Sara & Cariad's Weirdos Book Club - Men In Love by Irvine Welsh with Irvine Welsh

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

This week's book guest is Men In Love by Irvine Welsh.Sara and Cariad are joined by the multi-bestselling author of Trainspotting, and cultural icon - Irvine Welsh.In this episode they discuss success, capitalism, house music and DMT.Trigger warning: In this episode we discuss drug usage.Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you!Men In Love by Irvine Welsh is available to buy here.Tickets for Sara's tour show I Am A Strange Gloop are available to buy from sarapascoe.co.ukSara’s debut novel Weirdo is published by Faber & Faber and is available to buy here.Cariad’s book You Are Not Alone is published by Bloomsbury and is available to buy here.Follow Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club on Instagram @saraandcariadsweirdosbookclub and Twitter @weirdosbookclub Recorded and edited by Naomi Parnell for Plosive.Artwork by Welcome Studio.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Pasco And I'm Carriead Lloyd And we're weird about books We love to read We read too much We talk too much About the too much That we've read

Which is why we created The Weirdo's Book Club A space for the lonely outsider To feel accepted and appreciated Each week we're joined by Amazing comedian guests And writer guests To discuss some wonderfully

And crucially weird books Writing, reading And just generally being a weirdo You don't even need to have read The Books to join in It'll be a really interesting Wide Raging Conversation And maybe you'll want to

read the book afterwards We will share all the upcoming books we're going to be discussing on our Instagram, Sarah and Carriads, Weirdo's Book Club. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you. This week's book guest is Men in Love by Irvin Welsh. What's it about? Well, we revisit the train spotting lads in 1989 to see how everyone is doing after their little tiff. What qualifies it for the Weirdo's Book Club? Well, it must be weird to do that many drugs, surely. In this episode, we discuss success, capitalism, house music and DMT.

Joining us this week is Irvin Welsh. Irvin is a triple threat, a multi-bestselling writer, a cultural icon and an acid house DJ. Irvin Welsh, hello. Hi, yeah. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. We're very excited, aren't we? It's very, very exciting.

It's exciting for me. It's exciting for me to cross the river, basically. There was a sentence to jump straight into men in love about crossing the river back to civilization. and I thought Carriad's going to like that. I loved it. I used to live in South London. There was a lot of judgment from this later. Their character visits South London

and he's just not happy and he like crosses the river and he's like, oh, that's better. And I thought, yes, I understand. Yeah, I mean, obviously, Scottish, so I don't have any real skin on the North London, South London game. I've lived in both. But the character's sick boy is very aspirational.

So he wants to be amongst bourgeoisie, you know, at the highest end. He regards that. obviously North rather than South London. Well, especially because it's set in 1989, isn't it? 1988, 1989, which where Islington, where sick boy is at that point, was absolutely like the heart, you know, wasn't over-gentrified in a way that it was now, was coming up from being like pretty grim and not that nice.

So, yeah, it made me laugh. Islington as a borough is quite interesting or what I'm about to say is incredibly boring. Because essentially it's always had the poorest and richest people in the same borough. it is, has everyone on the spectrum. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've kind of moved from, you know, I moved from Hackney to Islington around about that time. And I kind of thought to myself, you know,

now Hackney's a bit kind of upscale now. Yeah, Hackney's more bougie than Islington. Dalston and all that, you know. But then Hackney was really down at heel, and I thought I kind of made it big time moving to Islington. This is before Tony Blair and the Grinita and all that kind of stuff. I thought, this is fabulous. So we're talking about men in love.

which is the sequel to train spotting in timeline because you've already written porno, which was them kind of 10 years on. So this is sort of going back and forward. A stepping stone between train spotting and porn. And porno, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've got absolutely no sort of kind of marketing sense or any sense about kind of,

this is how you build a brand, you write novels sequentially and all that. I just always write about these characters. And then, but I can't be bothered just sort of. publishing a book that until I find a theme to knock it on to, you know, it doesn't interest me to actually spend time pulling all these notes and stories and sketches together as a book, you know, so, I mean, I could bring out about half a dozen books on these guys, but I'd probably, you know, and on the glue characters, but I probably won't, or at least not until something

jumps in my face as an interest, is a point of interest. You know, with porno, it was like the growth of the internet and online pornography with Skag Boys was originally the start of trainspotting, but the boot was too long so I took it out. And I thought it was quite boring, you know, how they got into heroin. I wasn't really interested in that because

you were getting all these kind of sociological journalistic stuff was probing into all that. I just wanted to take people right into their world. So chunked, took the middle bit out of train spot and basically made that train spotting. And then I got a bit more reflective.

