Andrew Meehan on the influence of Elizabeth Strout, the book he’s most looking forward to this year, and how love in later life is complicated.
The first book I remember reading:
I’ll swerve Enid Blyton to tell the story of the time one of my older brothers, Niall, now a designer, bought one of the old Picador editions of Difficult Loves purely on account of its beautiful cover. In this collection is a heartbreaking story called ‘The Adventure of A Married Couple’, which is about a couple who both work shifts. So, while they sleep in the same bed, it’s never at the same time. The moment where each one climbs into sheets warm from their lover’s presence gets me every time. And that interplay between longing and wistfulness informed how I approached writing about love.
A book I recommend to everyone:
I don’t think I go a day without thinking about Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. It’s a book I never let out of my sight, and my first copy of it disintegrated a very long time ago. Strout’s writing about the delight and difficulty has brought so much new life into my writing life, and I’m just very grateful for its existence. I could look at every page of my own novel and point to her influence and inspiration. There it is! There!
The best book I have read in this year:
When I’m writing I prefer the pick-me-up of poetry. I’m never that far from Norman MacCaig, whose lines – ‘I can no more describe you/ than I can put a thing for the first time/where it already is’ – were on my mind as was writing.
The book I am most looking forward to:
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, a writer whose work unspools at its own pace; taking the reader with it, slowing us down. So I’d like to imagine reading it in a slow week in late summer.
A book I didn’t finish:
I don’t think I’d like to say, but I can talk of the manuscript I abandoned work on. I’ve always admired Ivan Turgenev’s novella First Love, a coming of age tale told by a lovelorn young man who finds out that his love rival is his own father! I had the bright idea to update this to a Scottish setting, but try as I might, I just couldn’t get it to work.
An author that has inspired me:
Elizabeth Strout and Amy Bloom have done their bit, of course, but I’m also a big admirer of the American novelist Nicole Krauss. Once, at her reading at the Edinburgh Book Festival, I presented a pile of hardbacks to her for signing. They looked so well read—lived in—that she was kind enough not to pass comment.
The book I am reading now:
As part of my work at the University of Strathclyde, I’m working on an academic project called Getting On: Understanding & Writing Love In Later Life, for which I’ve been reading Three Days In June, the latest novel by Anne Tyler. It’s the story of a long-divorced couple who reunite at their daughter’s wedding. Tyler writes with such warmth and such emotional precision. Love in later life? It’s complicated!
Best Friends by Andrew Meehan is published by Muswell Press at £12.99.
Read more of The Good Books here.
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