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In his newest publication, author Andrew O’Hagan presents several short essays originally recorded for a radio program. The mode is one of reflection, covering a forgotten early pal from the neighborhood where he was raised in 1970s North Ayrshire. He also reflects on former colleagues at the London Review of Books, where O’Hagan made his name in the 1990s, along with his older daughter’s past make-believe companion.

Friendship Explored

He examines the reasons thespians, elected officials, and members of the GOP are poor companions, how come author Colm Tóibín stands out as a great companion, and the ways in which the experience 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 …?”

According to the author, online interaction proves more harmful than losing someone, a perspective that may not shock for a writer who compares friendship to “a set of loyalties that spin in the mind like classic albums”. He fears that folks avoid visiting bars because they’re too busy making digital purchases.

Contrasting Family and Friends

In his essays, companionship frees whereas kin restricts. Being raised with multiple brothers, O’Hagan’s household was a “realm of challenges”, a “palace of stress”, featuring a distant dad who on one occasion arranged for their pet deliberately driven out into the countryside and freed, lost forever. At primary school, respite lay in exploring derelict areas 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.”

Subsequently, O’Hagan revises the formula to label another friend’s fellowship “a passport to being the kind of person you dreamed of being”.

Symbols of Change

Images of journey and transformation feel potent in a book suffused with implicit wonder at the path O’Hagan has advanced since boyhood. At one point, he’s stacking shelves during his teens at a nearby supermarket in Ayrshire; elsewhere, he attends a celebration for a recent romantic partner at “the Donna Karan store on Park Avenue”. He is open about being an inveterate name-dropper – clubbing with the Stone Roses, enjoying spirits with the journalist.

Boundaries in Sharing

Even though a lot of life happens in these pages, he doesn’t reveal everything. O’Hagan acknowledges that friendship is not merely a smooth path, yet he’s discreet, even coy, concerning the negative elements: slights, misinterpretations, disagreements (“I know a famous actor who invited me to his marriage, but he ignored my invitation when I asked him to my own wedding”).

The level of access, of disclosure, only goes so far: even as he briefly notes of his unsuccessful effort to ghostwrite Julian Assange’s memoir (the WikiLeaks founder struggled “to befriend himself”, according to the author, carefully), he leaves out about his detailed report for the LRB on the tragic blaze, interesting in this context particularly since the resulting uproar likely made him aware where his loyalties lay.

A Special Connection

In part due to this, the most intriguing item here focuses on the late Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, that he first got to know in London in 2009 after leaving Seamus Heaney’s seventieth celebration. When he invites her to lunch at an upscale eatery in Mayfair (““Excellent … seek out the corner seating, favored by the artist”), it’s the beginning a 15-year friendship during which “we called upon each other to develop concepts we struggled to conceive solo”, in O’Hagan’s curious phrase, glancingly elaborated on when he eventually reflects on “the mellow compositions we used to listen to while I supported her editorial work”.

Revealing Moments

Among the many celebrities referenced in the book, she’s the only one granted access into his personal nature. In most of his anecdotes, he appears as the one who emerges favorably – if as a child weeping over Charlotte’s Web when cruder classmates laughed, or like a resilient partygoer who is nevertheless earliest to rise the morning after a late party – so your ears prick up slightly when, apropos of nothing, O’Brien says to him (noticed, on this occasion, rather than observing) that she recognizes he is “an injured individual who deals with it perfectly and quite convincingly”.

Concluding Thoughts

As a personal account – which is what On Friendship is – that would seem to hold back, without a doubt. Ultimately, these recollections and reflections – in an attractively compact format, eminently gift-ready – prompt you to ponder about the larger autobiography O’Hagan may produce, assuming he decides to do so.