Nick's eagerly awaited new novel, A Long Way Down, will be published in May. Funny, sad, and wonderfully humane, this new novel asks some of the big questions: about life and death, strangers and friendship, love and pain, and whether a slice of pizza can really see you through a long, dark night of the soul.
Nick was happy to talk about the writing process and his new book:
I suppose the idea for A Long Way Down began a long time ago when I read that there were nights of the year when suicides spike. Where I live in north London there are also accounts of suicides that take place at Archway Bridge. If you've got a well-known suicide spot, and a night of the year when people choose to die, people must see each other. That was an idea that was sufficiently interesting to me not to let go of.
I'd always presumed there were great numbers of people who thought about suicide as a door that was open to them. It never occurred to me that people didn't think about it. Having talked to a couple of friends, explaining that it was something I was writing about, I was quite startled that some of them had never thought of suicide, and I suspect those people are in a minority. Most people at their darkest moments have had that speculation; I know I have, though the characters in my novel have taken it a stage further than I ever have, by moving from thought into action.
The other thing I liked about the theme was that for a writer there is an inbuilt drama, in that something reasonably extreme has to have happened in your life before you contemplate suicide, even if it's only an extreme battle with depression. I don't know how it feels to read, but it never felt to me contrived that all these people with dramatic stories are juxtaposed.
I suppose of all the plights in the book, I identify with Maureen most because I have a child with a disability. She's not me, and her child is not my child, but once you're in that world of disability and carers, which I am, the stories you hear are astonishingly powerful. I think that anyone would empathise with her story, but because of a route that one part of my life has taken, I am more exposed to those thoughts than many.
Ever since the first book, what I've always wanted to do is write sad books that are funny, or funny books that are sad: but properly funny, or properly sad. My big inspirations were American women, Anne Tyler and Lorrie Moore. They were the people who made me want to write fiction, because they had the tonal shifts where you go, 'This book is amazingly sad, and there is a fantastic joke here that makes you laugh--not a theatrical joke, but properly funny humour, that comes out of the characters.' |
|
|
