"When I was 12 years old, I lived by myself for a while.”

Glen David Gold lives in Los Angeles these days. In Hollywood, more or less.

He had to move from San Francisco some six months ago because he couldn’t afford it any more.

“The last month I was in San Francisco my rent was $4400 for a one-bedroom apartment,” he explains. That’s your Silicon Valley effect right there.

Still, he’s happy where he is, close to his girlfriend who teaches Pilates. He’s got cats. He’s got friends. “I love it down here. It’s authentically shallow,” he laughs.

Gold, 54, a celebrated novelist still best known for his debut Carter Beats the Devil, is putting San Francisco behind him. And maybe all it represents.

And it represents a lot, as will be clear to anyone who reads his latest book, I Will Be Complete.

It’s a memoir that sees Gold delving into his own past and his relationships with a largely absent father and a difficult mother, a mother who had dreadful taste in men and who, when he was just 12, left him home alone.

It’s a fine, funny, discomfiting book. And very candid. He writes about the boy he was and the man he would become. He even discusses his early sex life.

In short, it’s not the book you might expect from a straight white male in his mid-fifties.

“There’s a memoirist called Jenny Boylan. She was born James Boylan. She’s trans,” Gold tells me.

“She said: ‘Men and women each have 50 emotions. The difference is for men, 48 of them are: ‘I’m fine.’ “And I was very interested in what ‘I’m fine’ is made up of. What is really in there when you go into that armour?”

In his case, you might argue, a damaged young man desperate for love.

Maybe we can blame the parents. If nothing else, I Will Be Complete is an account of dysfunctional parenting.

His parents separated when he was a kid and he lived with his mum. Most of the time.

One day, when he was 12, she phoned Gold to tell him she had just got on a plane to New York. An adventure. It would be 10 days before she came home. And that was just the beginning of her absences.

“For four or five months in 1976 and 1977 I lived like that. Adults were around sometimes, but mostly not,” he writes. The longest time he was alone consecutively was two weeks.

His mother spent most of that time in a hotel in New York waiting for phone calls from her then current boyfriend Trevor, a fashion designer. When Gold’s father learned he was home alone he phoned and asked his son if he wanted to come and stay with him. “I told him no. I was fine.” Gold writes. “He didn’t press the issue.”

I tell him I read all this in a state of incomprehension and some anger. I have to ask, I say, when did he realise that none of this was normal?

“I think I was about … 35 years old,” Gold answers, laughing.

“Well, you know,” he continues, “You have to reach back into the 1970s in San Francisco. It was not abnormal. There were a lot of kids in a lot of screwed-up situations.

“And I was not particularly screwed up. I was given a level of responsibility that I probably shouldn’t have had. My mum made a bad misjudgement there. But I wasn’t tortured or anything.”

It is June when we talk. TV screens show images of refugee children separated from their parents in Trump’s America playing on a loop.

“I have to say it’s crazy on a day like today to be talking about how I was treated as a kid given what our country’s doing,” Gold points out. “So, in the seventies it was on the shadier side of normal, but it was not that crazy.”

Gold and I are of an age and after reading I Will Be Complete it’s clear we both absorbed the same pop culture: Marvel comics in the 1970s and indie pop a decade later. The music he was listening to in America in the early 1980s – New Order, The Smiths, R.E.M. - was the music that I was listening to in Scotland. But that only makes me even more judgemental reading all the things that happened to him, the things his mother did and his father didn’t, I say. In his book, when his mother chooses Trevor over her son, Gold writes: “From a distance I find her behaviour brave.” Reading that line, I tell him, I started tutting.

“I don’t think she’s a villain in all this,” he says. “One of these concepts that I keep coming back to is it was not something she was doing to me. I think my mum has some issues in how she makes judgements and it has almost nothing to do with me and everything to do with a version of self-harm. What was happening to me was collateral damage.”

Well, even if that is the case, I say, she was your mum. She was responsible for you. “Correct and we are not in touch and there’s a reason for that.”

As for your dad, I say, he washed his hands of you. “Yeah he did. He absolutely did. And it’s strange with my dad because he is the better parent and in 95 per cent of relationships he would be very much not. He’s been a good parent for an adult. He’s been apologetic …”

He pauses, reframes.

“I’m not sure apologetic is the right word. I would say he has accepted what he has done and expressed some remorse about it, but he would do it again exactly the same way.”

His mum, it has to be said, had terrible taste in boyfriends. And, frankly, she was working on a descending scale. She met the worst of them, Daniel, in the street the morning she was evicted from an apartment in San Diego.

Daniel and his friend helped her pack all her stuff into a van apart from a mattress. She had no way to pay for their help.

“She did as she would tell me later what she had to,” Gold writes. I don’t need to spell it out, do I?

Daniel hung around, came with her to Las Vegas, bought some crystal meth for the journey. She was 51, he was 27.

The thing that bothers me most about that story, I tell him, is that she told it to her son, even if he was a grown-up by this point. He says that his editor felt the same.

“I would say of all the things I didn’t know were abnormal that was the last. I didn’t know it was weird for a parent to tell her kid these things.”

At which point I guess we need to return to the idea of collateral damage. Given the adult relationships he was witness to, how did that filter through to his own?

“The pop psychology term is co-dependent. It’s a very good description for me thinking I would come in, find out what a woman’s problems were and solve them.

“There’s a line between acknowledging that you’ve had trauma in your life and being defined by it and I feel like that’s one of those lifelong battles.”

In the end the lesson life teaches us is that are our parents are human too. We are all flawed. We all fail those around us. Towards the end of the book Gold writes of his twenty-something self: “I did almost everything because I was afraid of death and because I wanted love.”

Is that still the case for the 54-year-old Gold?

“I would say I’ve come a lot further in my relationship with death. I’m only afraid of death three days out of five.

“Wanting love? Yeah, but I thought the terms of getting love meant agreeing with the person. I think that’s changed. I think I have a better idea of who and what I am and if I assert that then the people I love ... They better fucking love me back pal, that’s all I’m saying”

Glen David Gold can laugh about it now ...

I Will Be Complete, by Glen David Gold, is published by Sceptre, priced £20.