“It’s insane,” she says, of this perception. She recently wrote on Twitter: “a good thing about me is that you can enjoy my book without finding out that i went to oxbridge and my parents are both famous journalists like 6 months later and feeling somewhat betrayed.” The fact that she grew up in Newcastle means she is regarded as a diverse voice in the publishing world. “Or the other way around, I think they’re funny and then someone else reads them and is like, ‘This is fucking horrible.’” “In my head things are often a bit darker than I think they are, and then I read them back and realise they’re actually quite funny,” she says of her sense of humour. It’s just, as far as my parents are aware, I’ve never had sex, I’ve never taken drugs, and I definitely don’t know what the member of a man looks like.”Ĭhatting via Zoom, Clark is gentler than I’d anticipated from her book, but just as entertaining.

“Her mum’s this absurd harpy and her dad’s this weird, spineless, Freudian … and my parents aren’t like that! I suppose I’m going to have to let them at some point. And two, she’s worried they will think she based Irina’s parents on them. One, because it’s so explicit and she feels grossed out by the thought of their doing so. Have her parents read it? “They have not,” says Clark. And it is hilariously sardonic take Irina’s derisive verdict on her on-again-off-again best friend Flo’s taste in men: “She likes that white-bread, absolute fucking baguette of a lad from Call Me by Your Name.”

It is all a bit American Psycho, if Patrick Bateman were a consistently underestimated pretty girl.

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark