As a teenager, there’s perhaps no feeling as potent as falling in love for the first time. It can feel transformative, maybe even a little disarming, when someone ignores the awkward doughiness of adolescence and draws out the person you might one day become. With insecurity and the flush of hormones gnawing at your psyche, you might remodel who you are moulding your behaviour or interests to mirror theirs in order to ingratiate yourself further. If things get really intense, you might even find yourself asking: do I just want this person or do I want to be them? 

It’s a question that Theron David Alden, the narrator of Anyone’s Ghost, the debut novel from American writer August Thompson, grapples with when he meets the beautiful, older and enigmatic Jake during a lazy New Hampshire summer as a teenager. With a shared affinity for Metallica and metal music, drinking to excess and getting high out of their minds, they begin a deep friendship coloured by Theron’s yearning for Jake and both boys’ nihilistic tendencies.

Following an explosive end to their summer together, the pair go their separate ways, drifting apart as Theron finishes high school and then moves to New York for college. It’s there, six years later, that Jake re-enters his life for a brief but life-altering few days where old vulnerabilities rear their head, new intimacies are explored and fresh wounds are inflicted.

Tragedy, however, casts a shadow over the novel – from the first line, we learn that Jake will die in a car crash. Anyone’s Ghost forces you to live side-by-side with Theron as his feelings for Jake unspool or stack on top of one another with growing intensity. “I wanted the reader’s attention to be on the granularity of falling for someone,” Thompson explains. “To me, the book is about intimations and those tiny moments, not the artificial drama of whether Theron and Jake get together or not.”

Below, Dazed speaks to August Thompson about writing Anyone’s Ghost, the significance of yearning, the language of grief and his advice for young writers.

Yearning colours every aspect of Theron’s internal world. Why was that something you wanted to explore?

August Thompson: I would say outside of loneliness, yearning is the most familiar emotion and experience to me. The book is not very autobiographical, but the emotional aspect of yearning for basically everything, to be someone else, to be somewhere else felt very true to me as a young person who did not fit in. And then I think being bisexual, it’s a whole non-stop yearn-fest. You yearn for the men in your life or the women in your life. I’ve had times where I wish I could be more feminine or more masculine. For me it’s about never being truly satisfied. That’s where good drama comes from.

Even though there are brief moments of internalised homophobia, Theron doesn’t really spiral or panic about his queerness. Was there a reason why you swerved that?

August Thompson: I wanted to show it more in his actions and to put that more in scene. There’s a lot of flinching away from the things that he does, and a dishonesty he builds as a reaction to that. But I was very aware of trying to avoid what I viewed as the potential pitfalls of a queer coming-of-age story. I wanted to create characters for who queerness is a very integral part of their lives, but it’s not everything. I view that as realistic. We’re all so dynamic and being queer is one of the great parts of my life, but I can’t say that I think about it all the time, even when I was tortured by it. There’s a lot of other shit to worry about.

Jake and Theron have these nihilistic qualities. There’s a sense that even as they’re yearning for the future, the future isn’t necessarily for them, which felt very true to the feelings of young people. Why do you think that that is such a pervasive mentality amongst people like our generation?

August Thompson: With these characters, they all have different types of mental difference, and I wanted to give that its time and space. But I also didn’t want to diagnose them. But I mean, it’s hard to be excited about a world that’s exhibiting signs of catastrophic change and countries that feeling as though they’re moving backwards. These are the least original thoughts in the world, but it’s like there’s a mosquito in my brain that’s always buzzing around being like, ‘Man, this is getting bad.’ And I think we do everything we can to ignore it and stay present, but it’s hard not to feel exasperated.

Death – the threat of it and the way we flirt with it – hangs over everything, as does grief, not just for people who have died, but for ourselves and our parents. Why were you drawn to those themes?

August Thompson: I think that grief is the only guarantee in life. We all grieve someone and yet we are so bad at it, at least in America. There is no language for it and it really fascinates me just how unprepared we all are. So a lot of it was just giving myself time to reflect on that and try and turn those emotions into action. I didn’t really find any answers, just more questions. But I found great solace in knowing that the questions lead to more questions. It just is what it is.

