Extract from my journal November 2016
I remember my last day in New York. It was spent managing a familiar but unwelcome churn in my stomach. The pain that always pinched whenever I thought about leaving the city behind. Though it was late November, the skies were endlessly blue so I’d spent the day wandering the East River Promenade. I’m always at my easiest beside a river, and while walking by the East River you wouldn’t guess you were on the periphery of a glitzy metropolis swarming with some 1.6 million residents, and who knows how many thousands of tourists. There’s an unexpected stillness there and all the honking and rumbling and screeching of daily New York life seems to be happening in some other universe.
I’ve been in love with the rough and the smooth of New York City for as long as I can remember. It’s inexplicable, really. I was born and raised in Yorkshire and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve visited the place. But for whatever reason, I just feel at home there and am always scrabbling around, trying to find ways and means of going back.
My last excuse for crossing the Atlantic was to research the setting of my Starlight Diner books. I saved for a year to be able to make the trip. I’d written the first draft of Starlight in New York but I didn’t have a book contract when I reserved the flights. Consequently, my family were convinced my ‘research trip’ was just an excuse to gallivant around America for a few weeks eating more cheesecake than was proper.
And I’ll admit, cheesecake wasn’t in short supply.
I visited more than my fair share of diners on that trip and, following my river-side walk, my final few hours in Manhattan were spent in The Pearl Street Diner, an eatery not far from the tip of the island.
Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree played out over the speaker as I walked in. Festive music had followed me from the East Coast to the Mid-West since my plane had touched down in October, such is the American love for the holidays.
Inside the restaurant, the silver-backed seating was upholstered in blue pvc and ‘fresh baked cookies’ were piled up along the counter. I’d been to so many diners by that point I didn’t even pause for instruction from the waiting staff. I just walked up to the counter and dropped down into one of the high stools.
‘It’s cold outside,’ the waiter said to me.
I gave him a wry smile. ‘I just came from Chicago.’
The waiter almost snapped himself in half with laughing. Chicago wasn’t exactly known for being clement at this time of year and in the few days I’d spent there the whole city had been lost in a merciless blizzard.
‘That is…’ the waiter managed to reduce his hysterics to a chuckle. ‘That is a little different.’
I ordered a Diet Coke and watched him work, notebook and pen in hand. He knew what every customer wanted before they even ordered but one regular surprised him. Changing her usual cream cheese and tomato bagel to an omelette and reveling in the opportunity to take him off guard.
Watching him go about his day to day routine, I grappled once again with the same question in my head: why was saying goodbye to the city so difficult every time I had to leave? Why couldn’t I bear the thought of New York once again fading away; falling away from me as my plane took off?
In the four weeks prior, I’d flown three and half thousand miles with nothing more to get by on than the cash I had in my pocket. I’d taken buses and trains out to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and back again to better understand the places my characters hailed from. I’d been raved at by random strangers on the subway late at night, I’d chatted merrily to a young woman on the Greyhound bus service who was traveling to see her boyfriend on his first day out of jail and narrowly dodged a confrontation with a gang in a Cleveland parking lot. I’d done all this because I believed in the stories I was writing.
And so, sitting there in the Pearl Street Diner during the final days of November 2015 I decided to keep writing my stories with or without a book contract. My plane home beckoned and if I couldn’t stay in New York in person, then, I decided, I would stay there in my mind. Living vicariously through the characters of the Starlight Diner.
Three weeks after my plane touched down in Heathrow, I got an email from HarperCollins offering to publish my first novel and by January 2016 I had signed a two-book deal. There are a lot of people who helped me on my journey to whom I will always be grateful but it was my unconditional love for New York that kept me on my path.