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In his newest book, author Andrew O’Hagan offers a series of eight short pieces first recorded for a broadcast series. The style centers on memory, covering a vanished childhood friend from the neighborhood where he was raised in 1970s Scotland. Additionally, he reflects on former colleagues at a well-known journal, where O’Hagan built his reputation in the last decade of the 20th century, and his adult daughter’s former fictional playmate.

Understanding Bonds

O’Hagan considers the reasons performers, elected officials, and members of the GOP are poor companions, why the novelist Colm Tóibín makes such a good one, and how the experience of friendship is molded by loss 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 …?”

According to the author, online interaction proves more harmful than bereavement, a perspective that may not shock from an author who compares friendship to “a collection of devotions that spin in the mind like vinyl discs”. He expresses concern that individuals skip the local pub because they’re preoccupied browsing e-commerce.

Home Life Versus Companionship

In these pages, friendship liberates whereas relatives limit. Growing up with a trio of siblings, O’Hagan’s family environment was a “zone of adversities”, a “fortress of tension”, with an unloving father who once arranged for their pet purposely removed out of town and set loose, gone for good. In grade school, respite came from wandering empty lots with Mark, a neighbour 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 call the camaraderie of a different pal “a passport to being the kind of person you dreamed of being”.

Metaphors of Transformation

Symbols of movement and renewal seem powerful throughout the work filled with subtle amazement at the path O’Hagan has advanced since boyhood. On one page, he arranges products in his youth at a nearby supermarket in Ayrshire; in another passage, he attends a celebration for a recent romantic partner at “the high-end shop on Park Avenue”. He freely admits being an inveterate name-dropper – going out with musicians, sharing a drink with the writer.

The Limits of Disclosure

Even though many experiences unfolds in the essays, he doesn’t reveal everything. O’Hagan understands that friendship is rarely just an easy ride, yet he’s discreet, even coy, about the subject’s shadow side: rejections, misinterpretations, rifts (“A celebrity actor I know who asked me to attend his nuptials, but he failed to respond when I invited him to mine”).

The degree of openness, of sharing, is somewhat restricted: while he briefly notes of his failed try to pen Julian Assange’s memoir (the WikiLeaks founder struggled “to befriend himself”, he notes, diplomatically), there’s nothing about his lengthy reported piece for the LRB on the tragic blaze, notable here mainly as the subsequent controversy must have reminded him who stood by him.

An Intriguing Bond

To some extent because of this, the standout essay among the pieces involves the celebrated writer Edna O’Brien, whom he first met in London in 2009 following Seamus Heaney’s milestone event. When he invites her to lunch at the Wolseley in Mayfair (““Ideal … request the corner spot, once used by Lucian Freud”), it commences a long-term connection during which “we turned to each other to develop concepts we were unable to have alone”, as he uniquely puts it, subtly clarified when he later recalls “the mellow compositions we often enjoyed while I assisted her with her writings”.

Personal Disclosures

Of the various names dropped in these pages, she is the sole individual permitted an insight into O’Hagan himself. In the majority of his tales, he appears as the one who is portrayed positively – be it as a young student weeping over Charlotte’s Web while rougher peers mocked, or in the role of a durable celebrant who is nonetheless quickest to awaken the next day an extensive evening – so your ears prick up slightly when, apropos of nothing, O’Brien informs the author (noticed, on this occasion, as opposed to analyzing) that she perceives he is “an injured individual who deals with it perfectly and very plausibly”.

Final Reflections

As a personal account – which is what On Friendship is – it appears to leave money on the table, without a doubt. Finally, these memories and musings – presented in a neat volume, eminently gift-ready – leave you wondering regarding a fuller life story O’Hagan could author, assuming he he chooses to do so.