What I Talk About When I Talk About Things I've Talked To Books About

Friendship in the post-pandemic era, writing, reading, social sacrifice and interesting chats with living and dead people I've never met

Me (far right, Teenage Fanclub t-shirt), my friend Pete (bright stripy shirt) and members of the band Lilys in Manhattan, summer 1996

One of the many paradoxes that come with writing books is the fact that you work for more than half your life to become good at it, partly in the hope that people might at a distant point in the future say nice things about what you do, then when that finally happens, you find yourself wanting to go and hide in the nearest understairs cupboard behind some old floor mops, a pot of dried-up eggshell bathroom paint and a broken vacuum cleaner you should have thrown out when David Bowie and Prince were still alive. Being British, of course, I’m legally obliged to be utterly useless at accepting compliments. Add to this the fact that I grew up north of the River Trent, and have, since the official onset of middle-age, inherited my fully, officially northern mum’s habit of dodging the spotlight at nearly all possible opportunities, the contract becomes even more binding. It would be false of me to claim that I dislike hearing people make laudatory remarks about my work - if I didn’t, I’d be leaving pieces of writing like this one vacuum-sealed under a boulder in a heavily wooded ravine, not making them optionally free to read online - but I find that the compliments I’ve handled most comfortably, and which have most stuck in my mind, are those at least a little bit off to the side of “omg I love what you do.” One particular favourite was “Your writing does my bloody head in - but in a good way.” I also enjoyed “How the fuck did you keep ALL THAT in your brain?” and pretty much anything I’ve ever received which began as a response to a book then became more dominantly an articulate and moving essay or anecdote about emotional or pivotal moments in a reader’s life.

Another response I found myself recalling recently was from my friend Ellen, who wrote to me not long after my first book was published to say that after reading it she felt less like she’d been reading and more like she’d been having a really good chat to me for a few hours, and not in the sense that it was just me talking at her but in the sense that she had been, at all points, an equal contributor to the conversation. This occurred back when I was only 27, at which point Ellen was still probably the most intelligent and good-hearted person I’d ever met, just as she unquestionably had been when, during a Tindersticks gig at the Old Vic pub in Nottingham nearly a decade earlier, we’d ended up sitting at adjoining tables and I’d shyly struck up a conversation with her about just how many musicians the band were going to squeeze onto the pub’s tiny stage (I seem to remember we discovered the answer was either 113 or 114). I know her review of that book filled me with warmth at the time but it fills me with more now, at a point when I’m less detached from my own feelings and have gained a clear-eyed view of the significant friendships of my youth and which of them, through a mixture of laziness, neglect and the unstoppable avalanche that is 21st Century life, I must take some responsibility for allowing to drift. But I think there is more behind that feeling than a fine-tuned sentimental ability to identify the most wholesome and influential parts of my past. If there was a narrow segment of me, in my 20s, that turned Ellen’s comment against myself (“Oh Ellen is so phenomenally brainy she probably doesn’t view my book as a real book book, just a chatty, silly book”) it would not do so now, since I am someone who, more than ever, views books as conversations - and, above that, potentially the best conversations you can ever have as a human being. I want the books I’ve written to make people feel like they’re having a really good chat with me because, without exception, the books I enjoy most feel like that too: even the insanely clever ones that, as I read them, make me conscious, in the best fashion, that I’m not quite intellectually worthy of them.

Everyone goes through their life losing touch with people, often despite their best intentions, and Ellen, who I last spoke to around 20 years ago, is a prime example of that for me. But I’m not sure I’ve ever drifted out of touch with as many friends, new and old, in one five year period as I have between 2020 and now. I have heard unquantifiable numbers of people talk about how radically their attitude to friendships, and their social life as a whole, has changed in the same period. So when I think about the alterations in mine during that same period it’s easy to kid myself that I’m merely an inanimate object who’s been swept haplessly into some new phase of life on a vast and irrefutable cultural tide, when in truth it’s more complex and self-determined than that.

