James Meek & Lara Pawson: Your Life Without Me
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What is the event and who are the speakers introducing Your Life Without Me?
Welcome to the London Review Bookshop podcast. To find out about our upcoming events, visit londonreviewbookshop.co.uk forward slash events
Hello and a warm welcome to the London Review Bookshop. Thank you all very much for coming to celebrate the launch of Your Life Without Me by James Meek. Congratulations, James. Thank you for coming. Very pleased to have contributing editor to the London Review Bookshop, James Meek, here tonight. And Laura Pawson, author of Spent Light, which we launched, was that two years ago now? It is. January, two years ago. Yeah. Yeah, another extraordinary event. Laura, thank you for coming back. Honestly, it's lovely to have you both here. I'm really looking forward to this. I want to thank the publisher Canongate, as ever, for being brilliant and publishing great books and agreeing to help put on good events here at the shop.
Our authors will talk for about 45 minutes. Our authors, our speakers, will speak for about 45 minutes. There'll be time for your questions at the end. My colleague Liv will run around with the mic. Thank you for listening to me. I'll hand it over to our guests, James, Lara. Thank you both so much. Thanks, Claire.
Thank you.
Thanks for coming out on this awful night, everybody. I feel very, I know people say this, but I really mean it. I feel very honoured to be in conversation with James Meek. Slight digression, but 23 years ago, I got married and I was given this book. This was one of the wedding presents The Museum of Doubt, which is a book by James Meek. And alongside a very fantastic box of tools, this was my favourite present. And I really mean it. I mean, you can see it's very well-thumbed. It's kind of falling apart. I don't know if it's still in print, is it? I think it is.
Is it? It's theoretically in print.
Well, it's a really, really fabulous book of short stories, as well as having an amazing cover. I don't even know if it still has this cover. But when I then met James, I bumped into you a bit drunk at a party. I just couldn't believe that I was standing in front of this man who'd written this book. And I was thumbing through the pages today. I couldn't believe I was standing next to a reader. Ka-ching. Anyway, I found the card of the person who gave it to me. I have to say who I'm no longer speaking to, but that's not uncommon in my life. And there was a sentence about you and I just thought I've got to read it, if you don't mind. I'll tell you after you read it. He says, this guy was Russian correspondent for the Guardian and the Independent.
I remember his name from my stay there. He might, underlined, be good. And then he says, see what you think. It's an absolutely fabulous book. So yeah, he's very good. This book is another amazing book. I mean, I'm sure that quite a few of you here have read his whole body of work and his amazing, very lengthy pieces in the London Review of Books. And I have to say, I was a bit shocked. Can I say this upfront? I read a review of this in the TLS and I couldn't believe it was not, there's many good reviews of this book. That was not, I felt, a great review, but he didn't talk about the quality of your writing. The quality of writing in this book is just astonishing. It's so elegant. There's so many sentences that I've come with this ridiculous batch of paper that obviously I'm not going to get through.
But there's so many sentences and passages that I just read and read and kind of wanted as a writer to sort of absorb so that I might pick up some of your skill. I really just think it's a fabulous piece of writing. For those of you who haven't read it, I thought it might be helpful just to give a kind of a bit of a pricey. The story from my reading centres on a man called Mr. Berman, who was a secondary school teacher of English in a Northern town, somewhere maybe on the West Coast, wasn't quite sure. Lancashire somewhere, probably. Yeah, and his precocious former student, Raph, I've written in my notes a just go Buddhist who is in prison when the book opens for trying to blow up St.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the event and who are the speakers introducing Your Life Without Me?
0:02–17:18
2
How does Lara Pawson summarise the novel’s plot and main characters?
17:18–43:37
3
How did James Meek conceive the idea of a monument-targeted plot like St Paul’s?
43:37–53:58
4
Why does the book examine generational conflict through Leila and Mr Berman?
53:58–1:07:15