And I thought, well, it's quite interesting how people kind of get into how this society falls apart, basically, and people get into drugs. So I sort of went back to that. And then we were right forward to dead men's trousers. I thought, you know, I was experimenting with DMT. And I thought, what if these characters took DMT and met up again in later life? So all these things, there has to be something. to make me interested. Wow.

I mean, I'm really distracted, so I just want to ask you about DMT. I was about to ask a literary question until we got to DMT. Do you know about DMT? I don't know about DMT. I think, and I might be wrong here. I read about things, I don't do them.

I vicariously live. I think it's the, so your brain releases it when you die. Oh, that one, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, the pineal gland opens up, and it's a similar experience to, a near-death experience basically and you put you get to into a point

I mean I've done there's a documentary coming out on me in August which premieres at the Edinburgh Film Festival actually closes the festival and there's a segment of it is when I'm in a clinic in Toronto

doing DMT under control conditions and it's you know it was interesting for me because I've done the kind of the straight normal DMT, which is like the post-death experience. It's like what happens when you die, basically, you know. But this was the 5 EMO DMT, which is like the pre-birth experience. This just takes you back to before you were alive, basically, you know. And it completely changed my views on everything. I mean, I was a sort of, I was going

to say a devout atheist, but you can't say a devout atheist, but, but yeah. But, yeah, I I was a convinced atheist, and then I took DMT, and now I believe that, basically I believe that this kind of slither of our existence is like a working holiday. Yeah. Basically, it's not really who we are. You know, we're kind of, we're much more bigger

and complex and universal sort of things than that. We're not really a discrete organism. We're all kind of interconnected. and some sort of energy force. So I'll stop there because you get all hippie-drippy when you start jumping. You're talking to the right people. I'm here for the woo-woo.

That's really fascinated. Yeah, well, you get the, you know, with the straight DMT, the little gnomes take you away and they kind of, you know, and I was asking one of these questions, you know, I'm an individual, I'm a part of a big cosmic force.

What is it? And they were saying, shut up, just experience it, you know, calm down. And they took me into it. So many images are, So many experiences you have on DMT are like they've moved, they've been taken in because, you know, ancient tribes have been doing this pre-biblical. And the Bible basically, you know, Christianity just stole everything from the, you know, the tribes that went before. So you get all these experiences like you step, you know, the burning bush, you step into this flame, you shoot up into space, you're over, you're standing over the earth, over, you know, floating in space, looking down on it.

you know, I've never had the last supper imagery but a lot of people get that this last supper imagery was strangers There's a whole theory now called Jesus is a mushroom which is this which is that the Bible Jesus was on mushrooms and that so much of the Bible makes much more sense about hallucinogens

Yeah, yeah Yeah, well it's... I've heard that before about the loaves and fishes Yeah, it was like a group hallucinogenic experience You know, all that kind of literature basically is founded from the experiences of people, you know, the hallucinogenic experiences with kind of, I mean, DMTs, tree bark, mushrooms grow wild.

So I think that's why so many people are, we're seeing the limitations of the technological society we've created, basically. So maybe we should be looking for other answers. And, you know, they're going back to all this, you know, all the learning that we have from, you know, these chemicals, these natural chemicals, basically. Well, to bring it back to the book, because one of the characters acknowledges quite early on in the book

that the love experience is like drug addiction in terms of dopamine, serotonin, you need that person a way that can be unhealthy or it can be completely deliberating. So it's interesting that these are characters that have had drug addiction and then they're moving on to love addiction. And certainly, in some cases, I guess sick boy is completely moved from

coming off heroin to becoming addicted to, I get women, this is what I do. We live in a world that encourages kind of compulsive, obsessive behaviour. And we live in a world that the whole kind of division of labour under capitalism encourages us to behave in certain ways. You know, we're sort of, you know, there's now get a job, you know, get a girlfriend, get married, have a kid, get a mortgage, get moving to a bigger house, divorce, you know, meet somebody else,

kind of either do the same thing again or you know, you go through all these, and a lot of this stuff is determined by the sort of technology in the society that we're in, as well as kind of human drives and biology needs and sort of in kind of communion and community and sort of togetherness and relationship needs. So all these things are conflated.