While I found the major worldwide event of 2020 inconvenient in many ways, I probably found it convenient in just as many other ways. Prior to the pandemic, I had massively overcomplicated my social life. In the preceding half decade I’d moved house too much, got to know too many people in too many regions of the country, on top of the other people I was already acquainted with prior to that, which was already conceivably too many. I regretted none of these friendships and felt enriched by the majority of them, but had become increasingly exhausted by the way technology pressured me to keep each of them on a constant low heat. I looked forward to three-dimensional encounters, but I dreaded text messages, resenting the way they sapped my creative energy, and I lived with a constant sense of guilt about people I hadn’t seen or replied to enough and disorientation about where home and “my people” truly were. What I remember about being locked down in rural Devon between the springs of 2020 and 2021 was, while making the usual Covidian complaints about longing for hugs and pubs and dancing, a relieved sense of oneliness and peace. I still saw people when I could but felt soothed by solitude, the space it had given me to plot out and research a novel that I’d previously been denied due to the structure of my social life. When friends and family worried about me being “all on my own, living out on the moor” I felt like a fraud for accepting a modicum of their sympathy when in fact I was, with the exception of a couple of bouts of ill-health, approximately as fine as fine could be, and getting all the conversation I needed from the books I was devouring: books that I’d been annoyed with myself for prioritising less between 2013 and 2020 when I’d been out of the house almost every day, doing something with someone, and writing a jobbing journalist’s worth of words per week on Twitter and WhatsApp.

I am sure 2020 would have been the year I began to write my first novel, even if there’d been no pandemic. I’d been putting it off for too long, during which time it had risen, dough-like, inside the oven of my skull, until finally it took up so much space that the fact it still didn’t exist had become an embarrassing personal tragicomedy of sorts, therefore I would have permitted myself to put it off no longer. But with hindsight I can see how the pandemic eased the process of getting down to it, legitimising the sacrifices I needed to make to do it (and, with that same hindsight, there is no doubt that I incontrovertibly did have to make them).

Between October 2013 and April 2020 I had rented seven houses, within a rectangle of the English map roughly 370 miles wide and 260 miles long. On my many expeditions to find and evaluate these I’d always had the same criteria. First, I’d ask myself whether a house provided a safe environment for my cats. Second, I’d ask myself whether the living room or kitchen could serve practically as a part-time dancefloor. After that, I’d begin to ask myself other questions about the place’s potential living conditions. “Do I like it?” for example, “What is that black oozing stuff on the bathroom window ledge?” or “To what extent will I be able to overlook that bit of broken fence opening up directly onto a county council waste depot?” I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the house I moved to in November 2020, when I was halfway through writing the novel, was the first one for many years I’d never asked the dancefloor question about. That writing a book will change you, and that the better the book is, the more it will probably change you, was something I’d been learning for a while, but now I learned it again, more decisively.

Had I become a recluse? I don’t think it was that simple. It was more that the central nature of the conversations in my day-to-day life had changed. I still relished the prospect of chatting to interesting people on long country walks and in pubs and at friend’s houses. But the discussions I looked forward to most of all were the ones I was having during the course of reading and writing fiction, which just lately had become so much more richly rewarding, especially because, by extension, it felt like being involved in a discussion with all writers, with, in fact, all of history itself. It would not be exaggerating to say that, in the four and a quarter years since then, that conversation has become fuller, wider and more important to the way I live. Each time it expands it can only expand more. Each book inevitably leads to more books. And that expansion is something I find completely addictive. That, in adherence to the spell it continues to cast over me, I’ve rejected activities from my life of the 2010s in favour of it - the schedule of a social butterfly, a house regularly full of drunk boogying people, 20-30 spoken word gigs every year at far-flung locations, hangovers, generally being a good and reliable friend over text message, to name just a few - does not mean I have completely tired of all those activities; it’s just a measure of the mesmerising power of that spell and the way that, as it envelops me, I feel like I’m in the place I’ve always wanted to be.

