James Meek

speaker

486 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 15 Jun

James Meek’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · James Meek & Lara Pawson: Your Life Without Me · 15 Jun 2026 podcast

Yeah, yeah.

And none of the family had been to.

You mentioned the lawyer's story about her childhood and the story about the guy whose father ran the restaurant.

I mean, they're both about the generations and a younger generation feeling weighed down on by the older generation.

In the original draft, there was another one which I completely took out because it was too much.

I didn't think of Spent Light as a violent book at all.

The thing that got me about it was the object and the way that there was a key in each one of them for a memory.

And there was this particular scene in this book where Mr. Bowman is alone with his wife's things.

I tried to, it's very difficult.

You've been very nice about my book, but I still, I always doubt whether I succeeded in this very, very difficult thing of kind of conveying loss.

No, I think you did, you did.

And I tried to do it through objects.

I mean, when I think about ruins now, at the moment, one of the things that happened in the course of this book, I had my losses.

My father died, my ex-wife, who we've been separated with for a long time, she died.

But Ukraine kind of, it didn't exactly die, but a lot of it did.

And that affected me very, very deeply.

But, you know, I've been back a lot since Russia invaded and I've seen a lot of ruins.

And I suppose I must have thought this before, but it was something about this particular trip and the familiarity of the places that the terrible thing about ruins is the way that it's as if it was always there, that the ruin was always there, kind of somehow.

It's not really the ruins of a building, it's just ruins.

In an instant, everything is over.

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