Liverpool author Jeff Young, who was shortlisted for a Costa Award, writes for Northern Soul about his new book, Wild Twin. 

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Travelling used to mean going on holiday with my mum and dad. We’d have caravan holidays in Wales, Devon and Cornwall, and once we stayed on a farm on the edge of Glasgow with a view of the Gorbals far beyond the fields. I always wanted to travel further but we never left this island. Instead, I read books set in foreign cities – always cities – in Europe and America, and I dreamed of going to Paris and New York and being an artist or a poet or a bum.

When I was 17, I got my first passport and as soon as I could I walked out of my filing clerk job and hitchhiked to Paris with my friend Stan. I had no idea what I was doing, and things started falling apart on the third day of our trip when Stan abandoned me in Ostend and came back to Liverpool. At the time this was frightening and it filled me with anxiety, but I was determined to carry on travelling. After a restless night in a cheap hotel, I walked to the motorway and stuck out my thumb. In my head I was Jack Kerouac but in reality, I was a filing clerk, floundering out of my depth. In retrospect, being dumped by my friend was the beginning of my reinvention as ‘an artist’. It was also the beginning of a prolonged nervous breakdown and a lifelong aversion to accepting lifts in cars.

Over the years when I’ve told people the story of that first trip abroad and my subsequent life in Amsterdam, I’ve often been asked why I haven’t written a book about those days. The simple answer is that I was frightened to put it down on paper, scared of exposing my own naivety and waywardness, of talking about mistakes made, drunkenness and general youthful idiotic behaviour. But the stories kept churning their way back up to the surface and, after a lifetime of writing scripts for theatre, radio and TV I began – and failed – to write the stories down. I wrote another book instead called Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay, a book about my childhood, family and Liverpool, the city I grew up in. To my surprise, the book worked. It was widely read and reviewed, shortlisted for literary prizes, and it helped me transition from writing scripts to writing memoir – a territory I felt much more comfortable in (although comfort has never been my aim as a writer, being much more of a discomfort and uncertainty kind of soul).

“When are you going to write about your adventures in Paris and Amsterdam?” The question kept recurring. And so, I finally sat down to write a book called Wild Twin, the story of those days. In the years since I started writing Ghost Town my life has changed immeasurably. My dear sister Val died during the writing of that book and became the heart and soul of it. My health deteriorated rapidly with multiple long-term illnesses. I had to leave my job teaching creative writing at a Liverpool university. Covid happened and turned me into a recluse.

And then my father became ill, bedbound in the house I had grown up in. His diagnosis with Alzheimer’s led to rapid cognitive decline. I spent much of 2023 looking after him – the last year of his life – and while I was sitting with him in the long and difficult days, I began to write Wild Twin, a fever dream of dive hotels, rough sleeping, getting lost, squats, violence, poverty, thieving, illness and madness. 

The great epiphany was the moment it occurred to me that the room we spent our days and nights in was the centre of my universe – the very room where I said goodbye to my dad in the 1970s when I left to go on my wayward journey with Stan. The room became the heart of the book. Writing about the past in the company of an old man who could no longer remember became the central, poetic atmosphere of the book.

Between the words, beneath the surface, Wild Twin is a book about my relationship with my father. Throughout my travels and travails and my endless, restless desire to run away from the conventions of that suburban living room, what I was really looking for wasn’t wildness, or disappearing, or running away. What I was really looking for was home.

By Jeff Young

All images credited to Jeff Young, except main image which is credited to Pearl Buscombe Young