“I’ve always wanted to write a novel, ever since I was a little kid growing up in Ohio,” says Christopher Bollen, Interview Magazine’s editor-at-large, over lunch at a Nolita café not far from his office. He fulfills his childhood dream this month with the release of his début novel Lightning People, a forcibly honest study of a group of wayward New Yorkers in their thirties who are pushed around by the forces of fate and circumstance. “I wanted it to be about not so much youth, but people who are no longer young, which I thought was a much more interesting take,” he says. “That feeling when the youthfulness and excitement and the fervor of being new to a city and young, when you can be anything you want to be and you can fuck up as many times as you want because nothing matters and you’ll still be alright and you won’t pay a price. I was more interested, maybe because of my age at that point, in people who are of the age that no longer allows for that kind of easiness and excitement. It’s about the painfulness of waking up and realizing you’re an adult and you do pay a price for the company you keep and what you do and where you are.”