 “I think that grief is the only guarantee in life [...] There is no language for it and it really fascinates me just how unprepared we all are” – August Thompson

Towards the end of the novel, I got the sense that this thing between Theron and Jake was ultimately more significant for Theron. Would you say that’s fair?

August Thompson: It’s ambiguous. I’m not sure that Theron ever knows. I think Jake is this character who has a great need for external validation and attention, but once he gets it, it starts to repulse him. I think that’s a very common trait among attractive people, but it’s also tied to his fatalism and his proximity to destruction. He’s incapable of creating real relationships and that’s part of what makes him so alluring. All you want from these people, or all I’ve ever wanted from these types of hyper-charismatic and beautiful people, is to be the exception. I wanted to be the person that they would change for. And I think that’s part of what’s so torturous for Theron. He feels as if he’s close but he’ll never know.

I guess for Jake, how much of it is real? He’s going through all these emotions with Theron, but does it mean anything? 

August Thompson: It’s clear, at least to me, that Jake is a user. But something I wanted to resist in the book was creating clear throughlines via trauma. I’m glad that novels explore trauma so thoroughly now, but I am suspicious of books that have Dramatic Incident A lead to Self-destructive Behaviour B. I just don’t think people are that clean. 

In the acknowledgements, you spend a lot of time thanking the teachers in your life. What impact have they had on you? 

August Thompson: The acknowledgements are so indulgent, but I’ve had such an amazing education. Along with the books they’ve shown me, teachers have filled the gap in my own self-confidence and guided me towards fulfilling my ambition. They have affirmed me not only as a writer but as a person. And I think as a country, America treats its educators terribly. There’s this broad idea that they don’t impact our lives that much, but, damn, they practically raise you. So I do feel indebted to them. 

“Don’t get caught revising those first pages over and over. It’s very tempting, but it’s ultimately a form of procrastination, even if it feels like productive procrastination. You need barrel through and finish it” – August Thompson

You mention some of the teachers you had while completing your MFA. It must have been nuts to be taught by people like Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Eugenides. 

August Thompson: It’s absolutely wild getting advice and validation from some of the great American writers. I remember Joyce Carol Oates sending me an email being like, ‘Hey, I actually liked this.’ I have that saved in a folder somewhere that I can look at when I’m feeling down. But when criticism came it was tough because it’s not some random person criticising you, it’s a Pulitzer Prize winner. 

MFA programmes are expensive and aren’t accessible to everyone. What advice do you have for people who want to pursue writing fiction outside of them? 

August Thompson: I recognise that this is coming from a very privileged place because I was able to afford the time to go and get a degree and to pursue this. It’s hard for me to be like, ‘Just make time for it,’ because I have a lot more time than some people might. But honestly, the only advice I can give is just to write much as you can, to read as much as you can and to push yourself into uncomfortable places of thinking. I think all that stuff about making a community and networking is great, but if the work isn’t there then, ultimately, all of that is just socialising at the end of the day. I’m very pro that, but you have to just put in a brutal number of hours. I mean, with this book, I worked for three years, writing for at least three hours a day, six days a week. That is a stupendous amount of unpaid work, and you don’t know if anything is going to become of it.

Right, you have to treat it like a job.

August Thompson: Yeah. I think letting go of the fantasy of inspiration is important. As is finishing things. To bring up Joyce Carol Oates again, one of the best things she ever said in my class was, ‘You can’t know what something is until it’s finished.’ We all want our books to become something, but they usually end up, in many ways, unrelated to that initial vision. Don’t get caught revising those first pages over and over. It’s very tempting, but it’s ultimately a form of procrastination, even if it feels like productive procrastination. You need barrel through and finish it.

Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson is published by Picador on 11 July. Thompson will be in conversation with writer Oisín McKenna on 28 August in London. Tickets are available now.