Andrew O’Hagan: The Book That…
With his new novel (narrated by Marilyn Monroe’s dog) making quite a splash, we find out what books have made a lasting impression on Andrew O’Hagan.
I first loved…
I loved all those Enid Blyton books. Toasted teacakes and lashings and lashings of ginger beer: it just seemed so exotic from the perspective of 1970s Scotland. I later switched to Wuthering Heights. That seemed closer to home, all that brooding, menacing weather and bad temper.
I keep by my bedside…
At the moment, War and Peace. Either I will finish it or it will finish me. I’ve also got every one of E.M. Forster’s novels and all the poems of Seamus Heaney. I move between them, depending how optimistic I’m feeling about human nature.
I want to read next is…
I want to read every book of Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray. I’m on a mission. I’ve got a hunch about the design of those books and I want to test-drive it. Also, having just published a book I want to get lost in someone else’s imagined worlds.
I loved as a child…
I really loved the books of Truman Capote. They seemed so gracious and funny. When I was writing my latest novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, I kept coming back, in my head, to those breezy, thoughtful, lovely books, and thinking how much I wanted my own book to have that breeze.
Kept me awake at night…
Recently, I read Bill Clegg’s Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man in one night. I couldn’t sleep because of it. And I’m the world’s most talented sleeper. Non-fiction does that much more to me than fiction. If fiction is any good, it causes a kind of rhythmic dream-like state to occur in me, which is why I haven’t finished War and Peace. I fall asleep holding it.
Made me laugh…
John Lanchester’s wonderful assessment of the financial crisis, Whoops! made me laugh. He’s such a good writer he could make the life of a mayfly deeply involving to read about. But funny, man. I also snort like a pig every time I read a paragraph by David Sedaris.
Made me cry…
Almost everything makes my cry. All Irish novels. All Scottish poems. Anything involving a child. Howards End makes me cry.
Changed my life…
Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself. A revelation, just seeing how far a writer could go in using himself and his experience in his work.
I will read to my children…
The poems of Robert Burns. The novels of Stevenson. The beautiful animal books of E.B. White.
I would read on a beach / on holiday
War and Peace. Also, D.B.C. Pierre’s new novel, which is bound to sing.
I would read at Christmas
Some fat old memoir about the glory days of Hollywood. Some people think I only read them because I was writing about Marilyn Monroe, but, in fact, I love reading them anyway. I think I’m really a person from the 1940s. I believe in that old-fashioned kind of glamour, women wearing lipstick, men wearing ties. And I love old movies and the invitation to invent yourself that you find in those Hollywood memoirs. That’s why I wrote Maf the Dog: because I knew how to, and have heard that fictional voice forever.
