🔗 Share this article

Through his latest book, novelist Andrew O’Hagan offers eight short pieces originally recorded for Radio 4. The approach centers on reminiscence, touching on a forgotten childhood friend from the housing project where he grew up in 1970s North Ayrshire. Additionally, he muses over past coworkers at a literary publication, where O’Hagan built his reputation in the 1990s, along with his grown daughter’s past imaginary friend.

Friendship Explored

O’Hagan considers why actors, government figures, and members of the GOP make bad friends, how come the novelist Colm Tóibín makes such a good one, and in what manner the experience of friendship is influenced by grief and online life.

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

For O’Hagan, digital friendship has a worse impact than the former, a perspective that may not shock for a writer who equates friendship to “a collection of devotions that revolve mentally like old records”. He fears that folks skip the local pub because they’re occupied making digital purchases.

Home Life Versus Companionship

In his essays, bonds empower where kin restricts. Growing up with three brothers, O’Hagan’s household was a “zone of adversities”, a “fortress of tension”, with an unloving father who on one occasion caused their canine intentionally taken away out of town and set loose, never to be seen again. At primary school, respite lay in wandering empty lots with Mark, a local boy around his years.

“A great friend can summon a new world order, and, best of all, the beginnings perhaps of a new person for you to be, tugged from the constraints of home.”

In time, O’Hagan adjusts the idea to call another friend’s fellowship “an entry into the kind of person you dreamed of being”.

Metaphors of Transformation

Metaphors of migration and rebirth seem powerful throughout the work imbued with understood awe at the journey O’Hagan has travelled from childhood. On one page, he’s stacking shelves as a teenager at the community grocery in Ayrshire; on another, he joins a gathering for a recent romantic partner at “the Donna Karan store on Park Avenue”. He freely admits being an inveterate name-dropper – partying with the rock band, enjoying spirits with the journalist.

Restrained Revelations

Although many experiences happens in these pages, it’s no tell-all. O’Hagan acknowledges that friendship is seldom simply a smooth path, yet he’s discreet, even coy, regarding the darker aspects: rejections, confusions, rifts (“A celebrity actor I know who wanted me at his wedding, but he failed to respond when I extended an invitation to my ceremony”).

The degree of openness, of candor, only goes so far: even as he makes a passing reference of his unsuccessful effort to pen Julian Assange’s memoir (the WikiLeaks founder found it hard to accept himself, says O’Hagan, tactfully), he omits about his extensive article for the LRB on the Grenfell Tower fire, interesting in this context mainly as the resulting uproar must have reminded him who his friends were.

A Special Connection

Partly for these reasons, the standout essay in the book focuses on the deceased author from Ireland Edna O’Brien, whom he first met in London in 2009 post Seamus Heaney’s milestone event. When he invites her to lunch at the Wolseley in Mayfair (““Excellent … seek out the corner seating, favored by the artist”), it commences a decade-and-a-half bond during which “we called upon each other to complete thoughts we were unable to have alone”, in O’Hagan’s curious phrase, glancingly elaborated on when he later recalls “the gentle music we often enjoyed while I supported her editorial work”.

Personal Disclosures

Out of all the figures dropped in these pages, she is the sole individual granted access into the author’s inner self. Throughout many of his stories, he’s the guy who emerges favorably – if as a child crying about Charlotte’s Web as less sensitive kids jeered, or in the role of a durable celebrant who is nevertheless first to get up the morning after a big night out – so your ears prick up slightly when, out of the blue, O’Brien tells O’Hagan (noticed, on this occasion, instead of watching) that she recognizes that he is “someone with scars who manages it flawlessly and quite convincingly”.

Final Reflections

In a work of reminiscence – which is what On Friendship is – it appears to leave money on the table, without a doubt. Finally, these recollections and reflections – in an attractively compact format, eminently gift-ready – make you curious concerning a more comprehensive memoir O’Hagan may produce, should he ever decides to do so.