The only ambition I ever had was to be a writer; I never considered anything else — not for more than five minutes, anyway. I started when I was eight or nine years old, drawing comic books.
For most of my early adult life, it was considered a joke: I was headed to one place, and it wasn’t the Times Literary Supplement. My childhood had been unsettled; the adolescence that followed was choppy and disordered. I was in trouble with the police; in trouble with everyone. At 15, I was expelled from school, thrown out of the house by my stepfather. I spent seven years in the lurid squats and dingy bedsits of Bristol, then the peeling Georgian terraces of Brighton, claiming benefit.
Finally, when the Major government made deliberate joblessness too wearisome a task, I took some A-levels at night school then applied to study at Leeds University. I still wasn’t ready for a proper job, and what better way to avoid work than being a student?
But all this time, I was writing.
Back then, I had some romantic ideas about what it meant to be a writer. I’d use amphetamines and hammer at the keyboard for eighteen hours at a time, chainsmoking, making myself wired, nocturnal, paranoid and unwell. I thought this made me kind of legitimate. It didn’t, of course — it made me a dick. But I was only twenty-four, and what emerged was Mr In-Between.
Even disregarding the science-fiction epic I wrote and rewrote between the ages of 9 and 15, and even forgetting all the abortive late-adolescent attempts to reinvent the Catcher in the Rye, I’d written several novels prior to that — I still have the typescripts mouldering away in the garage. But after all those years and all that furtive hard work, I thought Mr In-Between might be the one; the story that was good enough for someone else to read. So I panicked and put it in a drawer, because what if it wasn’t?
It was finally published four years later, early in 1998. I was 28.
Although I barely recognise the young man who wrote it, I know Mr In-Between was the truest book he could have written. It’s close to my heart in ways no other book could ever be. Given the years that have passed and the many ways my life has changed, I think it holds up pretty well. I’m proud of it.
