The Best Nuisance I Can Be | philipcliveminty.com

The Best Nuisance I Can Be.

Why you might – or might not – want to read my book.

The Best Nuisance I Can Be ( ‘Nuisance’ for short) is a novelisation of my 1984-85 college diaries. It covers my tumultuous final year as an undergraduate at an English university, a period that delivered friendship, love, oodles of fun and some horrible self-discoveries.

For a slightly fuller synopsis, mingled with my doomed attempts at marketing, take a look at the original book blurb submitted to Amazon.

If you fancy reading (or God help you, listening) to a few extracts, have a browse through the posts below.

Stop me becoming extinct.

OK, DAMN YOU, I’ll take a look!

About the book

For anyone who’s interested, here’s where you can dig a bit deeper into who the book’s for and what it’s about.

How good is the book?

I’m confident that Nuisance is a well-written book. I’m not the reincarnation of Dickens, but my technical abilities and prose style are equal to the story I’m telling.

Penning that paragraph, by the way, sparked a full-blown attack of imposter syndrome.

I know that Nuisance has the capacity to make people feel something. My handful of readers tell me that it made them laugh, or cry, or both. They’ve also said the book has its own distinctive voice and vision – hopefully they don’t mean in a Florence Foster Jenkins sort-of way.

Ultimately, almost every book is good for the right audience and bad for the wrong one. Evidence of this can be found on any online discussion of great literature, where legions of adults cheerfully denounce the literary classics they were coerced into reading at school.

Who might like ‘Nuisance’?

I wrote Nuisance primarily for three people. Two are my buddies from that period: the book was my thank you for their friendship. The third is me, because writing is always fundamentally selfish.

However, I’m vain enough to think that Nuisance might appeal to others who weren’t part of the story. An obvious demographic is men of a similar age to me, i.e., frigging ancient.

I’ve specified men because much of my leisure time was spent involved in traditionally laddish activities, such as chasing women and perpetrating stupid pranks. I’ve specified ancient, because anyone too young just won’t get the 1980s cultural references. In addition, they might not like the language and attitudes associated with that era. Having said that, in many ways the book is a crie de coeur against lad culture. Protagonist Phil (me) hates blokey pastimes like sports, drinking and regional tribalism, and he’s shit at making or mending things. He’s into girly stuff like poetry, art and nature.

Maybe I should further narrow my likely audience to ‘ancient blokes who never fitted in.’

(I could be leaning into the whole men thing too much. Half of my tiny readership so far has been women, and the sometimes-disgusting narrative didn’t seem to put them off).

What’s the book about?

I intended Nuisance to be a love story. This may not be immediately obvious – in fact, one reader described it as “the In-Betweeners go to college”, though she was only about 30 pages in. But I hope that anyone who persists to the end might see that the book is really about four kinds of love.

First, there’s love of youth. Phil – my literary alter-ego – just loves being young. He self-consciously loves the physicality, the indestructibility, the irresponsibility of being in his early twenties. The book celebrates what that feels like. It’s also about what you’ll sacrifice in order to stop yourself moving on.

Second, there’s love of friends. Friendship in your early twenties is different. It isn’t yet restrained by wisdom, caution, self-preservation. When you make a friend, you’re all in, you’re into them up to your knees. My book is about that intense love of friends, unspoken by young men back then, but which roars through our veins and arteries.

Third, there’s romantic love. Romantic love is like fiction: it demands a willing suspension of disbelief, about the other person and yourself. And yet, when you’re in its grip, it is also very real. I’m interested in these contradictions, and what happens when they can no longer be sustained.

Fourth, it’s about love of place. Maybe you have somewhere that your memory has anointed with sacred tears. Maybe to such an extent that returning there is too overwhelming to contemplate. Mine is the place I’ve renamed Linden. I can only go back once I’ve been safely rendered into ashes.

If you’re getting the impression that Nuisance is a wee bit sentimental, you’re right. I’m the most sentimental fucker on God’s green Earth.

Another theme: not my 1980s

I also wanted Nuisance to challenge the stereotypical views of the early 1980s. Nothing encapsulates these better than those 80s retrospectives found on bargain-bin TV, the ones fronted by a familiar crew of Grade Z has-beens. The tick-list of 80s highlights always includes political turmoil (cue grainy footage of Falklands War, Maggie Thatcher, miners’ strikes); New Romantic music (clips of Boy George, Marilyn, Spandau Ballet), 80s fashion (insert video of shoulder pads and huge hair), and surges in wealth (Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney, partying stockbrokers). An ironic voiceover does the donkey work; the talking heads declaim with contractual enthusiasm or eye-rolling disbelief.

Yet that wasn’t everyone’s early 80s. As my diaries show, it sure wasn’t mine. I wasn’t caught up in Falklands War patriotism, neither liked nor loathed Thatcher, and had no particular view on the miners’ strikes (heresy, I know). For me, New Romantic music was boring and stupid and I only liked any aspect of new fashions that highlighted women’s bums, thighs, breasts or crotches. My personal wealth continued to hover around non-existent.

The point is that I didn’t live in the same 1980s that is now reconstructed by ageing journos. Much of those historical and cultural currents were an irrelevance to me. I had my own shit to take care of.

Maybe one can’t write an alternative 80s narrative for cultural refuseniks and apathetes, but I had a go anyway.

An extract is worth a thousand words

Maybe all this pontificating makes Nuisance sound grander than it is. It’s the mostly true college memoirs of a very silly person, set forty years ago, and chances are that you’ll like or dislike it on those terms. If you’re trying to figure out whether to drop a few pennies on it, why not read (or listen to) a few extracts, such as this one from early in the book, or this more serious one, or even this faintly appalling one?

Latest Nuisance Post

Best Nuisance 3: Phil discovers empathy, but he’s still awful (audio).29 March 2025
In which the author, reading his own work, sounds like a pervert.

All Best Nuisance Posts

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