Andrew O'Hagan

Thanks for listening to this extract from Close Readings.

It was always a book of laughter and tears for me.

that started from a very real incident, which was the death of my oldest friend.

And I realised that when I looked back at our lives as friends, that I'd always wanted to write a fully rounded book about a friendship.

And there was so much laughter in our childhoods, being in bands in Scotland and the West Coast during the 1980s, making life bigger and better than our parents' lives, we thought.

And then 30 years later to get that call to say that he was terminally ill.

I just wanted to connect a whole life's friendship up.

And so the laughter and tears were instant, I think.

I mean, we all have a childhood.

And often at the centre of it was this person.

And that was a 40-year friendship between myself and the person who the character was modelled on.

So Tully in the book, you know, I say without hesitation, it comes straight from life for me.

This is the most autobiographical book I've ever written.

And I felt that trying to just characterize Tully to offer a picture of what it's like to have a heroic friend who 30 years later needs you and depends on that old loyalty, but for a whole new set of reasons.

You know, I think it's one of the things that makes my generation distinctive.

People who were born perhaps from the late 60s to the mid 70s

That is almost a generation now.

Our fathers, if you're British, our fathers met other men in the army.

They did national service.

We didn't.