Speaker 1: In Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel, Our Evenings, his narrator Dave Wynn,
Speaker 1: remembers a piece of music played in his childhood by
Speaker 1: a music teacher. It's also called Our Evenings, and it
Speaker 1: is by Czech composer Leosh Yanichek. The book takes the
Speaker 1: form of a memoir as Dave reflects on a life lived,
Speaker 1: and throughout it the notion of evenings returns. He writes
Speaker 1: of evenings spent in the company of lovers, of friends,
Speaker 1: of the evening as a particular time he spent with
Speaker 1: his mother. He reflects on the fact that for an actor,
Speaker 1: the profession he's given his life to, one's evenings are
Speaker 1: rarely one's own. He thinks about a quote on the
Speaker 1: side of a sum in a garden where he spent
Speaker 1: time words from Cicero sinsim sinne censu, part of a
Speaker 1: longer phrase that loosely translates as gradually, imperceptibly we grow older.
Speaker 1: Our Evenings is Alan Hollinghurst's seventh novel. He won the
Speaker 1: book a prize back in two thousand and four for
Speaker 1: the line of Beauty. His books include The Swimming Pool Library,
Speaker 1: The Stranger's Child and the Spa Shalt Affair. He's a
Speaker 1: writer of rare grace and power, and he's very much
Speaker 1: on form with this new one. Hollinghurst fans will be thrilled,
Speaker 1: and for those of you who have never read.
Speaker 2: Him, you're welcome. What a treat you have in.
Speaker 1: Store, Unlichael Williams, And this is read This a show
Speaker 1: about the books we love and the stories behind them.
Speaker 1: I thought I might start with something I remember from
Speaker 1: when we last spoke, actually, but I've seen it pop
Speaker 1: up in a few interviews with you about this book,
Speaker 1: which is I'm going to begin at the end and
Speaker 1: at your sense of kind of fatigue and relief that
Speaker 1: it's over, and you once again banning around the terrible
Speaker 1: idea that you might not want to write another novel
Speaker 1: after this.
Speaker 3: That was my overwhelming feeling when I finished it, But
Speaker 3: I think it was with the previous two certainly. And
Speaker 3: it just gets more intense each time. Yes, it seems
Speaker 3: to be more complicated and more exhausting.
Speaker 1: How so is it less pleasurable the act of writing
Speaker 1: than it once was? Or are you loaded up with
Speaker 1: more and more expectations for yourself at this point of
Speaker 1: view career?
Speaker 3: I suppose there is that element of I want you
Speaker 3: to do something new. I think it's also something to
Speaker 3: do with getting older, and that one of the results
Speaker 3: of that for me has been writing these books which
Speaker 3: travel back over large periods of time. This one covers
Speaker 3: sixty years or more. On the previous two books even
Speaker 3: more than that. So the essential novelist question of selection
Speaker 3: becomes very intense. What out of this new book, Our
Speaker 3: Evenings is in the form of a memoir of someone
Speaker 3: looking back in his late sixties over his life. What
Speaker 3: is he going to light on? What the episode is
Speaker 3: going to be? So it was really a question of
Speaker 3: kind of the design of the book that took me
Speaker 3: the longest. Once I actually get two or three people
Speaker 3: in a row and get them talking, I'm really happy.
Speaker 2: And that's the part of writing. I love. My bigger
Speaker 2: worries were sort of structural.
Speaker 1: Is there for you a kind of discipline to working
Speaker 1: out the schematics before you dive into the people, the conversations,
Speaker 1: the terrible writers' festivals, you know, whatever it might be.
Speaker 3: I find it pretty scary to write without a plan
Speaker 3: of some sort. Yeah, So I've always been a believer
Speaker 3: in that, and I think some of my problems with
Speaker 3: this book were trying to loosen up that practice a
Speaker 3: bit and write in a more sort of spontaneous way,
Speaker 3: but actually it just got me into a lot of trouble,
Speaker 3: and unusually for me, because I'm such a slow and
Speaker 3: cautious writer, generally, I wrote a lot of material in
Speaker 3: this book which didn't make the final cut. I was
Speaker 3: chasing little narrative lines and opening up scenes and again
Speaker 3: enjoying doing that, but then having to place up to
Speaker 3: the fact that these scenes really just didn't belong in
Speaker 3: this book. So I tend to see the early part
Speaker 3: of the book pretty clearly, and I can see key
Speaker 3: episodes that are going to occur later on, and almost
Speaker 3: certainly the very end of the book, but all sorts
Speaker 3: of you know, the exciting thing is all the stuff
Speaker 3: you discover in the course of writing it.
