Crashing
(1998)

Crashing is about a group of four friends, a party, and what happens to them there.

It was written in the summer of '96, when I was nineteen and at home on holiday from University. I suppose this one came out of anxiety more than anything. At the time, I had a small circle of close friends that I'd grown up with in Leicestershire, and the previous year we had all split up to go to different Universities or jobs. Only a year had passed, but we were already losing contact, and it just hit me that even those friendships that seem set in stone are often so fragile it's ridiculous. Amateur psychoanalysis pegs this book as my solution to the problem; it's about a group of friends who are nearly torn apart by the events of one night, but in the end they forge stronger links than ever. I was really into Richard Linklater movies at the time and I loved the way he set them all in the span of a single night, so I figured I'd do the same. Most of the characters were based on those friends and myself, but I mixed up appearances and attributes so that none of them ever guessed; and besides, by the time the book came out two years later we didn't speak to each other any more, proving that fiction is probably a better place to spend your time than real life is.

This book got some criticism when it was released for not being hard-edged enough. It is pretty harmless, but then that was the intention. I didn't want a downbeat story at that stage; I needed a cheery one for my own sake. People expect a book about a teenage party to involve the protagonists taking drugs at some stage, but I didn't want to write a book about drugs; it's a boring subject and nowadays it relies on shock value or reader identification to limp its way from cover to cover. All the good books about drugs came out before I was born, and I think they pretty much covered it.

This was my first published work, and it still makes me cringe in places.