Andrew O'Hagan

It was a biography of Marilyn Monroe.

And I came across it, as I say, by accident.

And

I'm the kind of guy who reads biographies the way some people read thrillers.

I just love reading about lives rather than plots.

I'm not a very plotty writer myself.

I'm much more caught up with what happens in a family or what happens in one person's life.

And they're the kind of stories that I think really connect to people's hearts in the end.

They identify with the shape of a life and the consequences of decisions that are made or accidents that occur.

But this book about Marlon Monroe, I'll never forget finding it.

And it had this very striking picture of Marlon with a gold lammy dress on the cover and just opening it and beginning to read about this childhood in Los Angeles.

And then this career in the movies and these tragedies and these marriages.

And I was lost, absolutely lost in this story.

And it taught me something about writing.

which is about inviting the identification of the reader.

It's somehow creating a little piece of moral arithmetic on the page where they can put themselves in place of the characters and see their own lives afresh because of the way you've written it.

So it was like a, that book was like a sort of miniature sort of creative writing class for a sort of 12 year old, you know?

And so I've always, I mean, my top three sort of would probably change every day, I have to warn you.

But those three books are constants for me of being exciting and refreshing books.

Oh, absolutely.