Speaker 1: One of the products of the plan on this occasion,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, the kind of central conceit of the book,
Speaker 1: is that Dave wins recollections of his life, it's the
Speaker 1: writing of his memoir, it's his voice, and then then
Speaker 1: gives it a number of things struck that I think
Speaker 1: make for the kind of singular power of this book,
Speaker 1: one of them is about pacing, about the kind of
Speaker 1: languorous pace of ancient memory as opposed to the ever
Speaker 1: quickening speed of life as it comes to where we're living.
Speaker 1: It was that pace always embedded in the idea that
Speaker 1: you would luxuriate in thirteen year old Dave in a
Speaker 1: way that you couldn't afford to let yourself luxury ad
Speaker 1: in sixty year old Dave.
Speaker 3: That was part of the idea. Yes, I mean, the
Speaker 3: book's in two almost equal halves, and the first half
Speaker 3: is all about his education, really, and so I saw
Speaker 3: it as the time of rich As he says himself
Speaker 3: at some point conveniently at his age, all sorts of
Speaker 3: episodes from his past come back to him with amazing,
Speaker 3: unexpected fullness, whereas it's quite hard to remember what he
Speaker 3: did three weeks ago. I think all of us, as
Speaker 3: we get older, have that experience of time speeding up
Speaker 3: in a terrifying way. So the first half of the
Speaker 3: book it moves pretty slowly, and I hope that it
Speaker 3: conveyed a sense of what it's like for a young
Speaker 3: person who is contained within the structures of education and
Speaker 3: life is divided into terms and school years and university
Speaker 3: terms and so, and of course this young person is
Speaker 3: growing inside and outside of changing it all kinds of ways,
Speaker 3: but everything seems to take a lot longer. The sense
Speaker 3: of time is much more sort of extensive somehow when
Speaker 3: you're when you're young and the books that comes to
Speaker 3: big crisis in his life at the end of the
Speaker 3: first half, and then we rejoin him a year or
Speaker 3: two later in the second half, and he is.
Speaker 2: Sort of cut loose from this.
Speaker 3: This reassuring structure, so I hope that they have The
Speaker 3: time scheme slightly disconcerts the reader, as in life you
Speaker 3: just don't know where you're getting once you've left the
Speaker 3: educational system.
Speaker 1: It does disconcert, but it also, I mean, there's such
Speaker 1: a beautiful kind of inexorable quality to it. That's sense
Speaker 1: that you are privy to a life but also privy
Speaker 1: to the act of remembering.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: One of the great surprises and delights in this book
Speaker 1: is at all times you play fair with the reader,
Speaker 1: but you don't always give them everything they need to
Speaker 1: know at any given time.
Speaker 2: That's absolutely right.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's an interesting aspect of writing in the first person.
Speaker 3: Of course, it's a different sort of mischief that a
Speaker 3: third person narrator is doing a fears withholding things, but
Speaker 3: the memoirrist can tell you what he wants to hold
Speaker 3: what he wants, And the way that the writing of
Speaker 3: writing in the first person is an admission of the
Speaker 3: limits on your knowledge. A third person narrator is assumed
Speaker 3: to know everything about its character. Actually, I was very
Speaker 3: pleased to think that I didn't know everything about Dave
Speaker 3: and he didn't know everything about himself.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I was going to say, it's by
Speaker 1: my reckoning, it must be thirty years since you last
Speaker 1: wrote a book entirely in the first person.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: I'm curious. I remember reading you're talking about how liberating
Speaker 1: the third person had been, how much you suddenly were
Speaker 1: able to stretch, and you're able to do things and
Speaker 1: have asides and be wry and not be as credulous
Speaker 1: as your narrator, and all of that stuff to plan.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious about the homecoming to the first person.
