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Why I Love America

Britain has a strange relationship with America. It is like that of a man who married a woman, and then the woman divorced him way back in 1776, and now said woman – let’s call her Liberty – has gone on to better things. She has got rich, glamorous and strong while the man has gone a bit sour and is starting to look his age and probably needs tablets to keep it up.

Lots of Brits love America, but there is a lot of prejudice too. To hear some, it is a land of fake and phoney. A land of crazy religious types and airhead celebrities, of creationism and Kardashianism.

Well, I’m a Brit who loves America wholeheartedly. Always have, just like my Uncle James, a former hippy who decamped from Sussex to San Francisco in 1971. I went to my uncle’s third wedding when I was eight years old. It was by a swimming pool. His Mexican wife made us burritos and chilli burgers. We visited Yosemite and Disneyland and Lake Tahoe and drove on the Pacific Highway. My parents had to remortgage the house but I had found heaven.

I have been back many times since. My parents house-swapped with a family in Baltimore when I was 16, and I spent a month as a suburban American teenager, just like in a John Hughes movie. In 1992 I walked around the base of the World Trade Centre, impressed by its sheer immense enormity. On a book tour in 2007 I visited a lot more places – from artsy Portland to highbrow Boston and magnificently superficial South Beach.

I got engaged in New York, and married in Las Vegas, in a kind of conveyor-belt service that lasted fifteen minutes. And just now I have got back from three weeks in southern California, where I worked and pleasured in LA and San Diego.

Of course now I am a grown up, there are a few things that unsettle me about the US. Mainly the total faith in personal responsibility that leads to the belief that guns should be freely available but healthcare shouldn’t. The most visible shock in almost any American city is the number of homeless people. In San Diego there is a whole road which is known as Veteran Village, where former veterans (many of whom are amputees) sit in chairs on the sidewalk, with their HOMELESS AND HUNGRY cardboard signs.  Yet veterans are mythologised and given lip-service wherever you go, even the killer whale show at SeaWorld starts with a speech in which the audience are asked to applaud the armed forces.

I spoke to a twenty-one year old boy (he looked no more than a boy, his eyes twinkling with sincerity like a young Emilio Estevez) in Santa Monica and he said that he had lost his job, had been allowed too much credit, hadn’t been able to pay it back, and was now on the streets. It was the American Dream in reverse. I gave him some money and have never seen anyone more grateful for anything, ever. It broke my heart.

But then, America is also full of beauty and kindness and wonder. The flip-side of personal responsibility is that people believe it is their duty to be pleasant, to be kind, to be courteous, not at the government level maybe, but at the individual one. Service is miles better here, even when a tip isn’t involved. Smiles are more frequent, even when cosmetic dentistry isn’t involved. People will tell you about the location of a parade you haven’t even asked to see. Your children will be showered with compliments. Thirty something men can happily chat to a five year old boy without that British fear of looking like a dangerous predator.

Yes, Americans don’t know how to drink compared to the British, but that is because they don’t need to. Brits drink to get near that state of confidence and levity that Americans seem to wake up with.

Yes, LA is a surreal place. A collection of disparate dreams (and some nightmares) woven together by freeways. But it brims with an uncredited intelligence, has the most gorgeous modernist architecture (horizontal to NY’s vertical), bubbles with multi-cultural energy. One day I was driven around by a young woman from El Salvador who told me that there are over fifty brilliant Salvadorean restaurants in the city. A high-powered film producer told me that no-one in the film industry knew anyone before arriving into town. Hollywood is a meritocracy. Brutal maybe, but fair. Talent rises.

Yes, they are health-obsessed in kale-munching, yoga-matted Santa Monica, but it is not a simple looks obsession. It is about health, and longevity, and feeling as good as a human can feel. They may want to live for ever, but so would you if you lived in Santa Monica.

When I close my eyes and think of America I think of the infinite Powell’s bookstore in Portland, the crazy fountain show outside the Bellagio in Las Vegas, of eating pastrami in a New York deli, of roadside diners, of hash browns and ranch sauce and root beer, of driving along interstates and skateboarding along a sidewalk in Baltimore, of art deco Miami, of the most staggering art collection in the world at MOMA, of riding Eliot’s bike (with ET in the basket) as an eight year old at Universal studios, of late night swimming in a cheap motel with my father. In America, they are willing to see the best in you, because they see the best in themselves. That isn’t arrogance, it is optimism.

So yes, my love remains undimmed. America, you are infinitely complicated, and you have more than enough issues to warrant therapy, but I could still explore you for ever and not even begin to get bored any more than you can get bored in dreams.

 

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SOME FUCKING WRITING TIPS

This is the first blog I’ve written since writing blogs for the respectable charity Booktrust. Booktrust gave me no rules for writing blogs, except that they said I couldn’t swear. So after six months of non-swearing I have been bursting to fucking swear. I really fucking have. I just need to get it out of my system.

Anyway, thought I’d start as predictably as ever, and give some fucking writing tips. Here they fucking are:

1. Don’t think that being published will make you happy. It will for four weeks, if you are lucky. Then it’s the same old fucking shit.

2. Hemingway was fucking wrong. You shouldn’t write drunk. (See my third novel for details.)

3. Hemingway was also right. ‘The first draft of everything is shit.’

4. Never ask a publisher or agent what they are looking for. The best ones, if they are honest, don’t have a fucking clue, because the best books are the ones that seemingly come from nowhere.

5. In five years time the semi-colon is going to be nothing more than a fucking wink.

6. In five years time every fucking person on Twitter will be a writer.

7. Ignore the fucking snobs.  Write that space zombie sex opera. Just give it some fucking soul.

8. If it’s not worth fucking reading, it’s not worth fucking writing. If it doesn’t make people laugh or cry or blow their fucking minds then why bother?