And it's difficult to extract one from the other. You know, you don't really know what is internal or intrinsic to you and your own motivations and desires and what's been imposed on you from the world that we live in, you know. Well, this is where money becomes really relevant, and it's really relevant to your characters. But money is choice, and if you don't have it, you are going to have to wash pots in a hotel,

if that's the job that's going to pay you, or work in retail, even though that is a living hell. Yeah, well, I mean, basically that's that sick boy's thing. You know,

he has a man of the aspirational 80s. And he just wants to marry somebody with money, basically with money and status and connections as well, you know, because he has this very sort of inflated idea of himself. And there's kind of quite narrow idea of what, social mobility and happiness is but the character's continually subverting

his own sort of, this trajectory is set for himself, it's continually sort of subverting it because there's something else is a kind of restlessness within him that once he gets to that point where he has this thing that he believes he values, he just doesn't anymore. You know, he's kind of, he sort of, he self-sabotages in a way from his own trajectory.

I see I know lots of people like that because I do stand-up comedy and a lot of male comedians like this and this is the problem I think maybe the people who have... Do you think Sick Boy if it was like 1997 would have gone into stand-up rather than... The Edinburgh Festival would have got paid in cash, free drinks, easy to meet women. Because the 80s, like that's real like where people were doing it

like spit and sawdust, there wasn't any money but that like birth of comedy money you know when it's suddenly in the 90s became like oh you could make money out of this. Sick boy would have been right at the front thing like Yeah. Yeah, great. And also, alternative comedy was about authenticity of experience, and that's what he's brilliant at selling.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's so charming because it looks like he's being vulnerable and honest. I'll tell you, it's going to be a star. But what I was going to say is people who don't like themselves very much can't help but self-tabotage. It's why people have therapy. It's why they, because they realize you have this root that is going to poison everything else. It's an amazing thing that you do,

where you're walking along with this person thinking, what the fuck is wrong with you? But partly, you know, as he seduces a posh girl, and then when he sort of like tricks her parents, there's a part of you that's like, yeah, go on, tick by it. You can't help but be sort of on his side, which is impressive considering we hear the inner monologue. And we hear quite a lot of like,

what the fuck is he saying? Why does he, but it's almost because it's a compulsion, isn't it? He just lies constantly to everybody. And he's like, you know, he is one of these kind of harbangers of the post-truth society where people construct their own narrative. You've got all these, you've got his ridiculous politicians, you know, that they've constructed this narrative around themselves and they get people to believe it.

I mean, it's like there's people in America who believe that Trump is a self-made man, basically, that you kind of, you know, he worked as a longshoreman in Brooklyn, his fingers to the bone and invested in kind of got. you know, sort of, so, so the ludicrous fictions that people construct about themselves have moved into the reality, you know, and he's one of the, at that point in time, he's one of the kind of harbangers of that, that sort of, you know, that way of thinking. But to me, you know, what, to me, the book is about, and it's like, this is maybe from the vantage point of being older now, is that, is that time that men have in their mid-20s, you know, you. You know, when you're a kid, and women as well, I think when you're a kid, you grow up and your parents influence everything you do. You know, they socialize you.

And then you get into this peer group thing, you know, when you sort of, you're getting close to puberty and you're kind of hitting that and you're sort of, and you rebel against your parents and your peers are all important. And then you get to that point in your mid-20s, usually in your mid-20s, sometimes a bit before, sometimes a bit after.

