Geordie Williamson

The deaths of three men who were very important to Amos and the account of one affair, which he hasn't really spoken about in specific detail before.

And yet, I think the moment, which is this moment in publishing, is an autofiction moment where the work of people like Rachel Cusk and Ben Lerner and Nausgaard, of course, has kind of wrenched

the kind of the place where writing is happening right now, somewhere entirely off the old fictional rails.

And those rails were the ones that Amos with figures like Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, they rode that gauge track during the late 70s and 80s and 90s when they were, you know, obviously an incredibly talented bunch of writers.

So what I think has happened is that Amos's publishers have said this is where the action is.

He's written a deft, intimate, warm, funny, rude memoir and then given it a quick coat of autofiction and called it that.

But it's not.

It's a memoir.

Kate, my eye caught on those words, and then I looked at the length, which is somewhere in the 500 pages, and thought, okay, righto, knuckles, knuckle down, dispute.

Knuckle down and buckle up.

But look, in many respects, that's a feint and a dodge.

It is a coherent work.

It can be read in toto.

I did think that there were periods where I was bored.

And Amos himself says panegyric.

is the least of the literary genres.

And let's be honest, this work is essentially a panegyric.

It is a memoir which relates his relationship and his love and respect for particularly Sawbillow

and for Christopher Hitchens, and in a more at-one-remove way, Philip Larkin.

So it's a death-haunted book.