The book group thing

The book group thing was JJ´s idea. He said people do it a lot in America, read books and talk about them; Martin reckoned it was become fashionable here, too, but I´d never heard of it, so it can´t be that fashionable, or I´d have read about Dazed and Confused. The point of it was to talk about Something Else, sort of thing, and not get into rows about who was a berk and who was a prat, which was how the afternoons in Starbucks usually ended up. And what we decided was, we were going to read books by people who´d killed themselves. They were, like, our people, and so we thought we ought to find what was going into their heads. Martin said he thought we might learn more from people who hadn´t killed themselves – we should be reading up on what was so great about staying alive, not what was so great about topping yourself. But it turned out there were like a billion writers who hadn´t killed themselves, and three or four who had, so we took the easy option, and went for the smaller pile. We voted on using funds from our media appearances to buy ourselves the books.

Anyway, it turned out not to be the easy option at all. Fucking hell! You should try and read the stuff by people who´ve killed themselves! We started with Virginia Woolf, and I only read like two pages of this book about a lighthouse, but I read enough to know why she killed herself: she killed herself because she couldn´t make herself understood. You only have to read one sentence to see that. I sort of identify with her a bit, because I suffer from that sometimes, but her mistake was to go public with it. I mean, it was lucky in a way, because she left a sort of souvenir behind so that people like us could learn from her difficulties and that, but it was bad lick for her. And she had some bad luck, too, if you think about it, because in the olden days anyone could get a book published because there wasn´t so much competition. So you could march into a publisher´s office and go, you know, I want this published, and they´d go, Oh, ok then. Whereas now they´d go, Oh, ok then. Whereas now they´d go, No, dear, go away, no one will understand you. Try pilates or salsa dancing instead.

(HORNBY, Nick. A Long Way Down. London: Penguin Books. Pg 146)