But the relationships, become all important. The relationship with your partner becomes the most important thing and you're looking for a partner you can have that kind of relationship with. And so that's when, usually when people fall seriously

in love for the first time other than kind of the infatuations of youth. But it strikes me is that people are so ill-equipped to really be in love at that time. They're really ill-equipped to navigate all the stuff because they've got to, you know, they've got to earn the living,

they've got to decide whether they want children or not, they've got to decide whether they want to invest in work to the point that they get promoted in work and then these things in a way take them further away from each other take them further away from that intimacy and that connection you know so they become like a little corporation you know and they're trying to manage their lives in that way when i got back into the the dating pool with with women who had kind of done all that basically and have no time for any of your bullshit basically you know so you kind of I've felt that I became a kind of,

I didn't really become a proper man as opposed to a man-child when I got into my 50s and started dating women that were, you know, they've done everything, they've listened to every line of bullshit you can possibly give. And basically they see it coming a mile away. So you think now I'm equipped, finally I'm equipped to have a proper relationship with someone, you know?

and it's interesting, you know, but you're forced to do this when you're basically an idiot. I think this is also, but I also think it's underwritten by economics because everything you're describing in terms of these stages of, you know, what should be youthful adventure,

as you said earlier with capitalism, if you're going to be financially dependent on this partner, that relationship is already quite, it's got this huge amount of pressure, it's too much pressure it. What you're describing in your 50s is meeting someone who doesn't need anything else from you apart from your company, I would presume. And I think that it's that. You meet each other as free citizens. You don't really. You know, in some ways, you're, the both of you are, one of you

are slaves to capitalism. And, you know, and if there's kids, you enter into a pact about child rearing and all that, one goes to work, usually the guy, the other one, the other one looks after the kids, usually the women. And you, and it's like, but you're both kind of being exploited. Yeah, and that's not fun. Neither of those is fun. And I think even the stage before that, and again, it happens to your characters, people move in together because it's cheaper because rent anywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really, really expensive.

Yeah, both Renton in Amsterdam and Sick Boy in London have that situation. Well, it's rushed. So you have to share a bathroom. That is very hard to love someone else once you share a bathroom. And the fact is you don't get to miss that person, you don't get your own bed. You don't get that thing of just one night being like, oh, it's too long away from you. And then, you're also talking about, which sort of is mentioned in the book as well, like the loss of community, isn't it?

It's like you're talking about child rearing, but there was a time when child rearing was like held by a, a long, long time ago held by a village and a tribe and people, you wasn't just one by herself. Well, that's the thing with industrial society, and kind of post-industrial society, it's like because we're on the move so much, we don't really have community to the same extent that we used to.

So the sort of expectations that, people have from relationships. It's like every, you know, your partner becomes like this one-stop shop, you know, and you get into this incredible codependency, which is really destructive, you know, it's just far too much pressure on, on both individuals, basically, to maintain that, you know, that kind of, that presence, that engaged presence with someone in these circumstances. Yeah. All of the scenes with ecstasy where the characters, several different characters, we, you know, get to experience with them their overwhelming love for humanity.

It sort of pours out of them and it drips out of them. And the difference between the character on E and the character sober made me question so much of the desperation for human connection. And there's this really, really, really shortcut. But I also think there are other ways of doing it. Oh, yeah, they're definitely artists. You don't have to take any. But what struck me is how sometimes

because people's lives, because these characters' lives, let's just say, it's about these particular people. Especially at this point in time when the drug scene, the rage scene is like appearing and growing. The need for connection, the need for love, for humanity, for community, there is no other way for them to get it.

But to go to a club and have pounding music. And whether that's with strangers or friends or their lover. It's interesting with Renton as well. Renton has chosen to betray his childhood friends. friends and he's in a different country because of that. And so he doesn't have his parents, he doesn't have his school chums, he doesn't have anything. Well, he's experiencing the consequences of that, you know, something that seemed a good

idea at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And perhaps the one level was, you know, as a survival thing, it's got these deep consequences because he's alienated from family, community, friends. And he can, you know, in some ways you can never really see them again. He can never really go back. And that's why him taking ease seems to be such a death like, this is his only option. to feel connected in that community

because he's cut everything. Well, they have to build a new community around them which is kind of a strange thing to do in a way, you know. And I do, you know, I mean, I empathise with that because I mean I've lived in Amsterdam and I moved to Dublin and to Manchester and to Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Miami London, Edinburgh, London, Edinburgh, you know.

So I've been that kind of constantly mobile person And you do have to basically start again from scratch in a lot of ways, which is fun in some ways, because you kind of, you get to scrape off the bad bits of yourself in previous, you know, if you can reflect on that. And it gives you an opportunity to grow in your, but you become aware that you do make the same mistakes again.

You do get, you know, the same behavioural patterns kind of will re-emerge again. Yeah, I mean, I personally would find that idea terrifying. Right. The brand newness. Yeah, yeah. I'm making a new friend. I've got a friend.

