To this point, how writing has worked for me is that I get an idea stuck in my head. Like songs, they’re sticky. Many times, they start very insistently and eventually ebb away, apparently to find someone else’s brain to inhabit. But sometimes they don’t go away, and the only way to get them out of my head is onto the page. So it was with The Perfect Generation, technically my second book but the first that will sneak out into the world.

Unfortunately, I started writing TPG after I succumbed...