Do I Belong Here?

Last month, I attended the annual summer party hosted by HarperCollins at the V&A in London. A gathering of writers, agents and publishing staff, it was by far the fanciest event I had ever attended and I was incredibly excited to be there. But my presence left me feeling uneasy because, for the longest time, the idea of anything “fancy” has made me uncomfortable.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate nice things, more that I feel as if they weren’t designed with people like me in mind. On the few occasions I have entered a fine dining restaurant, I’ve struggled to shake off the feeling that the front of house staff will ask me to leave, having correctly identified me as someone who has spent most of their life eating food shaped and orange-breadcrumbed by Captain Birdseye. My sense has always been that if I have a place when it comes to luxurious environments, it’s outside them like a Victorian urchin, my grubby nose pressed against the window.

The feeling that I was not made for the finer things is something that started early on for me. As a child growing up in a largely working-class London overspill town in Suffolk, the greatest luxury I could think of was that I might one day be able to hold my birthday party at the local branch of Wimpy on the high street. I dreamed of the full works; cheeseburger and chips served on a China plate, party hats that bore the company logo, an unfortunate member of staff dressed up in a Mr Wimpy costume. But I would never have asked my parents for such a thing. Not only because I didn’t think they could afford it, but because I fundamentally didn’t feel I deserved it. It wasn’t, I believed, for the likes of me.

Meeting me for the first time, you might initially struggle to guess this about me. I bear the same non-regional continuity announcer way of speaking as my father, an affectation that he drummed into me just as it had been drummed into him by my grandfather. Our speech designed to make our family appear more refined than we are. But that affectation didn’t come with an instruction manual, so has only ever gotten me so far. You need only talk to me for a few minutes before the evidence of my origins begins to pour out, especially in grand surroundings. Not possessing the soft skills or self awareness that come with a certain kind of upbringing, I am unable to experience any form of luxury without passing remark about it.

“Isn’t this fancy?” I’d said to the person next to me as I entered the V&A and was handed a badge labelled Adam Farrer - HarperCollins Author before being guided past the entrance to a Cartier exhibition and through a display of marble sculptures. I said it again when ushered into the Italianate garden, where a cocktail bar was being set up in front of a shallow pool bracketed by trickling fountains and rows of immaculately-dressed wait staff. Each was holding a silver tray bearing generously filled champagne flutes or exotic-looking cocktails and in them I saw exactly what I needed. I was desperate for a drink, my throat dry from nerves and the walk from my hotel to the venue in 33-degree heat. Primarily though, I wanted a prop. If I was holding a glass, I could at least look occupied while I orientated myself. What I wasn’t sure of though, was the etiquette. Do I join an orderly queue? Wait to be asked to come forward? Spotting the writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie, I saw a way through this.

He’ll know what to do I thought, He’s been on the telly.

I watched as he approached one of the wait staff, exchanged a few words and selected a glass from their tray; a tumbler containing a large measure of cloudy liquid and ice speared with a stalk of rosemary. He thanked the member of staff then moved on. I followed his lead and approached the same member of staff but, more used to being on the other side of the equation and knowing that thanks in service jobs are in short supply, I got caught up with the thanking part, expressing gratitude to such a degree that it may have appeared to them as if I was taking the piss. Then I backed away and sipped from my glass, immediately flinching as the rosemary stabbed me deep inside my nostril. It was at this point, dabbing at my nose to make sure it wasn’t bleeding, that I asked myself an important question; “Do I belong here?”

It wasn’t just my concerns about class getting in the way this time, but the reason I was there in the first place. The truth is I have always felt like I’d somehow chanced my way to publication, having not done the whole thing “properly”. I don’t have an agent, still maintain a full time job and most of my successes as a writer were the result of determined, working class chutzpah. I did not study creative writing and my GCSE English grade could leave you wondering if I ever attended school at all. Before I was a part of it, I had no connections within an industry that, like pro wrestling or the manufacturing of violins, had no immediately obvious entry point. If there was a door to the publishing business, it seemed to me to be a secret one. Unable to find it, I channeled Mr Blobby and crashed through the wall instead. So, standing there at a grand literary party, surrounded by successful and famous writers, I couldn’t help feeling like someone who’d won their invite in a raffle.

I knew I was being absurd though and needed to address this, so I tried to focus on the few friends I had in attendance. There was the novelist Lucy Nichol, who attended the same now-demolished campus of Hull College as me during the mid-nineties. Statistically, it’s wild that even one of us was there, let alone two. But Lucy, it was obvious to me as she paddled in the pool, belonged. Then there was Emma Jane Unsworth, who before her many novels and scriptwriting credits had been my neighbour in North Manchester. Seeing her then, infinitely stylish and warmly greeting writer friends, you’d be hard pressed to believe that we ever frequented the same Tesco Express. But she also, clearly, very much belonged. Looking across that garden, I found myself wondering how many of the writers there felt the same way as me, worrying that they too, for various reasons, didn’t quite fit in. But I didn’t doubt that any of them belonged there so, regardless of my route in, maybe I shouldn’t doubt myself either.