It's me. She's done it once and it's fun. But that must be something about your character where you're able. You are, as a unit, you're quite contained in yourself and you can sort of replant yourself. Yeah, well, I think it's like part of it's being an only child, you know, you're just kind of, you're just left, stick him in the room with some corn with some crayons. It's like, you know, that's what it feels a bit like when I moved to a different place, you know. But, you know, again, I'm also quite social. So it's a, you know, it's a weird thing.

I think it's a good thing for a writer to have both these things because you've got to like spending a lot of time on your own. But you've got to be out there as well, kind of looking at the world and sort of learning about things and about people. And you can do that when you're quite light on your feet and you don't have a lot of kind of the baggage of other people as well. yeah that's that's good qualities for a writer isn't it being able to not particularly great qualities for human beings and romance and all that stuff

this is this is about books so yeah well I was going to ask actually about literary festivals because um obviously you're really hugely successful do you go to literary festivals and read out segments of your books because there were some what I mean Sarah's made to do that she doesn't like well most writers have to do it to sell 30 of them you know so I was reading segments going I wonder if this is what he would read out.

And do you do the different accents? Because you'd have to be going, you fucking can't. And then going back to Scots. Would you do different voices if you're doing a readout? Yeah, I do tend to try some of the different voices, some more successful than others. I do a lot of music festivals because of DJ as well. And it's like I was at the Bearded Theory Festival in Derbyshire at the weekend.

And we previewed the album. So I played a play a track from the album. There is a album that accompanies this book. Yeah, it's like, I'm trying to think if there's been another writer who's brought out a record at the same time as a book, like, you know. I can't think of it. Salman Rushdie once did that pop ballad.

John Lennon, when he did, his murder mystery that came out, yeah, the same time. So that's, I'm quite proud of that. You know, that's quite a new thing. And what's the album called? It's not. It's called Men in Love. But it's by, I did write this down, the band has got an amazing name.

Yeah, the sci-fi soul orchestra. Yes, yeah, yeah. You have written this music with... Yeah, with Steve Mack, who's my partner in my music label, my dance music label called Jack Said What, and one of my partners is four of us. And he's also my music partner, we write songs together, and we've got all these great musicians and who are the,

the sci-fi soul orchestra. We've got fabulous vocalists. We've got Sean Escofary, who's on stage all the time in a lion suit and the Lion King, but he's got that brilliant soul voice. You know, it's like kind of Teddy Prendergast, Luther Vandross-type soul voice. And we've got Louise Marshall,

who's just an absolute genius singer, but a genius harmonizer. She does all the West End shows and kind of... So we've got kind of... kind of big singers that can project, basically, and sing these fabulous songs that we've, you know, these kind of disco-type motown-type songs that we've written.

And we got into doing that. We wrote the Trainspot on Musicals. We wrote a bunch of new songs for it. And the ones we liked doing best were disco. You know, we just really got into doing disco. So we went with that energy. And we thought that disco's quite timeless. Like, everybody in the Men in Love book

will have listened. to disco or danced with disco music, you know, whether it's in a pub or a nightclub, they've had this disco music going on in the background. So it is almost like the sort of a series of kind of global national anthems, basically. I think the thing with music, particularly a kind of disco soul type music, you can get to the emotional side of these characters in a way that you can't really with, you get to, you know, you get to, you get to, You're in their heads and they're thinking about things. You know, they have these moments of reflection

and they have these moments of pathos. I wanted to ask you about success because some people, so train spotting, as a book and then as a film, and then as you say, as a musical, on all of these levels is such a juggernaut success that's very rare, especially. And it was your debut novel, right?

Most people don't read it. Yeah, it was your first novel as well to have that level of success. So it's not just a book that many, many people read it. It's also a cultural moment. It's beloved. It was posters on walls when I was at university. It's iconic.

Iconic. Yeah. So, such a level. Some creative people find that that it's then hard to carry on making things. Actually, what you think would be great can be detrimental. How have you found it? I think it was great. It was been very easy because

you've kind of, you have permission basically, you know, and I think anything, any artistic endeavor, you're fighting against yourself. You have to give yourself permission, you know, because there's always part of you saying, who are you, this is crap, you know, stop doing this. Suddenly, you know, so it's just the way I look at these things. I always saw it as a calling card rather an albatross around the neck, like, you know.

