Nick Harkaway

And so, but in the fundamental years where I was developing language at all,

An hour, two hours of my day consisted of hearing the George Smiley novels being written.

So when I came to write this, and I thought I got to turn the dial a little bit towards dad, it was 1%, one notch, and suddenly it was there.

Really?

It was that easy to come to?

It was so simple.

So the first thing I should say is that it's unknowable for me in a way because I don't know what it was like to be anybody else's kid.

And for most of my life, I have imagined that because my mother made a huge effort to keep our lives somewhat down to earth in various ways.

and was very successful in that, that my life was sort of mostly like everybody else's, but not in certain very specific ways.

And the more I look at it now from a distance, the more I realize that's nonsense on an epic scale.

my life was very odd, um, by any reasonable standard.

I mean, so how did it actually, how did it work?

I mean, I, we've talked about him reading across the table to my mom and so on.

So, you know, um, and that's, you know, that's not something most people experience and certainly it's not something most people experience with kind of genre defining historical period defining fiction.

Um,

I remember, on the one hand, we lived, when I was little, we lived on a house on the Cornish Cliff.

Our nearest neighbor was a mile away.

I'm a Gen X kid.

I spent my time walking up and down the coastal path with a dog by myself at the age of six.

I was a little bit feral.