Writers

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?!

A fellow writer recently asked me if I would prefer to be famous as a great writer or famous as a great lover. I said a great writer because, well... that’s what you’re meant to say, isn’t it? My friend chose great lover. Why? “There are lots of great writers,” he explained, “but men who are great in bed are rare. And besides, great writers aren’t sexy anymore.” I used to think that when male writers — and I mean novelists, critics, journalists — complain about how literature has lost its cultural significance and that no one cares about the printed word anymore, what they really mean is: no one wants to shag me. And I suspect that they’re right. The era of the Great Literary Sex God is over.