So because it's become such a big thing, it gives me an audience for every, everything that I do, basically. And it's, you know, that's really great and I really appreciate that. I just wonder what it is about those four characters, five, if you can count, what's he called, second prize, that keeps bringing you back. The weird thing is that I don't actually think about them until I come to write. People will ask me like, well, what would be a big boy or beg or rent and think of this? And how would they vote in the Scottish independence? How would they vote in Brexit?

What would they think of, you know, Trump or Kirstammer or whatever? And I don't know, I think, I don't have a clue, basically. So I don't really, the only come alive for me when I'm on the page with them. The thing about them is they're archetypes. Like, you know, everybody knows the nutter, the Violet nutter, everybody knows the serial shagher, everybody knows the kind of cynical, intellectual, and everybody knows the lovable loser, basically. You know, they're all sort of versions of them.

And the interesting thing is that, um, I think that women see the characters more clearly than men, basically, because guys just appreciate them because they think, ah, it's just like one of the boys and all that, you know, and they just kind of, they see it as an affirmation type thing or kind of, you know, sort of, they know these guys to a greater or lesser extent. Whereas women, it's worse for them because they've actually gone out with these guys. You know, they think, fuck, this is too.

Whenever you're reading a man, writing men, thinking awful thoughts, about women, what you're thinking is, I knew it. I absolutely knew that. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. Or some of their minds, some of the time. The manipulation from sick boy, that's the thing I find difficult when he is pulling those

absolute, just pulling the rug from under them. So for instance, with the Lydia in Paris, who's, he's, I mean, her friends, her friends, I just was like, her friend's been run over. You just want to be. The first day in Paris. Yeah. He's gone around. They've got money.

in a nice flat. He was sleeping with a different woman who had a dirty flat. He kisses the friend who's just been run over with a bruised up face. He's caught by the other friend that he's been sleeping with for 24 hours.

Just the lines, the absolute bullshit lines that he comes out with. I think there's some manipulation. I think the key to it is that he actually gets hard to apologise to him. Exactly.

That's his mission. Yeah, and that's what I find amazing about sleep boys that he, it's a chess game. And it's like, how can I get you to do this? and that's all it is.

It's like, what buttons will I press to make this puppet do that? And seeing that, hearing that in a monologue is really hard as well. Most of this comes from women, comes from my experience of talking to women about relationships of the being, basically.

Yeah, I'm not surprised. But you write it so that we, as the reader, get what he says out loud, her reaction facially and then he's, you know, Macan Aiken singing, okay, this is hit,

I'm almost there, lay this on a bit thicker, so we are. And he does it. with her parents later, Genevieve's parents, like it's not just women that sick boy he's trying to fuck over. Like when he's trying to, you know, the posh father

and he plays that card. Like he says, he'll do anything to surprise people. So when he's like, sure, okay, don't pay for anything. They're like, they think he's just in it for the money. And so he's constantly trying to regulate. Well, what does someone think I'm after? I'm going to make them think it's something else. Actually, I am after the money.

But I'm so good at this that I know. Poker player, you can't tell them. And it's just, yeah, it's, I mean, yeah, you've obviously spoken about women who've been heavily manipulated by men. Yeah, I mean, he is basically a sociopath, but he's also like, he doesn't have that ability to value what he gets. Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? Because he doesn't value what he gets, he's constantly, he's constantly sort of... He's never happy. Yeah, well, he's essentially got that anarchist streak, then he wants to, he's a mischief maker and he wants to just,

set everything on fire again and start from scratch. Because he likes the game too much. The consequences, the reward, he thinks he's driven by the rewards and the status, but he actually enjoys the game. That's why he's such an interesting character to read because it's not like he wins. You know, it's not like you see this character being like,

well, I would like the wife and kid from the posh family, I've got it great. He's still not happy. He's still, he's like, oh, I love her. So I better go and find another woman's fine. to test. I do love her. His journey isn't one towards contentment and I think this is probably why these

characters, you're able to keep telling their story to come back to them because it isn't it's never going to be a private predispend. I think this is a fundamental flaw, particularly of people in the world that we live in and it builds into satisfaction for the winners as well as the losers.

