The Globe and Mail

The thing readers always ask writers is: “How much of this is true?”

In my case, it’s all true.

My first book, Please, was based on events from my life. An accidental session in a fetish club, a midnight quest in search of a morning-after pill, shifts as a professional victim, drug purchases from gas-station attendants, stalking John Cusack – these were all things that had happened to me or someone I knew. It may not have been the best way to spend our time, but hey, at least I got a book out of it.

But with my new novel, The Warhol Gang, I wanted more. I wanted to write a broader, more social book, one that wrestled with Important Things rather than reveal the sordid secrets of my small, little life.

I wanted to get away from myself.

I wasn’t able to escape my life with this book though. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Oh, The Warhol Gang had little to do with me in the early drafts.

After all, what do my experiences have in common with the book’s central character, Trotsky, a hapless temp worker at a neuromarketing job that takes over his mind until he stumbles into a relationship with a woman who fakes accidents for insurance money? Sure, I’ve had my fair share of strange, violent relationships, but none of them have led me into an amateur revolution against The Mall like in the novel.

But while my editors at HarperCollins liked the plot of the book, they kept pushing me to close the emotional distance between the characters and the reader. Why does Trotsky fall in love with a woman who mutilates herself? Why does he break into people’s apartments when they’re not home and pretend to live their lives? Why can’t he feel any emotions? Why can’t he feel anything at all, other than the desire to be someone else?

I struggled to answer these questions. With each draft, the book got stronger as I wove the plot threads together and cut the scenes that were fun but just didn’t work. But the questions about Trotsky remained. And it became increasingly clear from my editors’ questions that what they really wanted to know was: “Who is he?”

The truth was I didn’t know.

I’d written a novel where I’d kept the main character at a distance.

Why? It didn’t matter. All that did matter was I had to figure out who he was. If I didn’t know, how would readers? But I was running out of time as my deadline approached. And my editors had to be growing impatient, although they didn’t show it, bless them.

So I did the only thing I could think of. After numerous edits, and when it was nearly time to deliver a finished manuscript, I rewrote the book. Up until that point, it had always been in third person, with all the emotional distance that third person brings. Now I changed everything to first person. Instead of asking, “Who is he?” and “What does he want?” I asked “Who am I?” and “What do I want?”

I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. Not my editors, not my agent.

Not even my wife. In order to make The Warhol Gang work, I had to dig deeper into myself, and the only way I could do that was by confronting my most hidden desires, my anxieties, my loneliness. That’s the sort of thing you can only do on your own. I won’t go into the details here, but all those secrets are there in the book now. And my editors said, “That’s exactly what it needed.”

The Warhol Gang isn’t a confessional though. Instead, it’s more a revelation. In revealing myself on the page like that, and talking about it with other people afterward, I was able to recognize how many of the things that drive me are shared, if not universal, concerns. We all dream about the house we can never have. We all dream about the job we can never have. We all dream of finding a way to resist The Mall. And then we all wake up to the lives we have.

So The Warhol Gang is the most personal thing I’ve written to date.

But also the most social and, I like to think, the most important.

With Trotsky I created a sort of everyman character, one whose identity is made up of all the fantasies that are sold to us but can never become real. I didn’t just write myself into the book, I also wrote all my friends into it. I wrote you into it. Because, at the end of it all, we’re trapped in this Ikea world together.

Peter Darbyshire’s novel, The Warhol Gang (HarperCollins) is in stores now.