Mum's the word - William Sutcliffe interview

THE author best known as an exponent of Lad Lit has only just arrived in the pub and right away we're behaving like men-boys, all gadgety and obsessive and competitive.

"60GB," says William Sutcliffe.

"Same here."

"But I've had it for four years and there are still hundreds of songs I've never played. The iPod can tell me that; it's like a diary. And if you're not careful, it can turn you into a real geek.

"Phew," I say. "Thank God we're not like that."

But Sutcliffe, who is 37, reckons that while the iPod might appear an essential part of the armoury of the kind of man he satirises, it's actually a weak spot. "The CDs a man has on display in his flat are the ones he wants you to see," he says. "But the Top 25 Most-Played on an iPod doesn't lie. I've got a friend who I always thought was pretty cool until he let me see his Most-Played and I found a Bucks Fizz song. He was like, 'Whoa, how did that get there?'"

So, William Sutcliffe, author of Are You Experienced?, a hilarious send-up of gap-year galoots, he seems quite cool, too – is he man-boy enough to reveal his?

"No way!"

We're just off the Meadows, the verdant district of Edinburgh to which Sutcliffe fled three years ago after London turned sour for him and his writing hit an impasse. Whatever Makes You Happy, then, is his first Edinburgh book. It's the story of three thirtysomething men who are still not properly settled. Sutcliffe only had to move 300 miles up the road to refocus his life; his protagonists all get their bachelor pads invaded by their mothers.

"A few things happened, like getting mugged, and as a writer I just got stuck," says Sutcliffe. "Writers can get a bit trapped sometimes, but this isn't like real work and we can't just apply for new jobs. So to give myself the kick up the arse I needed, I moved to a new city."

Sutcliffe's wife is the writer Maggie O'Farrell, who has family in and around Edinburgh; now they live round the corner from two of her sisters. They have a four-year-old son of their own, which would seem to further distance Sutcliffe from the men in his new book as the mothers are disappointed they have no grandchildren. But he's in there, as is his own mum.

"The idea for this book came to me when we had Saul. At that moment I realised it had never really occurred to me before that I'd once been a baby, too. That might sound daft; all I can say is men probably do this more than women. They change their umpteenth nappy and wipe up all the sick and they go, 'Oh my God, my mother did everything for me!' I know I did.

"When men become fathers, their relationship with their own mother changes. Up until that point, though, it's been a cruel one-way progression. Your mother starts off as the centre of your universe, but gradually you become less and less dependent on her – and also less and less interested in her. By the time you reach your twenties you can be pretty cold towards your mother."

In between his parental duties, and in between all the phone calls to his mum back in London that he wasn't making before, Sutcliffe thought he was on to something. "There's a terrible injustice here; mothers get such a raw deal – particularly in our culture. In Mediterranean countries, men are warm towards their mothers, but in a northern European protestant culture they're almost ashamed to admit they have mums."

In films, mothers are very often figures of fun. "How many times have you seen A-list actors like George Clooney or Brad Pitt play scenes with mothers?" An association with a mum usually denotes "loser". "That's a terrible thing; in fact it's a disgrace," adds Sutcliffe, who is small with close-cropped hair and, when he gets going, quite intense. "And I realised that the whole area between men and their mothers was a taboo. As a satirist, when you find one of them, it's like gold dust."

Sutcliffe is at his best when he's satirising his generation. Are You Experienced? broke another taboo: it dared to suggest that travel, for all those backpacking, braided, bangled-up gap-yearers, maybe wasn't so wonderful after all. Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist was the suncream-smeared bible for pre-millennium globetrotters and Alex Garland's The Beach was the one made into a movie, but you got more laughs from Are You Experienced? and afterwards you probably knuckled down to some work, or, in Sutcliffe's case, the sort-of job of novelist. The Alchemist and The Beach could be blamed for the worrying phenomenon of the second gap year, and I say that with all the resentment of a man who's not even had one.

"Socio-economically, my generation were lucky to be born when they were," says Sutcliffe. "By the time we reached our twenties, easyJet was waiting for us, and the advances in technology over the last 10 years have been incredible." Of the three men in Whatever Makes You Happy, Matt exploits the advances the most. He works for a lads' mag called Balls! and is a serial dater of bimbettes half his age. Another is gay and the third is Jewish, like Sutcliffe, and escapes to Edinburgh to pine for the love of his life.

There's a neat symmetry to Sutcliffe ending up in Edinburgh because it was the Festival Fringe which first inspired him to become a writer. "I was a member of the Cambridge Footlights in 1992. I didn't really like the performing side but there was something empirical about one of your jokes getting a laugh and it was amazing training for writing humour on the page. You move an implicit piece of punctuation and suddenly (it's] something funny." Incredibly, Sacha Baron Cohen was a Cambridge contemporary who failed that Footlights audition.

The best thing about Sutcliffe's writing is it's not self-consciously trendy. The parents of this indulged generation would not struggle with the language. These are the books that Evelyn Waugh might write, if he had an iPod. In a sense, then, Sutcliffe writes older than he is, although his real self is catching up. "I just don't get Facebook," he admits, "and for the first time I feel like my dad, struggling with the instructions and wondering where the world's going."

Of course, there's one person who always knew he would turn out exactly like this – Mum.

• Whatever Makes You Happy, £10.99, Bloomsbury