Everything is kind of commodified and disposable and it's like, you know, they're constantly on their phones, they're constantly looking at numbers. They're constantly trying to see that as a measurement of them getting one up

on someone else. In terms of the Romantics, you've got quotes at the beginning of every chapter with... Including Jane Austen. Jane Austen creeps in there. So I wanted to ask

about your reading, actually. Do you read? And what do you... Do you read and what do you read? Yeah, I read everything, basically. And I think you can't be a writer unless you read, basically you just have to be a reader

and most writers are readers I had to teach at Chicago and the university in creative writing for six months which I hated doing I loved the students but I didn't like teaching because I wanted to do my own stuff basically but I just kept telling people to keep reading you know and it's like

and it's amazing the number of people that don't read the number of people that go on all these silly creative writing courses and do degrees in creative writing because they want to be a writer. They don't even want to be a writer. They want to write a bestseller.

They want to have a bestseller. They want to have a bestseller. And, you know, I think you have to read everything. You have to love reading. You have to love ideas. And I read loads of fiction. I read loads of nonfiction. And, yeah, I mean, literally everything that I can get my hands on.

Was that true when you were a child as well? Yeah, basically, yeah. And do you think that was because you were an only child? wouldn't have mattered, you just loved it? Yeah, I think it did help sort of you do become, you do get, you know, I was always, I was always into the idea that I would go into other worlds, basically, you know, and I've been a compulsive traveler all my life, and I think that, you know, books, you know, they're a form of psychic travel, they let you experience new places and new worlds,

And that's always been an interesting thing for me. I mean, the documentary that comes out on me in August is called Reality is Not Enough, basically, and I think that's probably kind of nails it in some ways. How did you find the process of having a documentary made about you? It was fun. It was great because the guy who did it as a friend and he's a really great documentary filmmaker,

He did the polis-diery and documentary. He did the one on the one on Tish Marta, the photographer from the northeast of England. He's doing the one on Julie McLean, the woman who was sort of basically kind of compromised by the Secret Services,

kind of impregnated by undercover police who formed, you know, all this. So it's like a... So he's done... He's really a great documentary maker. He's a close pal as well. So kind of, so I sort of,

he had more access, basically, to me than I'm normally used to giving. I'm quite private person in a lot of ways. So he followed me around for, basically for a year. And because you live in your own head, you always think you have quite a boring life.

You're sitting there, you kind of just typing on. Do you have, like, was this different to the other person? books, do you have a very set way of sitting down to write every book, or is each book completely different? They're all different. I mean, I like to, I think the process by which you work, I like to decide that as well. You know, I don't, I don't like to, I don't want to just fall into the same habits of writing. I think you, I like to write a book in different ways,

you know, so the earlier books, it was more nocturnal, you know, it was kind of a night old, basically, because it was a kind of night old anyway. I was always, um, I was up kind of raving and going out a lot. And now I'm more of a daytime writer. I'm more kind of up early in the morning, kind of knocking out a few words. But it's, you know, I like to write outside. I like sitting on the tube and writing away

because I get descriptions of people, and they always end up in the book. And I like to write in, I like writing an airport. and on trains because that side of travelling and waiting around on airports can be such a drag

but if you're locked into your own world and all that you're called. You think there would be lots of distractions but it's the opposite, isn't it? Yeah, you just lock out all this crap basically and get on with it. Do you ever write anything that,

do you ever shock yourself? Do you ever write something and think, oh, fucking off. All the time, all the time, you know, and it's like, you know, I think, what's my mum going to think of this? What's my wife? You know, what are the kids going to think?

what is everybody going to think, my friends, the people that I used to work with, if I don't have that feeling of utter, sort of abject fear, I feel terrible, you know, so I've got to have that bad feeling. And then suddenly I think I was so, yes, you know, brilliant. You know, you're shit scared of the reaction it's going to have in your immediate group,

therefore everything's good, basically. So you always feel like you need to be pushing it that little bit? You need to be out of your comfort zone. I'm never comfortable when I'm, sometimes I'm comfortable. I'm kind of enjoying it. But most of the time I'm like, this is great. I thought it was so interesting what you were saying about how people who want to write have to read. And there was something that you said then that reminded me,

because we did an English degree at Sussex, and they sort of consider that the birth of the novel is the birth of proper empathy between human beings because it was such a huge experience in seeing really through someone else's eyes, spending time with another character and their world. And I think with your writing, so many people who read your books must come from such different places

and social class upbringings to your characters. Was that something you intended to do? Did you think, oh, these are people that we don't hear from, these people don't really have a voice in society? To an extent, yeah. I mean, I thought that I wanted to, I think everybody tries to represent where they come from, basically. They're trying to represent what's going on.

