The Quiet Defection
No one has interviewed Adam Vale. No one can. So he did the only thing left.
REC · IDENTITY WITHHELD
Every answer is his. He also wrote the questions. Make of that what you will; he has.
Let's start with the obvious. You're interviewing yourself. Isn't that a bit much?
It is exactly as much as writing a memoir about hiding, and then hiding inside it. If you already think the whole thing is a performance, this won't change your mind. But the alternative was silence, and I've done enough silence to last me.
Then who are you?
No.
That's it? No?
That's the honest answer. My name is in every copy of the book, encrypted on the copyright page. I hold the only key. I've offered £300 to anyone who can read it, which tells you how confident I am that they can't. I'll decrypt it myself one day — the day I can honestly say I've come back. Not a date. A condition. Until then, no.
The mask is the most honest thing about it.
The book is about "quietly leaving your own life." What does that mean?
You don't blow anything up. No affair, no breakdown in the office, no dramatic quitting. You just start being slightly absent. The phone at dinner. The email under the table. Two minutes in the car on the driveway before you go in — then ten, then years — and the whole time you look completely fine from the outside. That's the horror of it. Nobody can see it, including you, until you make yourself look.
You sat in the car on your own driveway. That's a real thing you did.
Engine off. Lights on in the house. My family in there. And I could not make myself get out. I told myself it was two minutes to decompress. The truth was I was using those two minutes to change character — to put away the person the day had wanted and assemble the person the house needed — and I couldn't do the changeover, so I just sat there. A few steps from the people I love most, and I stayed in the car.
Why write under a false name? Isn't that just a gimmick?
Partly, yes — I won't insult you by pretending there's no strategy in it. But the real reason is simpler: there are people in this story I won't drag into the light with me. And deeper still: the book is about a man who hid inside his own life while looking like he was winning. It felt dishonest to then stand in front of it with my name and my face and say look how honest I am. The mask is the most honest thing about it.
You worked "close to other people's money." That's deliberately vague.
And it'll stay vague. What matters isn't the industry. It's that I spent years helping careful people plan futures they were too absent to ever live in — and I had the exact diagnostic skill to see that happening, and I aimed it at every one of them except myself. That's the part that should worry the competent. The skill to spot it in others is not the same as the courage to spot it in you.
The skill to spot it in others is not the courage to spot it in you.
Is the book self-help?
No, and I've been rude enough about self-help in it that I should be careful. No system. It won't fix your morning. It's a map, not a cure. And at the end of every part it stops and asks where it might be lying to you — including where I might be lying to you — because a book about self-deception that didn't doubt itself would be a joke.
What do you want someone to feel when they finish it?
Recognised, and slightly caught. I want the person who has everything they were supposed to want and still feels absent from it to see they're not broken and not alone — and also to feel gently caught in the act, because comfort without the catch is just another way of staying in the car.
When you decrypt your name — what happens?
Then it's over, in the best way. It'll mean I can stand behind it honestly, which means I'll have done the actual work the book is about, which means the book will have been true. The encryption isn't a trick I'm playing on you. It's a promise I'm making to myself, in public, where I can't quietly back out of it. That's the only reason it's there. That's the only reason any of this is.
He didn't say goodbye. He never does. He just — as he'd put it — got up and went to sit in it.