I start a refrain in my head. Singing along to the thirties hashish song they are playing downstairs, I sing fuck politics, let’s dance. I sing it in a Greek accent, give the phrase middle-eastern inflections ...

How do you give a plot description of this book without entering into the very language that it problematises? Ari is young, unemployed, Greek and gay ... Or Ari is a poofter wog, a slut, a conscientious objector from the workforce ...

These are all loaded terms. How about if I said, like George (one of the characters in the book), Ari is ‘a nice young kid, fucked up but that’s normal’. I get depressed when I think about how this book might be taken up. I hate the labels – ‘Dirty Realism’, what does ‘realism’ mean in this day and age? (And there are a lot more dirty things going on in the world today than sex and drugs.)