The other day, feeling fed up for reasons far too lowering to go into here – suffice it to say I was looking at a night in a strange city with only a small bag of dry roasted peanuts for company – I pulled a book from our shelves on a whim: Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame, edited by Robin Robertson, which came out in 2003.
What perfect medicine. Pretty soon, I was completely lost in it, which is what tends to happen when you open a book that comprises lots of small pieces by brilliant writers. Among its contributors are Margaret Atwood, Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Claire Messud, Edna O’Brien and William Trevor; almost eagerly, they pass the humiliation along, one to the other, as if it were a baton.
As Deborah Moggach notes in her essay, writers can only really moan about this stuff – the humiliating reading to a yawning audience of three; the signing where nobody turns up save for a woman determined to flog you her self-published book about her recovery from cancer – to one another. Worse things happen at sea. But that doesn’t mean that reading about it isn’t painfully funny, or that writers deserve humiliation more than any other kind of human being. Certainly, no one deserves the experience Moggach had in Edinburgh one year when, in front of a large audience, Hunter Davies opened his conversation with her with the question: “Well, Deborah Moggach, you’re not really up there in the first 11, are you?”
Anyway, it’s all here, from the borderline abuse (in Stamford, Lincolnshire, Jonathan Coe told a stranger that, no, he wouldn’t be writing a novel about the fall of the Berlin Wall, only for the bloke to yell at him: “You’re a coward, man, a bloody coward!”), to the empty auditoriums (Michael Holroyd, the distinguished biographer, once had to give a lecture to an audience that consisted only of the chap who’d booked him), to the mistaken identities (Rupert Thomson’s own girlfriend – I promise this is true – once took Jeanette Winterson for him, which was awkward for them both). Delicious. Thoroughly recommended. To be hunted down by you, pronto.