I considered my credentials. When I last dared to check, my books were maintaining a steady 4.44 on Goodreads, a rating that even I can accept is a mark of general approval. If you grabbed my phone and checked my inbox, in amongst the notifications from Nextdoor and alerts that someone had tried to hack my Facebook, you would see emails about all kinds of writing projects. A request for mentoring, book events, festival and podcast appearances, plans for a US publication strategy and an invitation to teach a residential course for Arvon. I may have cluelessly stumbled into this world a decade ago but I’ve since learned enough about it that I can function, and my advice and abilities have value. Despite my lack of academic qualifications, I have lectured undergraduate students on life writing and taught the craft of memoir at retreats and workshops. Am regularly asked to provide quotes for writers whose work I admire. I’ve gone from doing spoken word gigs where I was paid in buffet sandwiches to earning enough actual money from my writing to justify a tax bill. As unnatural and grotesque as it feels for me to admit it, what I need to remind myself is that I am good at this. I was there because I am good at this.

So, instead of folding in on myself at this party, I threw myself into having a good time. I ate truffle-infused canapés and carefully sipped from divine non-alcoholic mocktails while I chatted with crime writers, authors of romance novels, a writer of children’s books and an incredibly fun lady from The Royal Mint.

I let my roots show just a little when I took myself on a tour of the V&A and snapped photos of a naked sculpture titled ‘Samson and the Philistines’ then sent them to my wife accompanied by puerile comments. Then I let myself down again when I sent a friend a text that read ‘Oh my god, I’m 99% certain I’m standing next to Gaby Roslin’ because, like a large percentage of readers, I get excited by writers that I recognise off the TV. But otherwise, I think I got away with looking like I belonged.

When I finally left at the end of the evening, it was not situational anxiety or imposter syndrome that drove me to the exit but heat exposure. Fair skinned and vulnerable in hot weather, the sun simply laughs at my factor 50 and presses through it, turning me so pink I look as if every inch of my flesh has been paddled. After a certain point, my head begins to pound, the nausea rises and know this a sign that I will soon throw up. Refusing to be sick in the V&A and having worked enough jobs that involved mopping up vomit to know that I didn’t want it to be anyone else’s problem, I hired a cab and headed for my hotel, keeping my nausea at bay by meditating on the punitive cost of the Uber cleaning surcharge. On-brand in not believing I deserved anything better, I’d searched Booking.com for the cheapest room I could find within a 30-minute walking radius of the party and settled on an economy suite in a faded hotel full of hollering gap year students. Tiny, stiflingly hot and kitted out with tired, collapsing fixtures, my room looked like it was designed to be sick in. So, I did that.

Once I’d introduced the toilet to everything I’d consumed that evening, I stripped down to my underwear, switched off the lights and collapsed onto my bed, a dusty, oscillating fan brushing warm air across both my body and the badge resting atop my stack of forsaken clothes; Adam Farrer - HarperCollins Author. Then I sweated the night away, a snoring creature that surely belonged in this musty budget room but also the V&A, the publishing industry and, if time travel one day allowed it, the Wimpy.

Any other business:

• What I’m Reading: The manuscript of Lucy Nichol’s brilliant forthcoming feminist revenge thriller Girls to the Front. The title comes from something Kathleen Hanna used to shout at Bikini Kill concerts (I also recommend Hanna’s memoir Rebel Girl).

• What I’ve been listening to: Theatre by Anna Mieke. We recently dropped our Spotify family plan after learning about the AI military drone scandal (should have done it sooner tbh), so have been rebuilding our playlists elsewhere. My daughter asked me for music recommendations to add to hers and I thought she’d like Mieke, whose music I regularly use to comfort me during the parts of my working week that involve MS Excel.

• What I’ve been doing: I hosted the launch of Jenn Ashworth’s incredible memoir The Parallel Path at Blackwell’s in Manchester, did an author talk about memoir at Wilmslow Festival of Writing and chaired a joyous crime writing event with Chris McDonald and Rob Parker at B is for Butterfly Books in Sale. I also did a brief author interview for the brilliant creative non-fiction publication Hinterland and appeared on East Leeds Community Radio’s excellent Love the Words show, an interview that features the line "I should say, Adam, that you write very well about your penis."

• What I’ll be doing: I’m doing a whole bunch of things from September until the end of the year, but I have August off. I’ll mostly be talking about the Australia and New Zealand release of Broken Biscuits and Other Male Failures, which has been pushed back to August 11th. Tell the antipodean in your life.