"He considers why actors, politicians and Republicans make bad friends, why the novelist Colm Toibin makes such a good one, and how the experience of friendship is shaped by bereavement and the internet. The latter, for O'Hagan, is more damaging than the former, which maybe isn't surprising for a writer who likens friendship to a set of loyalties that turn in the head like old records, and worries that people no longer go to pubs because they're too busy shopping online."
"In the age of the internet, what exactly is a friend? Can you swear by someone whose voice you've never heard ?, he asks, not seeming to mind terribly much strangely, for an author so companionable on the page that this isn't really a feature of online life so much as writing itself; Gutenberg, not Zuckerberg. In these pages, friendship liberates where family constricts."
Reminiscences cover a lost childhood friend from a 1970s North Ayrshire council estate, former colleagues at the London Review of Books, and an adult daughter's former imaginary companion. Friendship is examined alongside bereavement and the internet, with the internet portrayed as more damaging than loss. Actors, politicians and Republicans are depicted as poor friends, while Colm Toibin is singled out as a notably good one. Childhood home life with three brothers and an unloving father is described as a palace of stress, and friendships are presented as liberating, offering metaphors of migration, rebirth and a passport to the person one aspires to be.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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