The pandemic offered a convenient excuse for an endless number of corporations and organisations to create an invisible obstacle which would delay the provision of services, and to piss their customers around with great regularity. The problem is, when the excuse wasn’t factually there any more, they failed to remove the obstacle and continued to piss people around in the same fashion because, in the interim, they had cottoned on to just how much money it would save them. But I am neither a corporation nor an organisation, and neither is anyone else who, during the reduced social circumstances of Covid, re-evaluated the way they were spending their time then, when what has been tenuously called “normal life” resumed, took the lessons they’d learned during that re-evaluation and applied them to make their working life more fulfilling and their social life more sane. We have not hoodwinked or shortchanged anyone in attempting to look after ourselves and live a more present and peaceful life. I know I’m a bad friend by text, I know I’m a huge disappointment to people who would prefer to keep up with my life via social media, I know I’ve been a frustration to my publisher’s PR department by not going out on the road more often and flogging my work at festivals and bookshops, I know that some people probably incorrectly believe I don’t want to see them any more, I know that by regularly deciding to stay home and read a novel written by a, say, a woman called Molly who owned lots of fine hats and died at a refined and sensible age in the 1980s instead of going out to this or that 21st Century social event I am viewed as a let-down by some, but I also know that it would not have been true to myself to continue the whirlwind I was in during the previous decade: a whirlwind that, because it couldn’t be pigeonholed as something as simple as “sex, drugs and rock and roll” or the cliched doings of an urban party animal (I still lived in the middle of nowhere, for most of that period, and spent a large portion of my time alone photographing trees and badgers and reading 1950s books about farming, even then), and because it was being shaped by the insidious ways technology had come to browbeat our social life, had taken a little longer to identify as not being quite right for me.

“If you want to be a successful writer, prepare to be alone,” the brilliant

Sherman Alexie

has said. In his memoir about the intersection between his life as a novelist and as a runner, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami talks about a kind of commitment to not worrying about being liked or understood socially which he sees as part of the territory of writing the kind of novels he writes. “Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay to be independent,” he says. I don’t believe it has to be that drastic for every author following their calling. But I am sure of one fact: you can only kid yourself for so long that you can write the books you want to write and see everyone you want to see as regularly as you want to see them and be precisely the social animal the world demands that you must be. I also think you can look at the situation realistically, take a brutally honest view of what a brief and tricky balancing act life is, and do your best to get by and have a nice time without repetitively flagellating yourself with the the nearest loose tree branch. After all, if everyone, not just writers, chose to self-critically dwell on their social shortcomings and regrets, the whole population of the earth would probably be walking around in hairshirts from the age of 35 onwards.

Haruki Murakami’s writing routine, just in case you are feeling smug about your creative discipline right now

The curious situation I find myself in, having taken the attitude to my books that I have since 2015, and especially since the doubling down I’ve done over the last half decade, is that while, yes, of course my partner and close family members are the people who know me better than anyone, the readers of the books I’ve produced in that time probably know me better than real life friends - even many long time real life friends - who haven’t read those same books. That can be a little odd to come to terms with but it’s an inevitable consequence of committing more to the timeless conversation that is writing and reading books. I am, quite simply, better in books than I am in person because it’s during the reading and writing of books where I discover what I really think about everything. In the ones I write it’s also where I am able to distil and hone those thoughts in a flab-free, articulate way that I never would be able to in an actual conversation, but to reach its apex, the writing has always got to aim to be a conversation; it’s got to be trying to communicate a concept, however complex, in the most effective and simple way, rather than doing a little dance and saying “Hey, look at me, I’m some writing - aren’t I impressive?” There are some books I read in my 20s which, because I couldn’t understand them, I dismissed wrongly as examples of the latter kind of showing off. They were actually communicating in an extremely simple and effective way; it was just that the ideas and narratives they were communicating were so nuanced and complex that I wasn’t quite ready for them. That I have gained a true understanding of several of them now is one of the upsides of aging and having had deep chats with lots and lots of books, which counterbalances such downsides as losing your hair, having to wee more frequently and being viewed as a recluse or a let-down by some people you used to drink beer with.

