David Szalay: ‘In a sense, all fiction is fan fiction’
The author on being inspired by Hemingway, Joyce’s jokes, and the diary he loves to dip intoMy earliest reading memoryThe first novel I remember reading was called My Side of the Mountain. I’m not sure how old I was. Maybe nine. My memory of it is so intense, and yet so vague, that I had to look the book up to make sure that it actually exists, that I didn’t just dream it. It does exist, and it’s easy to understand why I liked it so much. It presents a vision of idealised solitude – a 12-year-old running away from society and civilisation and fending for himself in some American wilderness – that obviously spoke to something in me at the time.The book that made me want to be a writerIt’s hard to answer this question because it implies some kind of single “road to Damascus” moment that didn’t happen. Having said that, I remember even today the impact that two short, simple novels had on me when I read them at the age of 11 or 12. They were George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and it’s probably at about that time that I started “wanting to be a writer”. I think that the desire to be a writer is essentially the desire to imitate, to recreate the effect that other people’s writing has had on you. In that sense all fiction is fan fiction. Continue reading...
The author on being inspired by Hemingway, Joyce’s jokes, and the diary he loves to dip into
My earliest reading memory
The first novel I remember reading was called My Side of the Mountain. I’m not sure how old I was. Maybe nine. My memory of it is so intense, and yet so vague, that I had to look the book up to make sure that it actually exists, that I didn’t just dream it. It does exist, and it’s easy to understand why I liked it so much. It presents a vision of idealised solitude – a 12-year-old running away from society and civilisation and fending for himself in some American wilderness – that obviously spoke to something in me at the time.
The book that made me want to be a writer
It’s hard to answer this question because it implies some kind of single “road to Damascus” moment that didn’t happen. Having said that, I remember even today the impact that two short, simple novels had on me when I read them at the age of 11 or 12. They were George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and it’s probably at about that time that I started “wanting to be a writer”. I think that the desire to be a writer is essentially the desire to imitate, to recreate the effect that other people’s writing has had on you. In that sense all fiction is fan fiction. Continue reading...
