Olivia Laing
speaker
938 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Aug
Olivia Laing’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's a book about failure, fear of failure, and a coming through that.
It has a kind of, it has a journey to maturity.
that I personally found very moving.
Brian's going to read a little bit from it first and then I'm going to ask some questions and then you can all ask some questions.
I chose that bit because it felt like it had so many of the different threads of the book available in it that you get the sense of you as this young person in a very darling process of becoming and sort of trying on selves, working on selves, but also lots of reflections on what it is that you're trying to do with books, what you're trying to discover from books, what you're trying to become by way of books.
But let's start with that pronoun.
So just before Christmas, I read Brian's, is it your first book, In the Dark Room?
Yes.
Yeah, which I'd never read before, which is about this period.
It's about the death of Brian's parents and it's an intensely moving book.
But I was really interested to come back to this and feel like there's something
more lucid about it, there's something more resolved about it.
Clearly that's to do with the distance that you're an older person, but I felt like it was an awful lot to do with the massive shift that comes from changing I to this B, or very occasionally you say you as if you're talking directly to this person.
And I wanted to ask you, you know, how clear was that right at the beginning that you knew you were going to do that and what difference did it make to how you revisited your own past?
It's interesting because it both opens up a large distance between the you that's writing and the person who, you know, very clearly is at the end of this telescope, but also there is a kind of, you can enter it in quite an intimate way, that that person's troubles who are no longer your own troubles, or your own in a very different way.
So this young Brian, we start with him as a schoolboy, a Bowie besotted schoolboy who's reading music mags and searching out material that communicates to him in some secretive language that he doesn't quite understand.
He doesn't quite understand the spell it has, but he recognises the material that belongs to him.
And I wanted to, before we sort of start unpacking the different education systems that you're sort of simultaneously travelling through, I wanted you to just talk about what that alternative education was for you, what it comprised of, what attracted you about it?
And what's fascinating about it is that there are so many anxieties hedging around Bea's project of self-education of, I think we can call it becoming an intellectual.
And that perhaps is a thing that hasn't been historicised along with the Face magazine and the Blitz Club.
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