Happy publication month, Coco. What’s the response been like so far?

One of the things that has been exciting is to see people have such compassion towards these characters, especially as I’ve written a group of people who are very flawed and at times extremely frustrating. So to find readers who are so willing to relate and also withhold judgment in order to get to know them has been really gratifying. It feels very affirming of the human spirit and the human desire to connect.

A lot of the characters in this book struggle with loneliness, which you’ve said you related to. Can you tell me more about that?

The thing about loneliness is that it’s invisible a lot of the time – I was someone who didn’t necessarily seem like I was lonely (I often deliberately surrounded myself with people) and I wasn’t sharing the truth of my lived experience for many years. I was struggling with alcoholism in my early 20s, which separates you from the people you love and also from yourself, which is very painful. I stopped being able to recognise who I was and it became important to me to write about that.

My north star for writing has always been a quote from David Foster Wallace. He was asked why he writes and he said: “Because the good stuff makes you feel less lonely.” It’s such a simple statement but it made me realise that’s why I read and write. For me, the way to make people feel less lonely was to write openly about the parts of ourselves that we keep hidden, and that we’re ashamed of.

Did you know that you would incorporate addiction from the beginning?

No! It makes me laugh that when I started this book I didn’t think it was a book about addiction at all. I changed so much over the course of writing it – going from denial to acceptance – and so did my characters. But I think these characters are slightly delusional to a degree, which is harsh to say, but they’re in a kind of fantasy.

You explore the psychology of your characters really well. Your mother is a therapist, did you grow up around a lot of therapy chat?

Everyone in my family is very therapised. I forget sometimes there’s still a lot of stigma around therapy and sobriety in England, and that people can be embarrassed to admit they might need help. I’m grateful I didn’t grow up that way because of my mother – I started going to see a therapist when I was a teenager, which meant I had an emotional vocabulary from a young age, and a willingness to talk about feelings and inner worlds. When it came to the book, I wrote about what interests me and that’s human nature, and why we do the things we do.

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