The other day I found a note in my diary from November, 2019, written just after I’d done some spoken word shows for what was then my latest non-fiction book. It says “Talk less, listen more, read more.” This reminds me that, long before I got locked down or committed to writing the first proper sentence of my long-delayed novel, I could see my overgrown path through Book Forest beginning to fork. In the few years preceding that, I’d been doing more than two dozen spoken word shows per year, all over England. Mostly booked and managed by me, rather than my publisher, these took place at all kinds of venues - bookshops but also museums, AONB visitor centres, former chapels and factories - and had become a lively antidote to the solitude of writing. While they were all themed around incidents described in my books, they were not “readings” or conventional book talks, nor were they stand-up comedy, but the fact that I didn’t bill them as “comedy” and they took place loosely in the traditionally quiet and sober literary universe served as a pressure-remover and, as I improvised retellings of the loud - and often profane - stories about my family and my encounters with wildlife and rural eccentrics in my books, I frequently had the quietly anarchic and deliciously naughty feeling of somebody who had smuggled a shopping trolley full of geese into a church council meeting. I discovered what I would never have suspected back in the first decade of the century as I spoke haltingly through a shaking microphone at my earliest author events: I could make people laugh, deal with hecklers (guerilla knitters - Liverpool, 2017) and stage invasions (my octogenarian former employer from back when I’d been a teenage golf caddy - Coventry, 2018), and had zero problems filling an hour with jokes and narrative, despite turning up with zero firm plans about what I was going to say. Moreover, I got a buzz out of it. I might still be doing it now if I hadn’t scuppered everything by moving my focus from non-fiction to full-length polyphonic novels and deciding to exist during the era of a global health crisis. I could have upped my schedule to 40 or 50 talks a year, continued writing non-fiction books to keep my supply of material fresh, and all of that would have probably been very good fun, but there is no possible way that I could have done it and written the exact three books I’ve written since 2020: books that mandated a greater level of quiet and solitude. When I looked deeper into my own heart, I discovered that, much as I’d enjoyed the feeling of being responsible for the laughter of a room full of strangers, what I really wanted to do was write and read. Ultimately I was more interested in using the process of writing books to discover what I thought than to tell people what I already thought. I knew I’d miss the life I had been living but, no less solidly, I knew what I wanted. A vote for being alone, surrounded by words, rather than in a room full of 50-100 people, did of course feel like a vote for introversion, a turning away from connection, but it has never felt like a vote for insularity, and, of the two options, has at many times since I cast it felt like the bigger vote for socialisation.

I have had some particularly brilliant conversations recently with people living and dead. I talked to

George Saunders

, who told me, in the most phenomenally original and lateral way, about just how monumental and crushing it must have been to be personally responsible for the future of a young country, in the midst of a war that was causing unimaginable bloodshed, then having a beloved son wrenched away from you into the beyond by typhoid, and, in the process, George also told me some stuff about human compassion which made me think, “George, that is truly uncanny and astonishing: you’ve communicated with superb precision something I’ve been feeling recently, but in a way I wouldn’t have been anywhere clever enough to.” I talked to John Fowles, who cleverly made me think he was telling me about an early 1960s kidnapping but really wanted to tell me some truths about class, ignorance and the importance of art that are still relevant today. I talked to Jhumpa Lahiri who, even though I’ve never been an Indian immigrant to the United States during the 1960s, somehow made me feel like I was, and I talked to Sybille Bedford, who was quite posh, and not the kind of person I would normally have spoken to, and had some attitudes to money I found a bit offputting, but I was glad I talked to her and felt expanded for doing so. I talked to Russell Hoban about lions and maps and didn’t understand 100% of what he said but was at all times convinced of his bravery, wisdom and empathy, and I talked to Gabriel García Márquez who, when I was younger and more suggestible, I’d foolishly decided not to talk to because someone I no longer know whose opinion I took as gospel told me Gabriel was boring and made unrealistic things up. Gabriel and I got on like a rudimentary mountain shack on fire. “Do not worry if your paragraphs are long,” Gabriel told me. “After all, you’re not the fucking Daily Mail. Those you want to read your work will understand why you decide to make some of your paragraphs long, just as the people who I wanted to read my work did with mine.” At this point Sylvia Townsend Warner joined in, all the way from a convent in 14th Century Norfolk. “Right on!” Sylvia said to Gabriel. “Also I like the way you build up a detailed portrait of one small place over a period of more than one lifetime. You speak with my kind of rhythm. I’d probably ask you out on a date if we weren’t both ghosts, and I wasn’t generally more into women.” Then I left South America and the flatlands of East Anglia and walked through the Undercliff that separates Axmouth, in Devon, from Lyme Regis, in Dorset, in the company of Pete Millson: a place where, coincidentally, I’d also chatted to John Fowles barely more than three years ago. Pete and I talked about bracket fungus, the freedom of realising you can choose your own definition of success, the pleasure of reading, the disingenuousness of social media and how utterly unfathomable the impact of contemporary technology on friendships would have seemed to us in the 20th century.

