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Within his recent work, writer Andrew O’Hagan offers eight short pieces first recorded for a radio program. The style is one of reflection, exploring a lost youth companion from the neighborhood where he came of age in 1970s North Ayrshire. Additionally, he recalls former colleagues at a literary publication, at which O’Hagan rose to prominence in the last decade of the 20th century, and his adult daughter’s former fictional playmate.

Examining Friendship

O’Hagan considers why actors, government figures, and conservatives prove unreliable as pals, the factors behind why writer Colm Tóibín makes such a good one, and how the practice of friendship is molded by bereavement and the internet.

“With the rise of the internet, how do we define friendship? … Can you rely on a person whose voice remains unheard …?”

For O’Hagan, digital friendship proves more harmful than the former, which maybe isn’t surprising for a writer who compares friendship to “a set of loyalties that revolve mentally like vinyl discs”. He fears that individuals no longer go to pubs because they’re preoccupied shopping online.

Family vs. Friendship

In his essays, friendship liberates where kin restricts. Being raised with multiple brothers, O’Hagan’s home was a “place of hardships”, a “fortress of tension”, featuring a distant dad who on one occasion had their dog intentionally taken away out of town and freed, never to be seen again. In grade school, relief was found in wandering wastelands with Mark, a local boy of similar age.

“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 reframes the concept to label another friend’s fellowship “an entry into the kind of person you aspired to be”.

Symbols of Change

Symbols of movement and renewal seem powerful within the text filled with implicit wonder at the distance O’Hagan has travelled from his youth. On one page, he arranges products in his youth at a nearby supermarket in Ayrshire; in another passage, he’s at a party for a fresh love interest at “the high-end shop on Park Avenue”. He is open about being an inveterate name-dropper – clubbing with the Stone Roses, whisky with Christopher Hitchens.

Boundaries in Sharing

Although numerous events unfolds in the essays, he doesn’t reveal everything. O’Hagan acknowledges that bonding is not merely an easy ride, however, he is reserved, sometimes evasive, concerning the negative elements: slights, confusions, rifts (“I am acquainted with a well-known performer who invited me to his marriage, but he ignored my invitation when I extended an invitation to my ceremony”).

The level of access, of disclosure, is somewhat restricted: although there’s a brief mention of his failed try to pen Julian Assange’s memoir (the WikiLeaks founder struggled “to befriend himself”, says O’Hagan, tactfully), there’s nothing about his extensive article for the LRB on the Grenfell Tower fire, relevant to the theme if only because the subsequent controversy probably underscored who stood by him.

A Special Connection

In part due to this, the most intriguing item among the pieces focuses on the late Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, whom he first met in London in 2009 after leaving Seamus Heaney’s 70th birthday party. After asking her to lunch at the Wolseley in Mayfair (““Ideal … request the corner spot, once used by Lucian Freud”), it’s the beginning a decade-and-a-half bond during which “we turned to each other to develop concepts we struggled to conceive solo”, in his distinctive wording, glancingly elaborated on when he subsequently remembers “the gentle music we would hear while I assisted her with her writings”.

Insightful Glimpses

Out of all the figures referenced in the book, she is the sole individual allowed a glimpse into the author’s inner self. In the majority of his tales, he comes across as the person who comes out best – whether as a schoolboy crying about Charlotte’s Web while rougher peers mocked, or like a resilient partygoer who is nevertheless earliest to rise the next day a big night out – hence interest is sparked a little when, without context, O’Brien informs the author (seen, uniquely, rather than observing) that she recognizes he’s “a wounded man who handles it very impeccably and very plausibly”.

Final Reflections

For a memoir – which is what On Friendship is – it appears to hold back, at the very least. Finally, these recollections and reflections – presented in a neat volume, eminently gift-ready – leave you wondering about the larger autobiography O’Hagan may produce, if and when opts to do so.