Matt Haig

remember exactly but it was basically work related yeah so it's too much time spent working that kind of thing yeah yeah it's like too much time working not enough time saying i love you basically yeah essentially and we kind of know it as soon as you draw any attention to it but we don't you know we're encouraged not to you know our fears about existential things just become turned into industries

So you have the anti-aging industry because you don't want to think about death.

And, you know, so it's always a way to sort of commercialise everything.

So we don't actually think or engage with things.

Like it would probably be cheaper and healthier instead of like the anti-aging industry to actually just sit down, read novels and just sort of think about it.

I'll look up for five seconds and take a picture of my phone.

look back for your life did you kind of go there and be like what were the bits my train would slow down at yeah i mean but there's a lot of my parents in this book because my parents were in sheffield in the 1960s and so a lot of this book as you know is set in sheffield and set in sheffield in the past and so one of the things and i was born in sheffield but i didn't grow up in sheffield i grew up in nightinghamshire

But we were always in Sheffield.

So my parents spoke about Sheffield the way people talk about swinging London.

You know, they talk about it as art school and Rolling Stones concerts and Malcolm X came to visit.

And it's like, it's not what people, not what you hear of a sort of northern town in the 60s.

In the book, it happens in July 1964, but it actually happened in February 1964.

Because Sheffield City Hall has literally everything that's gone on there since 1952.

So you just sort of go through it.

Well, exactly.

And you think just music alone, what's come out of Sheffield.

I feel like Liverpool and Manchester obviously get their laurels, but Sheffield, for a city of under half a million people, to have Arctic Monkeys, Pulp, Human League, Heaven 17...

Self-esteem, yeah.

Yeah, it's incredible.

My dad, who doesn't normally say much about my books, he cried.