90s Nostalgia at its Best!
Catriona Child Guest Blog
In 2020, during lockdown, my Twitter feed exploded one day following the publication of a poorly thought-out article which asked ‘what’s stopping Scotland from producing its own Sally Rooney?’
Although being a Scottish female novelist myself, I wasn’t well-known enough to garner a passing mention in the article or in the multitude of responses that followed, which highlighted the wealth of amazing female writing talent there is in Scotland.
I started to feel a lack of confidence and self-doubt in my own writing ability. With everything that had been going on around me, I’d found it hard to concentrate on anything; trying to read a book was impossible let alone write one.
As the days passed and I mulled over the article and its impact, I began to get an idea for my next novel.
I started to think about my own experiences of navigating that strange transition period between teenager and adult which, for me, was growing up in Scotland in the 1990s.
Being in the middle of a pandemic and trying to keep up with my day job while also home-schooling two small children, it suddenly seemed like a good form of escapism to lose myself in the nostalgic past of my childhood.
It’s no coincidence that I’d already been repeatedly viewing Dawson’s Creek and My So-Called Life as part of the TV watching that we were all engaged in for lack of doing much else.
The story of Alex, Gavin and Banny started to evolve and I was compelled to bring it to life. It became not only a form of escapism but also a way to explore lots of themes that I’d wanted to write about for ages but had just never found the right way in to.
I’ve always been obsessed with visitor books in holiday homes and have been trying to write about one for years. I’ve also wanted to explore the nature of teenage friendship for a long time – the intensity of it and how that intensity just can’t last. The way it fades as you grow up but, much like the art you consume as a teenager, it shapes you and forms you and never really leaves you.
Fade Into You is probably the most autobiographical novel I’ve ever written while also being completely fictional and not about me in any way, shape or form.
I know what it was like to grow up in the 90s, to be in my 20s in the 2000s, to try and navigate school and university and figure out who I was while also just trying to survive life in general.
I was as music-obsessed as Alex in the book, using songs and lyrics to make sense of my emotions, going to T in the Park every summer (which luckily for me arrived on the doorstep of my hometown of Kinross when I was 17).
I spent my childhood holidays in Argyll, although my grandparents died before I was ever old enough to help out at their B&B. The fictional village in the novel is very much based on Connel where they lived and where their house looked out over the Falls of Lora.
Like Alex, I had a best friend of the opposite sex. We bonded over a shared love of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain and he also ended up going to war in Iraq (although, unlike Alex, ours was a platonic friendship).
In a nice twist of fate Fade Into You helped me reconnect with that same friend, and he read early extracts of the book and helped me write the chapters based around the 2003 Iraq War .
Maybe, because so much of it was drawn from real-life experience, the writing of Fade Into You was easier than anything I’d ever written before. Maybe the pandemic helped with that too, as it gave me space to write.
Once the children were in bed I was free to do what I wanted in my evenings. I sat at the kitchen table every night and churned out the words. Whereas previous books took years to write, this one took only ten months and came out pretty much fully formed.
It felt easy to become teenage me again, to remember what it felt like at that age.
Most of the music and pop culture references in the book were all taken from my own past. I say most of them only because the character of Banny in the book is way cooler than I ever was and some of his musical tastes are bands and songs I only discovered when I was much older.
And so, here it is, my novel Fade Into You – a love letter to childhood friendship and growing up in Scotland in the 1990s.
I think it might be the best thing I’ve ever written. It might not bring the kind of success that Sally Rooney has achieved and I might still remain an unknown writer even in my own country, but I’m really proud of this book and feel it was always inside me just waiting for the right opportunity to be let out.