My Book Is Out Today
'The most accurate portrayal of a high-functioning depressive I have ever seen.'
My book is officially out today, 4 July, in the UK. It’s also July 4, and UK Election Day. I relish in knowing people out there are eating red, white, and blue–dyed cakes and doing their civic duty. I will be at my desk job, actually quite relieved to be doing something that makes me feel normal in this wonderful yet disorienting time. Here are some places you can purchase Ghost Chilli:
Bookshop UK | Waterstones | Pages of Hackney | Goldsboro Books | Rare Birds Books (in Edinburgh!) | West End Lane Books | Coles Books | O’Mahoney’s (in Limerick!!) | WH Smith | Good Company (in Lisbon!) | Foyle’s … wherever books are sold in the UK and some parts of Europe.
If you are outside the UK, there is the option of ordering it on Amazon UK and paying for international shipping. If that’s not an option you’re into, that’s totally fine. Watch this space – I will mention any publication news from abroad.
I did a talk with my good friend and incredible writer Lucie Elven on Tuesday, which was almost cancelled because of low sign-ups. But by rallying friends and posting on social media, we managed to save it, and I’m so glad we did. I was moved beyond words by all the people who showed up / saved me from dramatically declaring that I never would have written a book if I had known how much humiliation I was signing up for. While it’s true that today is the day I officially give some person on GoodReads permission to crush my ego like a juicebox, it is also true that people might enjoy the book and listen to what I have to say about the joys and pains of being in your 20s. And, as Doreen Cunninham puts it on one of the blurbs, ‘how we survive each other’.
The event reminded me why I wrote this book in the first place – to tell a story about the awkward, non-linear ways we cope with repressed sadness and rage. As well dealing with that shadow of ‘the life you could have lived’ – something I hope anybody who has immigrated, or moved, or had an unexpected life change, can relate to. It’s also about loving people who are difficult to love, including / especially oneself. And the compulsive, sometimes violent, sense of humour one girl develops as a way to cope with it all. The kind of girl who, Lucie pointed out, spends a good portion of a first date asking a guy if he’d ever murder someone. When he says no, she tries to get him to say yes by asking if he’d kill someone evil, like Pol Pot. When he still says no, she thinks: ‘Hm, not the guy for me.’
Which brings me to this little anecdote. A long time ago, I was in an after-work writing workshop and there was a tall, gangly dude who stood out. He wore scarlet gym shorts to class even in the dead of winter and was really into genre and video game writing, while the rest of us thought of ourselves as literary ‘life of the mind’ types. When I submitted my story to the workshop – the one that would eventually become this novel – everybody disliked it, except that guy. I’ll never forget what he said: ‘This is the most accurate portrayal of a high-functioning depressive I have ever seen.’
Wherever that guy is today, I want to thank him for being way more open-minded to me than I was to him, a mistake I will never make again. I have been trying to concisely describe my book for years now, and I simply cannot do better than his statement. At the end of the day that’s all I really want – for people to connect with Ghost Chilli even if they don’t necessarily relate to it.
I was going to write this whole thing about how the title of my novel was originally You Don’t Know Hunger and why I changed it to Ghost Chilli, but I am going to see the Eras Tour this weekend and I need to pick an era. So the story of the title change will have to wait for another two weeks.
See you then,
Nikkitha