The Guy in the Kitchen
Interview with Andrew O’Hagan published in Los Angeles Review of Books
“THE SECRET LIFE is an inadvertent autobiography,” Andrew O’Hagan told me when we met at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last summer (2017). “These are men like me, men in their 40s, men interested in the unstable border between fiction and nonfiction, yet they had taken their eradication of selfhood to an absolute extreme.”
Prior to writing his new book, O’Hagan has authored five novels — Our Fathers (1999), Personality (2003), Be Near Me (2006), The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (2010), and The Illuminations (2015) — as well as two books of nonfiction — The Missing (1995) and The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America (2008). He’s earned a BAFTA for his play, Calling Bible John (which he adapted from The Missing), and has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and has been both short-listed (Our Fathers) and long-listed (Be Near Me and The Illuminations) for the Man Booker Prize.
On this sunny afternoon in August, at the end of a long day of events, he and I had nabbed the last cushioned bench under the fainting canvas of the busy Authors’ Tent. In its convivial atmosphere of batik footstools, abandoned glasses, and disheveled newspapers — it felt like glamping crossed with my granny’s living room post–Sunday roast — we settled in for the first part of a long conversation, the rest of which took place six weeks later in October.
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act,” runs Orwell’s oft-quoted aphorism. Day after day Twitter feeds trill with disclosures about the role foreign powers and social media corporations might have played in the American presidential election and the British Brexit referendum, along with seedy revelations of abusive shenanigans by powerful men in dressing gowns. Against this disheartening backdrop of obfuscation, slant, and misogyny, the essays within The Secret Life, though previously published in the London Review of Books (LRB), read like urgent news. Only a few days earlier O’Hagan had warned an Edinburgh audience that our reality is not what it was, that the internet is not just another space, but has “become the space of all spaces, and it seems inevitable now that nations will be, in some important respect, subsumed by it.”
Once we’d found a perch for our polystyrene cups, he reiterated that writing his latest book had not felt like undertaking a clinical overview of the porous dangers of the internet, but more akin to an intimate reportage, an excavation of the self. I asked him to clarify that his fascination with what he called the “unstable border between fiction and nonfiction” did not mean he advocated “truthiness” in journalism.
“That’s an important point, maybe the most important point of all.” Completely focused despite the chattering around us, he leaned forward. “I’ve never been an advocate of crossing out the truth to glory in a rich fictional tapestry that has no bearing in reality,” he said, “but to work like a dog to get at what I believe is the truth behind the facts. A person could write a memoir of their mother’s life and a friend could write a novel, and the novel is the truer. You have to ask yourself what that means. The fictional treatment could be truer because it gets further inside the social history, the patter, the dialect. If you work in both genres, as I do, you can write nonfiction where you look at a subject from many angles, bring the craft techniques of fiction to bear on understanding, utilize a novelistic sense of penetration, of detail, of setting, of pacing, of telescoping into memory, of playing with notions of time. But, boy, you’d better get it right.”
