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Through his latest publication, writer Andrew O’Hagan presents several brief pieces first produced for Radio 4. The mode involves reflection, touching on a lost early pal from the neighborhood where he grew up in the North Ayrshire of the 1970s. Furthermore, he muses over past coworkers at a literary publication, where O’Hagan made his name in the 1990s, and his adult daughter’s bygone imaginary friend.

Friendship Explored

The author reflects on why thespians, elected officials, and conservatives are poor companions, the factors behind why author Colm Tóibín makes such a good one, and the ways in which the nature of friendship is shaped by loss and digital connectivity.

“What defines a friend in the digital era? … Is it possible to trust someone you’ve never actually spoken to …?”

In his view, digital friendship has a worse impact than bereavement, a perspective that may not shock in a literary figure who likens friendship to “a series of commitments that turn in the head like old records”. He worries that people avoid visiting bars because they’re too busy shopping online.

Home Life Versus Companionship

Throughout the book, bonds empower while kin restricts. Coming of age with three brothers, O’Hagan’s household was a “realm of challenges”, a “palace of stress”, with an unloving father who on one occasion had their dog purposely removed out of town and abandoned, lost forever. At primary school, respite was found in tooling around derelict areas with Mark, a neighbour 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.”

Later, O’Hagan adjusts the idea to describe the camaraderie of a different pal “a passport to being the kind of person you dreamed of being”.

Imagery of Rebirth

Metaphors of migration and rebirth feel potent in a book filled with understood awe at the path O’Hagan has come from his youth. On one page, he’s stacking shelves as a teenager at the community grocery in Ayrshire; elsewhere, he joins a gathering for a new girlfriend at “the designer boutique on Park Avenue”. He makes no bones about his habit of mentioning famous people – partying with the rock band, whisky with Christopher Hitchens.

The Limits of Disclosure

Even though numerous events happens in these pages, he doesn’t reveal everything. O’Hagan acknowledges that bonding is rarely just a bowl of cherries, however, he is reserved, at times hesitant, concerning the negative elements: rejections, misunderstandings, fallings-out (“I am acquainted with a well-known performer who invited me to his marriage, but he didn’t even reply when I extended an invitation to my ceremony”).

The degree of openness, of sharing, only goes so far: even as there’s a brief mention of his unsuccessful effort to ghostwrite Julian Assange’s memoir (the WikiLeaks founder had difficulty with self-acceptance, says O’Hagan, carefully), he leaves out about his detailed report for the LRB on the Grenfell Tower fire, interesting in this context particularly since the resulting uproar probably underscored who stood by him.

A Notable Friendship

In part due to this, the standout essay among the pieces involves the late Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, that he first got to know in London in 2009 after leaving Seamus Heaney’s milestone event. Upon inviting her to lunch at the Wolseley in Mayfair (““Ideal … request the corner spot, once used by Lucian Freud”), it’s the beginning a long-term connection during which “we turned to each other to complete thoughts we struggled to conceive solo”, in O’Hagan’s curious phrase, briefly expanded upon when he subsequently remembers “the soft sonatas we would hear while I helped Edna with her manuscripts”.

Insightful Glimpses

Out of all the figures dropped in these pages, she stands alone as permitted an insight into his personal nature. In the majority of his tales, he appears as the one who is portrayed positively – if as a child crying about Charlotte’s Web while rougher peers mocked, or in the role of a durable celebrant who is nonetheless first to get up the morning after a big night out – hence interest is sparked a little when, apropos of nothing, O’Brien tells O’Hagan (noticed, on this occasion, instead of watching) that she perceives he’s “a wounded man who deals with it perfectly and very plausibly”.

Concluding Thoughts

For a memoir – which is what On Friendship is – it appears to leave money on the table, without a doubt. In the end, these recollections and reflections – in appealingly slimline hardback, eminently gift-ready – leave you wondering about the larger autobiography O’Hagan may produce, if and when decides to do so.