Speaker 1: As you say, from what I understand, part of it
Speaker 1: is about recognizing the limits of how much you can
Speaker 1: get into Dave's head.
Speaker 3: That is it, Bartley, Yes, And I think it was
Speaker 3: integral to the whole question of writing for the point
Speaker 3: of view of a mixed race narrator. I'd wanted for
Speaker 3: some time to sort of try and write something from
Speaker 3: a different racial point of view. Again, I felt if
Speaker 3: I was going to do that in the third person,
Speaker 3: it would introduce all sorts of awkwardnesses of me apparently
Speaker 3: knowing all about this person who is like me in
Speaker 3: some respects but has very crucial difference of big half
Speaker 3: Burmese and so being you know, something of an anomalous
Speaker 3: figure in many of the worlds that he moves through.
Speaker 3: So I liked the merely partial knowledge, the modesty if
Speaker 3: you like, of writing it for the inside, which it
Speaker 3: seems slightly paradoxical in a way, but it seemed to
Speaker 3: be the more tactful and in the end more interesting
Speaker 3: way of doing it.
Speaker 1: That paradox and that that tact. I love the idea
Speaker 1: of it as an act of tact, like you're giving
Speaker 1: him his space as he requires it. But it does
Speaker 1: seem fascinating to me that for many years, and I
Speaker 1: think you're a writer who's long written very well and
Speaker 1: very interestingly about race, but that desire to write from
Speaker 1: the perspective of a protagonist with a different racial makeup
Speaker 1: to your own. I love that you held off on
Speaker 1: that until the moment when it was the most culturally
Speaker 1: charged it could be and the most fraud exercise. That
Speaker 1: seems like a singular brand of masochism.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, it became much more fraut during the years
Speaker 3: when I was planning and actually writing the book, and
Speaker 3: I was very exercised about all that.
Speaker 2: Of course.
Speaker 3: I mean my position has always been that it's part
Speaker 3: of the point of bigger being an immerginative writers that
Speaker 3: you can pursue any viewpoint you like, But of course
Speaker 3: everything depends on how it's done in practice. But I
Speaker 3: felt potentially vulnerable on the question, and I think that's
Speaker 3: why I settled partly on the mixed race thing, so
Speaker 3: that will be this sort of element of someone who
Speaker 3: is more or less like me, maybe more or less
Speaker 3: through the time that I'd lived. And also choosing this
Speaker 3: actually very unusual combination of the Dave who has a
Speaker 3: white English brother and a Burmese father whom he never knows,
Speaker 3: and the Burmese culture is a very remote one which
Speaker 3: hasn't left much of an imprint in British life. Since
Speaker 3: it would have been a very different matter to write
Speaker 3: side from the point of view of a sort of
Speaker 3: second generation Jamaican immigrant something of that kind, you know,
Speaker 3: who have a large cultural presence in Britain and a
Speaker 3: literature of their own and everything.
Speaker 2: But Burber was much much more marginal.
Speaker 3: But also has its kind of intrinsic interest because it's
Speaker 3: the end of the colonial period and Dave's mother met
Speaker 3: his father when she was working in Roungoon for the
Speaker 3: British governor just before the Burmese independence in nineteen forty seven,
Speaker 3: So it has those little resonances. But Dave, of course,
Speaker 3: he's very, very remote, and he never actually goes to Burma.
Speaker 1: And part of that colonial story is one of silences.
Speaker 1: Dave's mother, for a range of reasons of her own
Speaker 1: and otherwise, is not exactly forthcoming with stories about his father.
Speaker 1: And so while Dave has a kind of visual signifier
Speaker 1: of difference, while he's a man of color in a
Speaker 1: part of Britain where it's relentlessly white, beyond that, you know,
Speaker 1: what's inside is very much a product of his mother's upbringing.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's absolutely right. Yes, Now, the only family that
Speaker 3: we get to see his horrible uncle, his mother's.
Speaker 1: Brother uncle is a proper shit.
Speaker 2: He is a real shites.
Speaker 3: And you know Dave's mother has, of course her own
Speaker 3: had quite interesting life in the book. She's a courageous person.
Speaker 3: She's done this courageous thing of going off to the
Speaker 3: other side of the world explained whim to get away.
