In my early 20s, I experienced a strange sensation, like the present was already becoming memory. I woke up in my sparse London bedroom, hyper-aware that this was my Early 20s –First Heartbreak, First Housemates, First Salary. And, whilst in the midst of it all, I felt it slipping away – Last First heartbreak, Last First housemates, Last First salary. Not only this, but each day, those pivotal university years were feeling further and further from me. Dramatic, I know, but I was a dramatic 22-year-old.
So I started taking notes in an attempt to preserve, if not freeze, time – notes on university, particular anecdotes, ideas, conversations, essays, lectures, notes on life in London, on my own experiences, and friends’ experiences, on our worries, doubts, successes, the galleries we were visiting, theatre, what everyone was talking about, wearing, cooking, listening to, the habits and faces of people on the street, in the tube – all scribbled in a little black notebook like some obsessive, encyclopedic time-capsule. One of my Last First Housemates, Naomi, suggested I try turn these scribbles into a novel (thank you, Naomi). And so, I started writing a fictional narrative, creating characters that fit into the world of my scribbles. I took the task of writing fiction very seriously and thought long and hard about the kind of story I wanted to write. Though I love reading cool, knowing, whip-smart literary fiction (written about here by my own whip-smart friend, Jennifer, I decided I wanted my story to be emotionally charged, pulsing, and hectic to reflect that period I was so desperate to hold onto.
If you would have asked me at the time, I probably wouldn’t have confessed to my ‘the present is already memory’ fear. I would have told you another truth, that I wanted to write ‘a story about falling in love and discovering yourself through conversation’. I wanted the characters in my story to engage in deep, penetrating conversation – the kind that strips you of your skin, exposing muscle and bone, and keeps slicing, shaping, sculpting, until you’re something new. Why? I was a very dramatic 22-year-old and I was also enchanted by the 36 Questions to Fall in Love, a study published by the New York Times about questions that make strangers fall in love.
I wanted something like the 36 Questions to exist in the world of my characters, but due to my complete lack of understanding of copyright, I assumed I couldn’t use the real questions from the study. So I wrote my own 28 Questions (because the book naturally fell into 28 Chapters) and how fun to write a book structured this way – a book about falling in love through conversation structured just like my favourite article, if a little filled out.
Yes, I knew this kind of book would invite a few ‘so is this novel your life?’s and I knew that I would have to explain over and over that this book is the world I was living in, yet not my life or my story. But it was worth writing. Because now I have 28 Questions – a book about love and conversation and those transient early 20s, set in a world I was determined never to forget, now preserved forever.