Michaela Kolofsky

And it took a little while to get going for me.

Part of the structure of the novel is that it's a

It's a road trip story and it's claustrophobic.

Amy and Alex are just at each other's throats for 75% of the story and I just wanted them to get out of the car and get a shower and take a breather and just de-escalate.

But that's not the story we're in, although they do eventually come to sort of start to communicate and understand each other.

Like it builds up that sense of it really well.

Yeah.

He does.

It did remind me of being 19 and just smoking way too many cigarettes and feeling like your head was made of cotton wool.

It's got that feeling.

So he evokes that very, very clearly.

And it's, I think as well, it's about, you know, as you said, you wondered if we'd learn more about the parents and really it's about Alex's lack of self-awareness or lack of self-knowledge.

You know, he's a very strange combination.

He's incredibly self-conscious and

and yet he doesn't know who he is or who he's for.

But he's very hyper-aware of everything he does.

And I think in his own character kind of development, his own sense of creativity, he's very drawn to composing music.

And ironically, it's the one thing he fails in his leaving certificate at school, much to his shame.

And he ends up, instead of doing something creative like composing music, he ends up sort of selling music.

And I don't think he's even come to terms with how a kind of an inversion or a perversion of his own creative dreams that is as well.