Andrew O'Hagan

This book connected to so many of the other books that I've loved in my life.

We've talked about some of them, you know, and there's so many others, Wuthering Heights and, you know, books by Graham Greene and, you know,

novels by Truman Capote, you know, that just seemed to have a sense of what was possible as a writer.

And I was one of those kids who, I mean, I was cocooned in books.

I felt buoyed up by them.

They became the kind of oxygen in the blood for me, carrying it all back to the heart, you know.

And it's good to be in a position, or it feels nice to be in a position of having written a book that is a kind of homage

in a way, to all those terrific, beautiful books about what time does to life, what life is at the centre of change.

And it was those books that really brought that to me.

So I consider myself lucky and grateful there.

It's always a book of laughter and tears, this for me.

It started from a very...

real incident, which was the death of my oldest friend.

And I realized 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.

Tully was that very charismatic person that I think so many of us have in our lives, especially in childhood.

He was the classic front man.