9. Don’t be the next Stephen King or the next Zadie Smith or the next Neil Gaiman or the next Jonathan Safran fucking Foer. Be the next fucking you.

10. Stories are fucking easy. PLOT OF EVERY BOOK EVER: Someone is looking for something. COMMERCIAL VERSION: They find it. LITERARY VERSION: They don’t find it. (That’s fucking it.)

11. No-one knows anything. Especially fucking me. Except:

12. Don’t kill off the fucking dog.

13. Oh, yeah, and lastly: write whatever you fucking want.

(Please buy my fucking book.)

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Book club Skype Tour


Hello! I like book clubs. Are you in a book club? If you are and fancy reading The Humans then you may want to know I am doing a book club tour over June and July. All you need to do is to tell me who you are and we’ll arrange a date and time when you can chat to me via Skype for half an hour or so…

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Some thoughts on THE HUMANS

My new novel, The Humans, is published this week. I thought I would tell you some things about it:

This is the book I am most proud of.

It was the first idea I ever had, but it took me eight books to get to this point. This story needed confidence because a) the narrator is an alien, and people might dismiss it because of that and b) I knew it would be emotional to write.

It is a book I will never be able to write again.

It contains all that I think about this weird and terrifying and wonderful existence. It is my attempt to show that through all the pain that comes with our existence, we have things that make all the darkness more than worthwhile.

This is my 80,000 word message to my suicidal 24 year old self. It was me, sitting down to write an advert for humanity. To put down, while I am here and alive, just what makes it so special to be here and alive.

I wrote it between January and June last year. On more than three occasions I got so carried away with the story I literally wrote all the way through the night.

It is now out, in actual existence, being read. And I am about 10 times more excited about this than I was 10 years ago with my debut. In fact, I might just faint.

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Ten Writing Rules to Break

I hate rules. This gets me into trouble sometimes. When I was 16 it got me arrested. (I stole a Crunchie bar and some wet-look hair gel from Boots the chemist. Because my plan was to give the Crunchie bar to my best friend Jonathan I thought this made me a kind of latter-day Robin Hood rather than the spotty small-town tosser in a Cure T-shirt I actually was.)

Anyway, I try not to be illegal these days, but I still have a natural aversion to being told what to do. And when you are a writer – a writer who wants to say stuff – there are all sorts of quietly agreed rules floating around.

Here are 10 rules I am starting to ignore:

1. DON’T USE CLICHES. An admirable rule, surely? Well yes, perhaps, but a cliche is sometimes a cliche for good reason. A cliche is often a universal truth. That is why people like it. And people often speak in cliches, so what then? Surely to write honest dialogue you are going to have to use cliches? The aim, I suppose, is to come up with new cliches.

2.DON’T WRITE UNDER THE INFLUENCE. Michael Chabon: ‘All novels are sequels; ignorance is bliss’.

3. LINEAR IS UNCOOL. Maybe in the twentieth century it was saying something when you smashed a narrative into pieces and quoted Godard’s line about how it was good to have a beginning, middle and end but not necessarily in that order. But the thing is, I think there is nothing cooler and more wonderful than a story, and a story that feels like a story. So here’s to beginnings, middles and endings in the right places.

4. IT MUST BE DIFFICULT. No-one admits this rule. Maybe I have imagined it. But I think there is a distrust of books that are easy-to-read. A belief that they should shut people out, because most people don’t know what is good for them. This is snobbery. I ignore this, and try and write with open arms. The aim for me is never to take a short cut.

5. TO BE SERIOUS YOU MUST NOT TELL JOKES. I like jokes. Shakespeare told jokes. Joseph Heller told jokes. I am going to tell jokes. Comedy is just tragedy that hasn’t come to fruition.

6. LITERARY FICTION IS SERIOUS, GENRE FICTION IS NOT. Lock lit fic and genre in the same hotel room with only one bed and keep them there and see what happens. Fun things, normally, though some people don’t like fun things. I do though.

7. ADVERBS ARE EVIL. They can be, but some adverbs sound wonderful. Sporadically. Unquestionably. Woefully. No words should be put in a ghetto. Language is a smorgasbord.

8. WRITERS SHOULDN’T SELF-PROMOTE. I have a novel out this week. It is called THE HUMANS. The Independent says it is ‘outstanding’. The Times says it is ‘funny, gripping and inventive’. You can see other quotes and buy it here. I live to write. It is the only thing I can do. If I was in any other job I would be expected to help sell something, so why not this one, the one that I am best at…? So I am not ashamed of the first half of this paragraph.

9. SENTIMENTALITY IS BAD. Why? Who says? Humans are sentimental. ‘Sentimentality’ as Graham Greene said, ‘is just the name for sentiment we don’t share.’ Why not be rose-tinted from time-to-time, if we are aware of it? I am someone who cried at ET and Casablanca. Sentimental things speak to a deeper part of us than brain-only stuff. Speak to the heart via the head. The things that are sentimental tap into strong emotions, and emotions are what it is all about. Emotions are the last things the androids will be able to replicate.

10. HAPPY ENDINGS ARE FAKE. Yes, we all die, and yes, life is messy, but who says art can’t be different? Not Aristotle. Not Shakespeare. A book can have a neat ending where everything is tied up. It can even end in a way that allows us to be happy and hopeful. Why not? It is a book. And the very power of a book, the reason we escape into them, is that they aren’t weighed down by the same rules that weigh down reality. Books don’t suit fences.

Goodbye.

(Shoplifting is still bad though.)