Burgess (interviewed below) set the book in Bristol, where he lived for a period, in the early to mid '80s. In his author’s note, he writes: “All the major events have happened, are happening and will no doubt continue to happen. I saw many of them myself […] The book isn’t fact; it isn’t even fiction. But it’s all true, every word.”

Junk (U.S. title Smack) is a story told from 10 different perspectives, by 10 characters – some of whom are based on real people Burgess knew in the Bristol days, and still knows. The opening chapter is Gemma (a slightly annoying, typically excitable teenage girl) and Tar (a tortured, sensitive teenage boy) innocently eating cheese rolls with Branston pickle together in the back of a Volvo estate – not having sex. Over the next 325 pages, they both change beyond recognition.

We’re introduced to Lily, the heroin addict in aforementioned black string vest, who smells like trouble, as Gemma observes her at a party – a scene Burgess tells me is actually based on his own first memory of the real life Lily. Gemma stares at Lily, and says this thing that so artfully encapsulates the teenage experience:

“Did you ever see someone and think straight away, I want to be that person? I want to look like her and think like her and have the same effect as she does. […] She was more herself than anyone else ever was and as soon as I clapped eyes on her I knew I wanted to be myself just as much as she was herself.”

Now 62, Burgess lives the life every aspiring writer dreams of in a quiet town up north, spending his mornings writing, his afternoons socialising and walking the dog, and his evenings cooking. His seminal book that lit up my boring 13-year-old existence is being re-published for the 20th anniversary with a new, slightly less bright green cover – as though darkened by 20 years of teenagers obsessively reading it.

As a fan to an idol, I asked Burgess every question I’ve ever had about Junk – what happened to the real Gemma? The real Lily? The real Tar? What was fact, what was fiction, and is it still the truth?

So I’ve read Junk about 20 times…

Oh right! Fair dos, you probably remember it better than I do then.

Do you ever feel emotional reading it back?

Yeah, I suppose. The funny thing is that once you’ve finished it and you’ve left it alone a while, you can come back to it as a reader.

Why did you write it for teenagers, not adults? It’s still so relevant for adults…

Well I started off writing what I thought were books for children and I was told they were books for teenagers. Nobody wrote for teenagers when I was a kid, there was no such thing as YA.

My publisher suggested I do a book about drugs, and I had been thinking for a while how absolutely ludicrous it is that you can get books on potty training and being a grandad and absolutely everything in between, but the one bit where there’s no books published directly for you is at that seminal time when you’re a teenager. I was living in Bristol and I knew all these people... It didn’t all happen to me but I saw it, I was around it, and I was a part of it, so I thought, okay, I’ll write the book that I would have liked to read when I was 16.

When I was coming up to that age, people were selling hash in the playground and the Beatles and the Stones all seemed to be having a good time on drugs but at that time, the police and the authorities were telling us what an evil monstrosity it was, so you were completely surrounded by misinformation and nonsense, so I thought I'd just write something authentic, that didn’t try to moralise. I felt it was a book that should have been there.

Did you ask the people you wrote the book about (either loosely or directly) their permission before writing their stories?

I told them I was doing it, and I’m still in touch with the character I based Gemma on and I gave her the book to read, to check up, you know [laughs]. And I gave it to the character of Sally. It was interesting because they had really lost a big slice of their lives to addiction, so they were quite keen to treat it as rather more educational than I wanted it to be. I remember them saying to me, ‘there should be more deaths’ and I was like, 'why, none of you died’ and they said, ‘so that people will learn from our mistakes.' I didn’t do it though because I wanted it to be authentic and I didn’t want to make things worse than they were because certainly at that time, there weren’t actually many deaths from heroin, it did happen from time to time, but the damage it did was of a different kind.

There is a bit in the book where Alan and Helen, who are dealers, die through an overdose. This does happen. For some reason, some much cleaner and stronger heroin comes on the market and people take their normal amount and they can overdose, because the quality of it is black market so it just goes up and down like a yoyo. I wanted to put them in to show what happens and how it does happen. In the original version, I had Gemma and Tar going in to get the gear and being frightened to take it in case it killed them, but the people I gave the book to said, “no, no, we were straight in there.” So I was able to change details like that [after showing it to them.]

I always felt it was so unfair that Gemma is ok in the end, and in real life she went back and did her A-levels – and eventually a PhD. Whereas Tar – the more likeable character in the beginning, who gets dragged in, to some extent, by Gemma – ends up a wreck. Did you feel that sense of injustice?

Tar was a mixture of characters: Gemma’s real life boyfriend – who sadly ended up dying on the streets – and my brother, who had a heroin problem, and died not from drugs, but from Hodgkin Disease, just as he was getting clean. Tar was a bit more of a concoction – a bit more fictive, and the real life Tar didn’t come from a violent background.

What’s with the dandelion theme?

When you pick something symbolic in that way, it takes on a life of its own. When I lived in Bristol, and it was a poor part of Bristol, every little scrap of waste ground at the right time of year was covered with dandelions and they’re great because they’re weeds so they grow anywhere but they’re actually very beautiful. So I felt it was appropriate for Tar to want to draw that – and that it had that strength as an image of something that grows out between the cracks of pavements and which everyone despises but is in fact very beautiful. And my girlfriend at the time did a drawing of a dandelion.