Speaker 3: She returns to England pregnant, so she gives birth as
Speaker 3: a single mother to a brown faced child in this
Speaker 3: extremely conventional Berkshire country market town. So she's a person
Speaker 3: who's having to deal with all kinds of social stigma
Speaker 3: and potential ostracism and so forth. And Dave himself, therefore
Speaker 3: is brought up in this peculiar sort of world marshal acceptance.
Speaker 2: Averill the mother, she.
Speaker 3: Becomes a dressmaker, and this also gives her this strangely
Speaker 3: intimate kind of access to various women in the town
Speaker 3: for whom she's making clothes. Actually that springs a whole
Speaker 3: new development in her life.
Speaker 1: Averil is one of my favorite characters. I think in
Speaker 1: any of your books. Story is her story is magnificent,
Speaker 1: and her relationship with Dave is so beautiful and so
Speaker 1: lovingly observed, And I don't want to give away the
Speaker 1: many singular pleasures in the book, but suffice it to
Speaker 1: say that she forms with Dave this kind of unlikely
Speaker 1: queer family in the time and place where they're coming together.
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean it's probably not too much of a spoiler,
Speaker 3: as it's.
Speaker 1: Octa, I think it's worth it.
Speaker 3: Yes, that one of her customers, a rather rather overwhelming
Speaker 3: woman called Leslie Croft, a rich divorce takes. Dave finds
Speaker 3: he's gone off to boarding school, so he doesn't have
Speaker 3: his his evenings with his mother any longt and she's
Speaker 3: left alone and is obviously rather lonely, and he finds
Speaker 3: that in his absence, she's seeing more and more of
Speaker 3: this other woman, and slowly, without anything, as he was saying,
Speaker 3: she was not one for spelling things out. All that's
Speaker 3: slowly this completely new situation establishes itself. Yes, I like
Speaker 3: the idea, as you say, of this little alternative queer family.
Speaker 3: At the end of the first half of what would
Speaker 3: all sorts of things have gone wrong, they all eventually
Speaker 3: sort of come out to each other.
Speaker 1: Would I be right in saying that's the first coming
Speaker 1: out scene in one of your books. I was trying
Speaker 1: to I was skipping back through and I couldn't remember
Speaker 1: another coming out scene. And you know, for a writer
Speaker 1: who is I think rightly heralded as one of the
Speaker 1: great writers of the gay experience of the twentieth and
Speaker 1: twenty first century, you know, one of the absolute masters.
Speaker 1: Truck me that the coming out story is not one
Speaker 1: that you've returned too much.
Speaker 3: I've never done it at all before. No, I think
Speaker 3: it was just that thing of starting or presumption that
Speaker 3: one was at you know, it just it just didn't feature.
Speaker 3: So yes, I wrote, I sort of shyly, and eventually
Speaker 3: myself got around to have anyone. There is this this
Speaker 3: big atmosphere of the unspoken between David and his mother,
Speaker 3: as we were saying, but it does mean that for
Speaker 3: the horrible, the horrible uncle that Ape seems to have,
Speaker 3: you know, let the family down badly twice, not only
Speaker 3: in big a single brother of a brown faced child,
Speaker 3: but also being a lusbian. So they are officially excommunicated
Speaker 3: from from the horrible family and very happily formed their
Speaker 3: own little family.
Speaker 1: When we return, Ellen reveals why he didn't want to
Speaker 1: write a Brexit novel, but why this might be the
Speaker 1: closest he comes to writing his own memoir. We'll be
Speaker 1: right back it strikes me, not just on the character
Speaker 1: of the uncle, but you know, in particular Giles, but
Speaker 1: other figures in this book. It strikes me reading through
Speaker 1: your Evra. One of the things I know about you
Speaker 1: is Allan Hollinghurst is a man who despises a bully.
Speaker 1: That a bully might be your most loathed character.
