🔗 Share this article

Through his newest work, writer Andrew O’Hagan delivers eight short writings initially aired for Radio 4. The mode centers on reminiscence, exploring a lost childhood friend from the neighborhood where he was raised in the North Ayrshire of the 1970s. Furthermore, he recalls ex-associates at the London Review of Books, in which O’Hagan made his name in the nineties, as well as his grown daughter’s bygone imaginary friend.

Friendship Explored

The author reflects on why thespians, government figures, and conservatives are poor companions, how come the novelist Colm Tóibín is an excellent friend, and the ways in which the practice of friendship is influenced by bereavement and the internet.

“In the age of the internet, what exactly is a friend? … Can you swear by someone whose voice you’ve never heard …?”

According to the author, online interaction is more damaging than the former, an opinion that could be expected from an author who likens friendship to “a set of loyalties that spin in the mind like classic albums”. He expresses concern that people no longer go to pubs because they’re too busy browsing e-commerce.

Contrasting Family and Friends

In his essays, bonds empower where family constricts. Being raised with a trio of siblings, O’Hagan’s household was a “zone of adversities”, a “domain of anxiety”, including a cold paternal figure who previously caused their canine purposely removed into the countryside and freed, gone for good. At primary school, respite came from tooling around derelict areas with Mark, a nearby friend around his years.

“An exceptional companion can invoke a fresh reality, and, most importantly, the potential start of a transformed self, pulled away from domestic limits.”

Subsequently, O’Hagan adjusts the idea to describe the companionship of an additional acquaintance “an entry into the kind of person you dreamed of being”.

Symbols of Change

Images of journey and transformation seem powerful within the text imbued with understood awe at the distance O’Hagan has come from his youth. At one point, he arranges products during his teens at a nearby supermarket in Ayrshire; on another, he’s at a party for a recent romantic partner at “the designer boutique on Park Avenue”. He is open about being an inveterate name-dropper – partying with the rock band, sharing a drink with the writer.

The Limits of Disclosure

Even though many experiences happens in these pages, he doesn’t reveal everything. O’Hagan knows that companionship is seldom simply a bowl of cherries, yet he’s discreet, at times hesitant, concerning the negative elements: snubs, confusions, rifts (“I am acquainted with a well-known performer who wanted me at his wedding, but he didn’t even reply when I asked him to my own wedding”).

The degree of openness, of disclosure, is somewhat restricted: while he briefly notes of his aborted attempt to pen Julian Assange’s memoir (the WikiLeaks founder had difficulty with self-acceptance, he notes, diplomatically), he omits about his extensive article for the LRB on the devastating incident, relevant to the theme particularly since the subsequent controversy likely made him aware who his friends were.

A Special Connection

To some extent because of this, the standout essay here involves the late Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, who he initially encountered in London in 2009 post Seamus Heaney’s seventieth celebration. After asking her to lunch at the Wolseley in Mayfair (“Perfect … ask for the corner table, Lucian Freud’s table”), it commences a 15-year friendship during which “we relied on one another to finish ideas we couldn’t form by ourselves”, in O’Hagan’s curious phrase, glancingly elaborated on when he subsequently remembers “the gentle music we used to listen to while I assisted her with her writings”.

Insightful Glimpses

Out of all the figures referenced in the book, she is the sole individual allowed a glimpse into the author’s inner self. Throughout many of his stories, he comes across as the person who is portrayed positively – be it as a young student getting emotional over Charlotte’s Web when cruder classmates laughed, or as a hardy reveller who is nonetheless first to get up following a late party – hence interest is sparked somewhat when, apropos of nothing, O’Brien says to him (seen, uniquely, instead of watching) that she can see that he is “someone with scars who manages it flawlessly and quite convincingly”.

Concluding Thoughts

For a memoir – as this collection is – it appears to not reveal all, at the very least. Ultimately, these recollections and reflections – presented in a neat volume, eminently gift-ready – leave you wondering about the larger autobiography O’Hagan may produce, should he ever he chooses to do so.