Pete isn’t dead and he’s never written a novel. He’s a photographer and musician, and I’ve been friends with him since the summer of 1996, when a subsidiary of Warner Records and the New Musical Express sent us from Heathrow to New York to interview and photograph the chameleonic band Lilys, who had recently gone from being a US east coast answer to My Bloody Valentine to making a fabulously sticky LP of Byrds-meets-Monkees psych pop. Besides both feeling increasingly like relics of a bygone age who are trying to find small ways to stave off grumpiness and survive in a world that feels far more batshit and bullshit-friendly than the one we imagined we’d live in during our 40s and 50s, the two of us still have much else in common: we both read a lot of character-driven novels written between 1930 and 1996, are comfortable with spending long periods of time in our own company and have a weird habit of swiftly mutating into 17-year-olds when listening to great music. We are regularly appalling at keeping in touch, virtually never text one another, yet, when we do get around to meeting, we always find no end of topics to discuss at length and speed, ending up dizzied by all the things we don’t find room to say as well as all we do. I thought, as I chatted with Pete on our latest walk, about how rare and special it was for a friendship to still feel like that, after getting on for thirty years, and how our own separate dismantling of our preconceived notions of success and our difficult realisations about the realities of making a living from our own creativity had sent us off into more disparate places before finally, perhaps, bring us closer to one another than ever.

Something else also occurred to me about us during our walk, something staring me right in the face, but which strangely hadn’t quite occurred to me before: Pete and I had both been inveterate, almost comically polite people-pleasers during our young adult lives and, having seen the negative effects that could sometimes have on the ways we spent our time, and how it could lead us to situations where we had to endure antisocial people of an obverse nature to ourselves, learned to be better at carving our own spaces out to do what we most enjoyed - even if that just meant “being a bit more bullish, in a well-mannered way, about sometimes demanding a quiet few hours alone in which to read a book”. In short, I suspect that Pete, like me, has become less apologetic about being a sensitive soul of a quiet and curious nature, despite the ways the dominant culture continues to appear to reprimand him for it. I was surprised, in the loose-flowing course of our conversation, as we reached Lyme Regis and passed the grand house where John Fowles wrote his later novels, to discover for the first time that my old friend Ellen - another sensitive soul of a quiet and curious nature - was a mutual acquaintance of ours, and I was pleased to hear that, the last time Pete had seen her, she was married and well and devouring books and, from his description, pretty much just as I remembered her in every detail. In the car on the way home, after I’d thought about how refreshing the pint of beer Pete and I had drunk at the end of the walk had been then remembered that we hadn’t actually had one, I felt, as I always do after all the best conversations, like I wanted to learn more and live more and read more and listen more and write more and walk more and chat more. In other words: that I wanted to squeeze each and every one of the good things in life into my remaining time on the planet, and find the perfect balance between them, in spite of all the incontestable lessons I continue to learn about that not being logistically possible.

Some half-coherent rambling from me, halfway through the writing of this piece, during a walk on the UK’s South West Coast path:

My most recent books are 21st-Century Yokel, Help The Witch, Ring The Hill, Notebook, Villager, 1983 and - published in March and pre-order able now - Everything Will Swallow You. All of them can be ordered from Blackwells UK, who do free international delivery to most worldwide destinations.