Author Tom Newlands on neurodiversity, new towns and becoming a novelist at 40
Author Tom Newlands tells us about his latest novel Something Like Happiness, which is set in a Scottish new town, and how being diagnosed with ADHD changed his life.
Tom Newlands started late but seems to have cracked this novel-writing business. If only someone had told him when he was 19 that you didn’t have to have the whole thing in your head all the time, that you could, as it were, peel bits off and just work on them, he might have written a whole shelf by now instead of now, aged 46, just the two.
His first - Only Here, Only Now - was last year’s Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year and won five other awards and prizes. “This isn’t just a great first novel,” blurbed Roddy Doyle, “it’s a great novel”. The second - Something Like Happiness - which launches on Saturday 15th August at the Edinburgh Book Festival will, boast his publishers, confirm him “as one of the brightest talents of his generation”.
The reason Newlands didn’t start writing novels earlier is that, as someone who is both autistic and has ADHD, he found it difficult sticking to a single idea.
“I get too many of them, and might get 15,000 words into one line of thought and then another one pops into my head and the novelty of that draws me in. The issue for me has always been finding something that is going to maintain my interest over a long period.”
In Something Like Happiness, that ‘something’ is actually two things. First, there is the relationship between Frazer and Caitlin, a young couple with a neurodivergent five-year-old son.
“It’s a love story that opens at the end of love,” Newlands explains. “Two teenage sweethearts who have come to an impasse in their relationship”.
Caitlin can’t wait to get out of their barely habitable flat in a Scottish new town and into the new-build semi they have been offered by the housing association; Frazer, cocooned in the past and surrounded by memories of his now-dead parents, doesn’t want to leave and keeps procrastinating.
This might seem a very slight basis for an entire novel - surely it’s obvious, you might think, that anyone would want to move out from a flat with mould spreading across the ceiling - yet such is Newlands’s skill as a writer that his novel holds the reader’s attention throughout. More than that: it’s actually gripping. We might suspect that Frazer is undiagnosed autistic, but Newlands doesn’t spell it out, and we certainly don’t know whether he will be tempted by a woman who had a crush on him at school and who makes her availability obvious.
The happiness of the title could easily come from Frazer’s life with Caitlin - “It was simple: two people, a wee kid, a small flat. That had always felt to him like love, like happiness” - but it could also be an ironic reference to Calderknowles, the Scottish new town in which they both live. Born in Perth and brought up in Stirling, Newlands admits that he himself hasn’t ever lived in a new town, but Cumbernauld - which he knows reasonably well through friends who live there - provided much of the real-life template.
“New towns fascinate me,” he explains. “They were built with such hope, and even today there is still something inspirational about the way they were planned, with all these wonderful modernist sculptures and interesting architecture. A lot have degraded very badly, and sometimes it’s just pure neglect. But it’s interesting to visit them and contrast what they are like now with the dreams everyone had in the 1950s.”
In his novel, Calderknowles enticed its first residents with the ubiquitous slogan “Happiness. Here.” The slogan was put on a hill overlooking the town which became known as Happy Hill, although people soon forgot why.
“By then,” Newlands writes, “it was not a place of promise of aching, dandelioned concrete, of crapped-on pigeon spikes and signs forbidding football, of buses that never showed.” And if you notice the “aching” in that sentence, you will no doubt pick up on his vivifying use of language: “quick, accurate birds”; “a small huddle of fidgety trees”, “slow herds of clouds” to pick three examples at random.
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How much does he think his writing style owes to neurodivergence?
“A lot of neurodivergent traits are really useful as a writer. I’m a very observant person, very empathetic, and also when you are autistic you are not necessarily born with the ability to absorb social skills the way a neurotypical person is. So you have to learn things like that, and when you do, what you’re actually doing is learning about human interactions."
At school in Stirling, he says, “I was really passionate about art, music and English. Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar was huge for me. It was recommended by my teacher and I couldn’t believe there was this guy whose writing was so strange and beguiling and it was all happening 100 miles from where I was.”
Having to spread his focus across the rest of the curriculum, however, “killed school for me”, and he only lasted a week at university. “Yet if at the age of 14, I’d been told to go home and get on with things I enjoy, I'd have probably published my first novel at 19.”
He’d tried his hand at art and photography and was working in a London warehouse packing and shipping prints when the Covid lockdown happened. He was 40, and had been diagnosed with ADHD two years earlier.
“That changed my life. Having the diagnosis and reassessing my skills showed me that there were things I was definitely good at. That’s when I thought I’m going to get my head down and do something about that.”
Lockdown gave him the time to write and he completed a 120,000-word first draft of his novel in just three months. Two years later he became a full-time writer.
There are so many moving passages in his new book - along with, I should add, heaps more humour than one might expect - that I ask him which passage he will choose to read from on Saturday. “I don’t know,” he replies. “I’m working on my third novel now and so immersed in it that I haven’t yet given it any thought.”
Something Like Happiness by Tom Newlands is published by Phoenix Books, price £20. He will be at Edinburgh International Book Festival at 1:30pm on 15 August.
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