Speaker 3: Is that fair? I just running back over earlier things. Yes,
Speaker 3: I do hate bully. God knows we've got cause enough
Speaker 3: to hate. Yes, Dave's quite call him as never says,
Speaker 3: But his sort of polar opposite for the beauty of
Speaker 3: the book is Giles Hadlow. He wins a scholarship to
Speaker 3: this little public school, boarding school, a scholarship which is
Speaker 3: given by a family called had Those Giles is their son,
Speaker 3: considerably less clever than than Dave. And yes, a bully,
Speaker 3: someone who very much resents and despises Dave. Yes, so
Speaker 3: it's not the kind of intimate picture of a bully,
Speaker 3: but it's in need. There's something I think unsolvably mysterious
Speaker 3: about why he's a bully. You know, he's born to wealth,
Speaker 3: he has charming, delightful, generous parents, but he just rebels
Speaker 3: from very early on against all that in a sort
Speaker 3: of stubborn and inflexible way, and we never really get
Speaker 3: a glimpse of Giles's in their life. You know, He's
Speaker 3: just this kind of obstacle which keeps cropping up in
Speaker 3: Dave's path, and he forgets about it for years on end,
Speaker 3: and then at some crucial moment he will pop up again,
Speaker 3: and in the latter part of the book it becomes
Speaker 3: a very right wing Euroskeptic Tory MP who's very instrumental
Speaker 3: in the disastrous Brexit vote and so forth. So in
Speaker 3: a sense, Giles actually wins. That's the Yeah, that's the
Speaker 3: annoying thing.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately. I think if the world's teaching us anything, it's that,
Speaker 1: of course, Giles wins. Giles wins again and again and again. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: but perhaps wins without being able to penetrate the kind
Speaker 1: of the relationships of love or integrity or you know.
Speaker 1: Giles is, in the context of the book, largely, as
Speaker 1: you say, an obstacle, but also irrelevant to the life
Speaker 1: that Dave builds for himself, and that seems kind of important.
Speaker 2: I think that's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the book is really, of course all about
Speaker 3: Dave's in a life and his understanding of life and
Speaker 3: not not about Giles's. Dave becomes an actor, and clearly
Speaker 3: quite a good one, though he can't reach his full
Speaker 3: potential in his earlier adult life because of his skin color,
Speaker 3: so his travels around with Round Shackle Alternative Theater Company.
Speaker 1: Quite a good actor, but also very keen just to
Speaker 1: get his kit off whenever it gets a chance. You know,
Speaker 1: that seems to be a motivating factor.
Speaker 3: Well, the company that he joins is which gets a
Speaker 3: certain amount of schedualous attention bout having a good deal
Speaker 3: of nudity in it, and it's I had quite a
Speaker 3: lot of fun with that little tactic company.
Speaker 1: I mean it is crucial that of having written so
Speaker 1: well about literature and about visual arts and fine arts,
Speaker 1: it makes sense that this time around the art in
Speaker 1: question had to be about performance. It had to be
Speaker 1: about artiverse, and it had to be about how you
Speaker 1: present in the world, both as a creative act but
Speaker 1: also as an active survival.
Speaker 3: Yes, I think that's absolutely right. I didn't want to
Speaker 3: write another book about it, writer, but it seems to be.
Speaker 3: It will be quite interesting meeting Dave as a young
Speaker 3: teenager adapting to a new media. He discovers he has
Speaker 3: this gift her mimicry, and he's clever, and he can
Speaker 3: learn complicated speeches and so forth. And I saw acting
Speaker 3: as being a way that he adapts to his environment,
Speaker 3: that he's becomes different things for different purposes and different situations,
Speaker 3: and something before which he has a real, real gift,
Speaker 3: which will sort of be his way of escaping, I suppose,
Speaker 3: from the world which he had seemed to confine him
Speaker 3: in the first half of the book.
Speaker 1: You mentioned Brixit, and I think you know it's one
Speaker 1: element of this novel. I know that you are very
Speaker 1: keen not to write a Brixit novel, so I'm not
Speaker 1: going to insult you by saying that you have. But
Speaker 1: it seems to me that in the context of this book,
Speaker 1: which is so much about memory, about nostalgia, about acceptance,
Speaker 1: and about ideas of what the country you live in is,
Speaker 1: all of that feeds very powerfully, I think, into a
Speaker 1: kind of backdrop to a Britain that ultimately decides at
Speaker 1: once to leave Europe. Was that always in the kind
Speaker 1: of DNA of this book, or was that something that
Speaker 1: became clearer as it took shape and as the arc
Speaker 1: of Dave's life became clear.
