NYC
19th-20th of June 2002

The thrill of taking my first lungful of American oxygen is delayed somewhat by a ten mile queue for passport control at Newark airport in which everyone is made to feel like a potential terrorist. I've never felt so foreign in my life. In the Lincoln Town Car (God, I love those cars) on the way from the airport, I catch my first view of the city’s panorama and promptly burst into tears. This is my first time in the States and a dream come true. First stop is the Warwick Hotel on West 54th Street where I’ll be spending the next two nights. This is the view from my window:

Oh my God, I am soo in New York!

I have a couple of hours to stare out of the window, have a bath and iron a shirt before I'm collected from my hotel by the delightful Erin, a publicist with my US publishers who bundles me into the back of yet another Lincoln Town Car and whisks me back to New Jersey to appear on a local chat show, Jersey’s Talking.

We talk about cats and books as we drive and she’s so lovely she almost manages to make me forget that in half an hour I'm going to be appearing on live television in a foreign country and I'm totally cacking myself. The TV studio is in a small building on an industrial estate in the back end of beyond. It doesn't take long before I realise that all local TV and radio studios in the States are in small buildings on industrial estates in the back end of beyond:

I'm on with a local singer-songwriter:

and a local actor called J.B. Smoove who’s in a big Hollywood film with someone really famous. He turns up with his five year old daughter, wearing distinctly un film-starrish shoes and looking even more nervous than me. I'm told I'm on about ten seconds before I'm on, which is good because I've no extra time to get nervous. I'm interviewed by Lee Leonard who is dry and charming and has really done his research. He asks me loads of very interesting questions, the sort of questions I wish I got asked when I'm interviewed at home and before I know it I've been on live TV for twenty minutes and I’ve really enjoyed myself. Here’s me and Lee after the interview. Notice how immensely relieved I look:

The next morning I'm awake fairly early to eat my bran flakes and banana breakfast (I'm going to be in the States for two weeks - I feel I should ease myself slowly into the inevitable odyssey of over-eating) and do two live radio interviews. I sit on my bed pretending to read a magazine, waiting for the phone to ring and feeling mildly sick. WEDG-FM are fifteen minutes late and I start to relax thinking that they’ve obviously forgotten about me and I'm going to get out of doing it. Then the phone rings. I have no idea throughout the whole interview if I'm on air or not. I want to ask if I'm on air but I can't, in case I am. I decide to assume that I'm on air, even though it doesn’t seem as if I am, and answer all the questions in a breezy, professional manner and try not to swear. And then five minutes later the guy says thanks, have a nice day and I think, well, maybe he's about to put me on air. But the line's gone dead and it’s obviously over. I feel rather unsettled and the silence is overwhelming.

Things improve when Erin turns up to take me for a slap-up lunch at Provence with the top dogs at Plume and Dutton. We’re a bit early so we wander around the shops of Soho for a while and I buy a very cheap necklace with a gem encrusted pineapple on it. Lunch is lovely (though I'm the only one drinking - I feel self-conscious sipping my champagne and say no when I'm offered another glass even though I would have loved one). After lunch, Erin and Brant (another publicist at Plume, who works on my paperbacks) walk me back to their offices on Hudson Street and Brant introduces me to everyone who has worked so hard on my previous paperback releases. Everyone is uniformly nice and incredibly friendly and it feels just like being in Penguin’s offices in the UK. At 4pm, I meet Ron Hogan from Beatrice.com, who brings me chocolate (clever man) and interviews me for his excellent website which consists solely of in depth interviews with writers. Well worth a look, if you’re interested in writers, writing or books.

I do a book reading that night at Barnes & Noble on East 86th Street. It’s exactly like a book reading in London. About fifteen very nice people turn up, listen to me read and then ask me exactly the same sort of questions I get asked at home. I feel very at home and smile widely as I sign dog-eared copies of Ralph’s Party and crisp new One Hit Wonders. Then a tall fair man approaches me and gives me his hand to shake. Hi, Lisa, he says, Tim Geary. If you’ve been elsewhere on my site you’ll see that Tim wrote one of my favourite books of all time, Shouting at the Shipmen. He moved to the States from the UK a few years ago and had seen the poster in the window so decided to come in and say hello. Although we’ve exchanged a few e-mails it’s the first time I've ever met him and very exciting it is, too. Before leaving London, I managed to track down my old college friend Malcolm Beckford, and arranged to meet him at the reading. As I chat to Tim I see Malcolm over his shoulder and wave at him. He comes straight over and says hi to Tim - turns out the two of them know each other. Patently these ex-pats in New York move in small circles. I’m feeling incredibly popular by this point, and very I’ll-take-Manhattan.

We say goodbye to Tim, and Malcolm takes me to his manor in the Lower Village in my first yellow cab. We have dinner but I'm feeling too jetlagged to eat so just drink lots of rum and coke instead. Malcolm takes it easy on the booze to start with, in a cool, NY kind of a way, but it doesn't take long until he's back in Brit mode, drinking and swearing and letting that juicy Brummie accent do its thing. We haven't seen each other since about a year after we left college so we’ve got eleven years of gossip and news to catch up on.

We’ve also got football to watch! England are playing Brazil tonight in the quarter-finals of the World Cup and it doesn’t kick off until 3am, so we go on a bit of a crawl and I drink lots more rum and coke. In a bar where the men are outnumbered by women by about six to one, I talk to a large transsexual black guy in hotpants who starts off talking pure Manhattanese before revealing his true Mancunian accent. He's the most wired person I've ever spoken to and I've spoken to some wired people in my time. The bar where we’re due to watch the football is already full to capacity so we enact a comical caper around the area, jumping in and out of cabs trying and failing to find somewhere to watch it. We find a bar with a TV and see England score their first goal, but don't hear it as the volume is turned down so that the entirely disinterested American clientele can listen to Bon Jovi. We get out of a cab and hear shouts and cheers so sprint across the road and peer through the window of yet another (full-to-capacity) bar just in time to see Brazilian players leaping all over each other in a jubilant fashion.

Feeling a little deflated we wander around a bit more until we finally find somewhere to watch England lose. Malcolm knows the only other people in here - two Swedes who don't seem to give a shit who wins. One of them is wearing a T-shirt that says ‘God.’ I'm starting to feel all After-Hoursy. Here’s some of the action and there’s Malcolm and his Swedish friend, God.

Malcolm puts me in a cab and I get back to the hotel at 5 am feeling like a worn out old piece of dog-chew.