoying’. ‘I’m putting weight on,’ she said at one point, ‘but when I go to Dubai I’ll get plenty of exercise.’ ‘Why?’ we said, and she replied that she’d be seeing her ‘gorgeous toy boy.’ Presumably fucking herself slim. Not a bad plan.

J was there, too (SW’s best man’s boyfriend). It was interesting to meet him - I’ve heard a lot about him in the past, though he’s always mysteriously absent when we meet all up. He’s Danish and certainly interesting . He was dressed in jeans and a grey cardigan with a checked tie, his hair long and greasy and tied back in a pony tail. With his wide eyes and ever-present grin the effect was of a sort of slightly mad Jack Nicholson, but it worked, in the way that looking really fucked up can work for people who are truly beautiful. He told us he worked as a sort of future-trend spotter and, without prompting, starting talking about the evolution of culture and cities in exactly the way that DBC Pierre did last year when we went to see him chat about Lights Out in Wonderland. Essentially the idea is that these things go in cycles - an area’s cultural ‘worth’, or ‘trendiness’ (or whatever you want to call it) is always essentially on a sinusoidal cycle. Pierre had set Lights Out... in Tokyo, London and Berlin, essentially because each is at a different stage in that process (Berlin at the top, but about to dip, London at the bottom, probably for the foreseeable future, and Tokyo? I can’t remember where he felt Tokyo was in the cycle, probably on the up). J felt L.A was the place to be at the moment, or else Detroit.

I suppose it’s like the evolution of the East End. Here (Hoxton) was hugely cutting edge a few years ago, then became merely trendy, and now it is the domain of fashion students and hen nights so it’s not even trendy. ‘The Kids’ first moved to Hackney, and then Dalston. They’ve probably moved on again, now, driven out by people (like me?) who want a bit of the action.

Anyway, J was interesting, but as the day progressed got more and more drunk. I wasn’t aware how much so until sometime during the evening he suddenly slammed open the lid of the piano that sat in the corner of the room and started shouting (literally) ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ When nobody did he jumped on one of the tables (unfortunately not even one that one of our group was occupying) and had to be persuaded down by the bar staff. The weirdest thing was [his boyfirend’s] reaction, which was to do absolutely nothing. He has his back to J table and some of his friends were telling him to look round, but he refused, in a very obvious I-know-what-I’ll-see-if-I-do-so-I’m-not-going-to way. Weird. As I said to N, I would hope that if I ever got like that he’d look after me. [The boyfriend] seemed to want to do no such thing, and in fact suggested to J that he drink more. Later J came and sat with us, making no sense whatsoever, and later saying to N (and me? I couldn’t tell) ‘We are going to have fun later, aren’t we?’ - this coming on the back of his invite to Chariots- and stealing drinks as soon as someone put one down (by now [his boyfriend] had sensibly stopped him drinking). He wasn’t being loud, particularly, or abusive, or violent (apart from to his boyfriend, who he kept pushing away) but still it was deeply unsettling. He was just so out of control, in every way, and the worst of it is that apparently, according to S, this is a regular occurrence and the next day he is always filled with remorse. [The boyfriend] later spoke to us about it, albeit indirectly. He seems genuinely at a loss to know what to do for the best. J has been arrested numerous times, once spent the night in the cells for rearranging crowd control barriers by the cenotaph to stop the traffic, and has on occasion had to be carted off in an ambulance.

And I feel bad getting so drunk I fall asleep.