Where were you in 2006?

I’m big on nostalgia. Anyone who’s read any of my novels can tell you that.

I thirst for memories of bopping to crappy teen music, wallowing in heartbreak (or what seemed like heartbreak) and wearing those trousers with skirts over the top like Steps used to (Boot-scootin-baby indeed).

So it’s no surprise that Goodbye Ruby Tuesday features a lot of flashbacks, when the girls were 16, 17 and 18. Now, it’s my book, so I made them my age. Their memories of tightly pulled back hair and huge gold hoop earrings from Argos are my memories (though not my style, I pulled worse faux pas than that). I’m a nostalgia junkie, and it’s probably why I love YA books so much - a passage back to the awkward teenage years, that, in truth, were probably not as good as now (especially now Craig David has returned, I mean, what more can a girl ask for?) but are somehow painful and beautiful, and a bit magic.

Well, we’re planning an event to celebrate the launch of Goodbye Ruby Tuesday in July, in London. More details will be coming soon, but it will be celebrating a lot of things that are mentioned in the book (arts for mental health, charity work, burlesque, cocktails and kick ass females) and will be featuring some excellent noughties music.

We’ll be sharing details about the event soon, but there’s a way for readers, bloggers and writers to get involved without stepping out from behind a computer screen.

We’re asking you: Where were you in 2006? I’m looking for a few sentences, a paragraph, a memory, about something you did, something you felt, something you were in 2006. We’ll be tweeting the shorter ones in the run up to the event, but more than that, we’ll be displaying them in real life, so that guests can walk through a room of a hundred people’s memories, and wonder about who they are, make them nostalgic. And then everyone can have a boogie.

So, if you’d like to share where/what/how you were in 2006, please email your sentence or memory to: [email protected]

I’ll keep you updated with the event details as they become available, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a party that Ruby herself would be proud of!