Literary festival

I had just left Tate Britain and was heading toward the Pimlico underground station when I noticed an attractive woman coming toward me. I smiled at her and she smiled at me. And then she stopped and said, “Are you Cosmo Landesman?” There are writers and journalists who get public recognition like this all the time. Alas, I’m not one. But I was married to one of them, and it’s a real drag having a famous partner. You have to stand there at the supermarket checkout line with a big fake smile on your face as your loved one laps up all the love from some adoring fan. Imagine how poor John Gregory Dunne must have felt being married to the very recognizable Joan Didion. Having a famous writer friend is also a bummer. Socially, you will always be in their shadow.

This is the season when literary festivals start to happen all over the UK. From the highlands of Scotland to the South London lowlands of Deptford, there are book festivals for every taste and tribe. Festivals devoted to crime fiction, women writers, LGBTQ writers and young novelists. Even old Marxists are having their own summer festival. I’m thinking of starting a literary festival for neglected and bitter writers like me who don’t get invited to literary festivals. I ask myself: why should I care? But I do. I spend long nights of self-torment scrolling through the lists of people appearing at various festivals and shouting at my laptop screen: who the fuck is he? What has she written? Why is Bono there and not me? For heaven’s sake, who invited Minnie Driver?!

I like to think that I’m too intelligent, too sophisticated and too cultured to get excited by the presence of a famous person. Let the manipulated masses enjoy the bread and circus of celebrity; we enlightened members of the metropolitan elite are far above that sort of thing! Or so we like to think. Whenever I encounter the famous, something very strange happens to me: I go all groupie. I get excited. I giggle. I inwardly drool. I long to please. I want to be their new best friend. I want to tell all my friends about meeting my famous new friend — who isn’t actually my friend, but never mind. I was reminded of my groupie tendencies the other day when I went to the Idler Festival, Britain’s best arts and literary festival. I usually hate those sorts of events.