Speaker 3: No, it was very much from the start actually, and
Speaker 3: as you said, I really didn't want to write something
Speaker 3: which grindingly went through all the stages of brexit chronological
Speaker 3: arc of the book the early nineteen sixties, when Britain
Speaker 3: was making its first attempts to join the EU, to
Speaker 3: the end of the book just after the disastrous referendum
Speaker 3: result in twenty sixteen. So that gave it a sort
Speaker 3: of temporal framework, if you like. But I'm pleased to
Speaker 3: what you say about those larger ideas about country belonging, landscape.
Speaker 2: And so forth.
Speaker 3: They were very much part of my design from the beginning,
Speaker 3: and I hoped that yes, they would take on a
Speaker 3: certain weight and resonance and interest through the book without
Speaker 3: it being sort of a labored political analysis of what
Speaker 3: was going on intell youroskeptic thought and so forth. Some
Speaker 3: reviewers have indignant Brexiteers have said, having done justice to
Speaker 3: the full range, and they were a history of auroskeptic
Speaker 3: thought on the right, and that's so much not my intention.
Speaker 1: Are you incredibly sad not to have a positive Good
Speaker 1: Reads review from Nigel Farage?
Speaker 2: What a loss?
Speaker 1: What a burden that must be on you? I hope
Speaker 1: you can sleep at that. How much in the space
Speaker 1: of your seven books, in the space of your career,
Speaker 1: do you feel the environment for writing queer characters and
Speaker 1: queer love stories, how much is changed that Millieau?
Speaker 3: Oh gosh, well, it has changed enormously, as hardly anybody
Speaker 3: was doing it really when I started out. I think
Speaker 3: there was a great appetite for it then, and I
Speaker 3: think that appetite has persisted. But of course the subject
Speaker 3: itself has changed and developed, starting with what happened actually
Speaker 3: whilst I was writing that first book, which was the
Speaker 3: eruption of the AIDS crisis, which transformed the landscape and
Speaker 3: generated its own literature. As you know, I've tended to
Speaker 3: like looking back and dropping in on episodes in the
Speaker 3: past in British gay history, but always had I've always
Speaker 3: had a sort of present day element of that present
Speaker 3: day is constantly moving forward. The gay novel as a
Speaker 3: sort of genre, which was sort of really blossoming through
Speaker 3: the eighties and nineties, now seems to be a slightly
Speaker 3: sort of historic thing and born out to a particular
Speaker 3: time of emergency and novelty political moment. The political questions
Speaker 3: now have probably changed and the sense of sexuality is
Speaker 3: now much more complex. People are interested in exploring sexuality
Speaker 3: rather than defining it. I feel so it feels to
Speaker 3: me a much more borderless sort of subject.
Speaker 1: Is that exciting as a novelist?
Speaker 2: I think it is.
Speaker 1: Yes, Your mother, if I understand correctly, died before you
Speaker 1: started writing this book.
Speaker 2: Yes, she did.
Speaker 3: She died when I was just in the last phases
Speaker 3: of writing the previous one.
Speaker 2: Yes, in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: The book is dedicated to her.
Speaker 2: I believe it is.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yeah, it again not to I certainly don't want
Speaker 1: to spoil something which is deliciously ambiguous and has multiple
Speaker 1: meanings when it comes to the possessive pronoun in the title.
Speaker 1: But the evenings in question of note ah, those shed
Speaker 1: between Dave and his mother really aren't they.
Speaker 3: They are the sort of primary meaning I suppose, yes,
Speaker 3: And I love the phrase because it's so. It proves
Speaker 3: quite elastic and recurs at various points throughout the narrative
Speaker 3: and the different shades of meaning. But yes, I think
Speaker 3: that they are fundamentally Yes, that that secure home relationship
Speaker 3: between the boy and this mother.
Speaker 1: Part of what you reflect on is the ways in
Speaker 1: which the loss of a parent has this kind of unmooring,
Speaker 1: ungrounding effect that to be to be an outsider, to
Speaker 1: be someone who's struggling to work out a question and belonging,
Speaker 1: as is the case for so many of your characters.
