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Through his recent book, writer Andrew O’Hagan offers several concise writings first produced for a radio program. The approach involves reminiscence, touching on a vanished youth companion from the housing project where he grew up in 1970s North Ayrshire. Furthermore, he reflects on former colleagues at a literary publication, in which O’Hagan built his reputation in the 1990s, as well as his adult daughter’s bygone make-believe companion.

Examining Friendship

He examines why thespians, elected officials, and Republicans prove unreliable as pals, why author Colm Tóibín is an excellent friend, and how the nature of friendship is molded by loss and online life.

“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 proves more harmful than the former, an opinion that could be expected in a literary figure who equates friendship to “a series of commitments that turn in the head like vinyl discs”. He worries that folks avoid visiting bars because they’re too busy browsing e-commerce.

Home Life Versus Companionship

In these pages, bonds empower where family constricts. Being raised with a trio of siblings, O’Hagan’s household was a “place of hardships”, a “domain of anxiety”, including a cold paternal figure who once arranged for their pet purposely removed out of town and freed, gone for good. During his early education, respite was found in tooling around 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 revises the formula to label another friend’s fellowship “a ticket to becoming the kind of person you wanted to be”.

Symbols of Change

Images of journey and transformation seem powerful within the text suffused with subtle amazement at the path O’Hagan has travelled from childhood. On one page, he works as a stocker as a teenager at his local Tesco in Ayrshire; in another passage, he attends a celebration for a new girlfriend at “the Donna Karan store on Park Avenue”. He makes no bones about his habit of mentioning famous people – going out with musicians, whisky with Christopher Hitchens.

The Limits of Disclosure

Even though numerous events happens in these pages, he doesn’t reveal everything. O’Hagan understands that companionship is seldom simply a smooth path, yet he’s discreet, sometimes evasive, about the subject’s shadow side: snubs, confusions, fallings-out (“A celebrity actor I know who asked me to attend his nuptials, but he failed to respond when I invited him to mine”).

The extent of revelation, of sharing, has its limits: even as he briefly notes of his aborted attempt to co-write Julian Assange’s memoir (the WikiLeaks founder found it hard to accept himself, according to the author, diplomatically), he leaves out about his detailed report for the LRB on the Grenfell Tower fire, notable here particularly since the subsequent controversy likely made him aware 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 milestone event. After asking her to lunch at a renowned restaurant in Mayfair (““Excellent … seek out the corner seating, favored by the artist”), it’s the beginning a long-term connection during which “we turned to each other to complete thoughts we were unable to have alone”, as he uniquely puts it, glancingly elaborated on when he later recalls “the gentle music we would hear while I assisted her with her writings”.

Insightful Glimpses

Of the various names referenced in the book, she is the sole individual allowed a glimpse into his personal nature. Throughout many of his stories, he comes across as the person who emerges favorably – if as a child crying about Charlotte’s Web while rougher peers mocked, or like a resilient partygoer who is nevertheless first to get up following a late party – thus attention is grabbed somewhat when, without context, O’Brien says to him (seen, uniquely, instead of watching) that she recognizes that he is “someone with scars who manages it flawlessly and quite convincingly”.

Last Musings

For a memoir – which is what On Friendship is – that would seem to leave money on the table, at the very least. In the end, these recollections and reflections – in appealingly slimline hardback, perfect as a present – make you curious regarding a fuller life story O’Hagan may produce, should he ever decides to do so.