And for me, with the first book, I was trying to represent a community that were basically neglected. There was this massive heroin, intravenous drug-driven AIDS epidemic. And the authorities, the council, were much more concerned about the... the Dutch elm disease, the epidemic of trees, that would be bad for tourism. They didn't, you know, they had no connection at all with the places that they were supposed to represent as a council, basically, as a community,

as they were supposed to represent, because, you know, it's a bit, it's a bit like any city. It's a bit like kind of Zones 1 and 2 London. If you don't really live there in zones 1 and 2, you're not really relevant in the whole grand scheme of things, you know, and it's the same with, you know, Edinburgh was, if you're not in the,

if you're not in the Newtown, the old town, you know, the farther out you get, the more, the less relevant you seem to have. And it was galling for me to see what was happening in the place that I grew up in. You start to think, well, the reason that people are marginalised, the reason they're not getting their proper health care, they're not getting their proper resources in housing, they're not getting the proper resources in employment, is because they don't really have a voice. They don't really have that opportunity to have to have their voice. has heard and I just felt that I wanted to write about, I wanted to write about myself, you know,

apart from anything else, but I wanted to write about myself and the people that I knew in my community and to get perspectives from them and all that, and not necessarily perspectives that agree with. I wanted to get all the contradictions and all the, you know, I didn't want to, I I didn't want to make value judgments about what people were saying and how they were acting. I just wanted to represent, basically. I think that's so imperfectly encapsulated in your writing. The second I started this book, the dynamism of your sentences, the speed of thought, the speed of which I instantly felt like I knew where a character was,

you know, emotionally, psychologically, as well as geographically. it's so alive and so vibrant the world that you're created and it feels so real. My head's going to get so big and you're not going to have to move that door, you're going to have to open that door. But I think when I started writing,

I was kind of raving a lot and I was obsessed with 4-4-beat. I was obsessed with acetouse music and I was obsessed with the 4-4 beat the way things just kept continually moving. It was a continuous track going right through the night and bang, bang, bang. And it had that kind of energy.

And then you had all the effects on top of all that, you know. So it became obsessed with acid house. And I wanted to try to replicate that energy. And I was interested in how people in bars and in pubs and in chill-out zones, how they told stories and how they performed stories. And it was very much in Scotland, it was very much that oral tradition, that kind of Celtic kind of oral storytelling tradition. And so that was my kind of, that was my, that was my 4-4-beat, basically.

And I wanted the, I wanted the effects on top of that would be the set of graphical experiments that I did in the earlier books, particularly like in the Hacet House and Maribu's Thought Nightmares. I wanted to get all this mad distraction going on, you know, on top of the 4-4 beat. Wow. As you were speaking, I was thinking of William Shakespeare and Iambic pentameter. And if he'd been sort of out and been like, this loop player, it was crazy. and it's making the iron bit. It's the heartbeat.

It's the heartbeat underneath speech. How would Shakespeare vote in the Scottish? Yeah. That's an interesting one, isn't it? That's an interesting one, isn't it? I mean, thank you so much. We could talk to you forever. Oh, thanks, guys, for having me.

Men in Love is out now. It's incredible, brilliant book, and obviously everyone knows these characters anyways. It's very amazing to see what they're up to. And also, neither of us have read train spotting, and we love this book. So actually, anyone who thinks you have to go back to the beginning, maybe you should,

but you don't have to do them in order. Yeah, you don't have to do it in order. It's not like... I try to make them stand alone. Yeah, you definitely are definitely. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks guys.

Keep listening to The Weirdo's Book Club. Men in Love is out today. 24th of July. My new children's book, Where Does She Go? Is also available to buy now. And I'm on tour. Tickets for my show. I'm a strange group.

I'm on sale from saropasco.com. You can find out all about the upcoming books. We're going to be discussing this series on our Instagram at Sarah and Carriads Widow's Book Club. And you can join our Patreon for extra special secret content. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you.