Speaker 1: But you know, Dave I embodies are not just at
Speaker 1: a level of his sexuality, of his class, but also
Speaker 1: of his race, the loss of a parent being an
Speaker 1: ultimate act and a loss of place as well.
Speaker 3: Yes, that was something which very much struck me personally
Speaker 3: after my mother died. I was an only child. We'd
Speaker 3: lived in Loocestershire for most of my life. That had
Speaker 3: been my sort of home landscape, and it was to
Speaker 3: me a kind of unanticipated dimension of bereavement that I
Speaker 3: lost not only my mother, who was ninety seven and
Speaker 3: had had a good, long life, but I also lost
Speaker 3: something enormous which was geographical, but with it something larger
Speaker 3: and more indescribable about the sense of place and belonging somewhere.
Speaker 3: And when I sold her house and sort of drove
Speaker 3: back to London for the last time, I just just
Speaker 3: had this whole sense of the landscape of my earlier
Speaker 3: life being closed off to me. Obviously, I could jump
Speaker 3: in the car again and go back there today if
Speaker 3: I wanted to. But that's not quite the point. It
Speaker 3: was a much larger sort of sense of dispossession, if
Speaker 3: you like, from my earlier life.
Speaker 1: I'm curious about whether you have ever contemplied in writing
Speaker 1: memoir yourself, whether you keep a diary, whether you know,
Speaker 1: whether you honest childhood memories for the process of writing
Speaker 1: this book, or whether that's a very separate part of
Speaker 1: your brain and your process.
Speaker 3: I think this is as close to memoir as I'm
Speaker 3: likely to get. Really, I did in writing this book.
Speaker 3: I did find areas of my own adolescence in particular
Speaker 3: time at Oxford suddenly opening up, And so there was
Speaker 3: a big infusion of memoir, not in so much precise
Speaker 3: narrative of detail, but in the kind of vacation of
Speaker 3: a world, in the state of mind that I was
Speaker 3: in at a particular time. I think I've always felt
Speaker 3: a slight problem in writing anything non fictional in the
Speaker 3: first person. I'm just not very good at it. It
Speaker 3: sounds pretentious, but not quite knowing who I am or
Speaker 3: what the persona is that I'm putting before the public.
Speaker 3: And if I make a joke, will they understand it
Speaker 3: or will they think I'm, you know, just being a twap.
Speaker 2: So in a way, the.
Speaker 3: Mask of the fictional character is for me that the
Speaker 3: closest I think that I can can get to it.
Speaker 3: And it's a way of talking about personal things without
Speaker 3: actually sort of directly presenting myself to the public.
Speaker 1: Alan Hollinghurst's beautiful seventh novel, Our Evenings, is available at
Speaker 1: all good bookstores. Now before we go, I wanted to
Speaker 1: tell you what I've been reading this week, and one
Speaker 1: of my great traits is always to reading new Michelle
Speaker 1: Dee creates a book and her latest Theory and Practice,
Speaker 1: is no exception. I'm actually going to talk to her
Speaker 1: about it early next year. She will be the first
Speaker 1: read this guest to get a repeat visit. Last time
Speaker 1: she was on, she's talking about her love of Shirley Hazard,
Speaker 1: and we're going to have her on in the show
Speaker 1: early in the new year to talk about Theory and Practice.
Speaker 1: A book that is part essay, part memoir maybe, but
Speaker 1: all fiction. It's wonderful. You can find it and all
Speaker 1: the others were mentioned today at your favorite in the
Speaker 1: ben and bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If
Speaker 1: you enjoyed it, Please tell your friends and rate and
Speaker 1: review us. It helps a lot. And next week I'm
Speaker 1: read this no grab to play because we're heading back
Speaker 1: to Fitzropaul to see what people are reading on a hot,
Speaker 1: hot summer's day. The forecast is over forty degrees and
Speaker 1: I look forward to being very awkward asking people if
Speaker 1: they want to be on a podcast. Read this as
Speaker 1: a Schwartz Media production, made possible by the generous support
Speaker 1: of AR Group. The show's produced and edited by Clara Ames,
Speaker 1: with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zolman Fetcher.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, See you next week.