Reports Of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (But Probably Only On Social Media)
Why have I been thinking about death so much this week? It’s probably an autumn thing and no doubt it’s not entirely unrelated to my recent health problems but also, taking a glance back at what I’ve been reading and watching, it’s not like death was going to be a topic I was going to find it easy to avoid dwelling on. I watched Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s 1988 film about the jazz legend Chet Baker, who died four months before the documentary was released, and I can’t think of a more haunting and melancholic portrait of a musician’s life (not even Margaret Brown’s brutally sad and brilliant Townes Van Zandt documentary Be Here To Love Me from 2004). The viewer’s knowledge of Baker’s imminent fate combined with the monochrome footage helps create a woozy antechamber-to-the-afterlife quality, as Baker - whose out-of-itness is clearly so ingrained it serves as his own peculiar form of consciousness - rides around in a convertible, with an entourage mostly less than half his age, from studio to bar to hotel room and guides us falteringly through his crazy life. In his youth, he was a chiselled, stunningly photogenic hybrid of James Dean and the young Johnny Cash, but in his late 50s his deeply lined, toothless face is like a map of the contours of his own misdeed. He’s lived and loved hard, has a worn-in charisma that draws people to him wherever he goes, and his music speaks with soft toasted eloquence about loss and pain, but there is also a sense that by this point no relationship in his life is quite as important to him as the one he is about to have with his next packet of cigarettes.
Here, refreshingly, can be found none of the typical “I was in a dark place but now, with the help of those around me, I am the person I always should have been, and have seen the light!” thrust of most music documentaries whose hard-living subject is still alive during production. Pretty much everyone who’s got to know Chet well talks, in a weirdly accepting way, about how he’s been an unmitigated shit to them. His own mum cannot bring herself to call him “a good son”. Chet, meanwhile, describes his love of speedballs to the camera, and why it’s so important not to frontload them with too much cocaine. What you can’t help thinking, over and over, while watching the film is “How did 1957 Chet become 1987 Chet?” I thought of the 57-year-olds I know now and reminded myself that such an age meant a very different thing in the 1980s to what it means in 2025. My nan was born just over a fortnight after Baker and, like him, had no teeth by 1969. She had also, by the point Let’s Get Lost was made, seemed old for quite some time. But my nan wasn’t a celebrity, never did heroin, lived in Nottingham, and the reason for her lack of gnashers was not, as far as I know, because she’d been jumped out of nowhere on the street in LA by a gang of black guys. (Coincidentally, though, like Baker, she did talk her way out of the army by refusing to use the communal latrine, enthusing about bebop and talking repeatedly about her ambition to be a florist.)
Baker died in May, 1988, from a head wound, after a fall from an Amsterdam hotel room balcony while under the influence of heroin and cocaine. Nobody knows exactly how it happened, since Baker was alone at the time, but there is a rumour that he slipped while crossing from the balcony of the room adjacent to his, having locked himself out of his own room and hit upon what he thought was the easiest way to solve the problem. The Dutch police wrote that they found “the body of a 30-year-old man with a trumpet”, which suggests a couple of possibilities: 1) this, as cases of official European cadaver-based misjudgement go, was the flipside of the time Parisian police thought the 27-year-old recently deceased Jim Morrison was in his 50s, or 2) upon death, Baker immediately morphed, in a vampirical reverse Dorian Gray way, into his pristine young self. Having watched Let’s Get Lost, I certainly wouldn’t put option two past him.
In Carol Shields’ Pulitzer-winning novel The Stone Diaries, a much younger intoxicated man falls from the window ledge of a European hotel room and expires from a head wound. His name is Harold Hoad and he is at the time on his honeymoon with the book’s main character, Daisy Goodwill. Immediately prior to this excursion, Harold’s comically awful mother, known throughout the book only as Mrs Arthur Hoad, has lectured Daisy on all manner of married person etiquette (“we invite people to dinner, not for dinner”), culminating in instructions about why the couple must not, on any account, touch the bidets of France and Italy. This is classic Shields: the seamless pivot from funny to sad and back again. Yet it was said of Shields, a few times, that she did not "do" sad well (whoever said this surely had not read the final sections of The Stone Diaries). She was also criticised for being too concerned with the small things, too “domestic”, too keen to write positive characters, too digressive. But ,if you ask me, there are few novelists who feel as much like they are knitting together all of life as it really is. The Stone Diaries is a big book. Bigger than you’d imagine, going solely on what it weighs.
I chatted about The Stone Diaries as a guest on the BBC Radio 4 show A Good Read this week (the recording won’t go out for another month or so). Unfortunately the beginning of my Zoom appearance coincided, with tragicomically precise timing, with a sharp relapse of the pain I’ve been experiencing for the last month and there was no question of cancelling, especially as I’d already had to pull out of a 3D appearance in the London studio. Being on the radio doesn’t make me nervous or discombobulated, but pain does. I remember almost nothing of what I said, but I am sure little of it was eloquent or interesting. On the bright side, I had been given an excuse to read The Stone Diaries for the second time in two years. In fact, A Good Read ask their guests to put forward three potential books, then the producer and presenter select the one that fits best. My other choices were Ragtime by El Doctorow, which remains the only adult novel I’ve read more than three times, and The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner which, sentence for sentence, is probably the most relentlessly gobsmacking book I’ve read in the past decade. But as I started to reread The Stone Diaries, I began to see that, by sheer chance, A Good Read had chosen arguably the most “me” author of the bunch… certainly the author who, if she were still alive at this exact moment, I’d have the most to say to.
I don’t sell a fraction of the books Shields did, don’t even (to my bafflement, considering how many people from over there read imported copies of my books) have a publishing deal on her side of the Atlantic, and am not a woman in the 20th Century dealing with the obstacles associated with being a woman in the 20th Century writing about 20th Century women’s experiences. But I do want to say to Carol: “Carol, what did it feel like, when people called your writing, which actually explored big themes, ‘small’, because they couldn’t see that subtle and small are two extremely different things? Was it frustrating, when people dismissed as ‘rambling’ or ‘digressive’ the same parts of your books that the people you wrote those books for saw were absolutely integral to the narrative and shape and feel of those books? Or when your detractors suggested the warmth that made so many people enjoy your books was some kind of defect that made your writing intrinsically worse, sapped it of weight (bullshit!), and your determination to search for the best in human nature via your characters was a literary weak point (also bullshit!)? And did it - as it does now, for me, when I receive not identical, but not entirely dissimilar, criticisms about my own writing - make you want to double down, be even more stubborn about doing what you do in your way, and make more of an effort to shut out the noise and get on with it? And also, what was it like, back in the 90s, before the internet had ruined everyone’s life, when making such a choice must have been so much easier?
To write books is to commit to being misunderstood. It’s often painful, but it’s also necessary. It makes those moments when someone really does understand it so much sweeter. At a talk I did the week before last, someone who wanted to write for a living but was worried how they’d deal with negative reviews asked me how I felt when I got them. I said some of the stuff I’ve said before on the topic. Yes, they can sting a bit. That’s part of being human. But to try to please everyone is a surefire route to dull books you don’t believe in, plus, quite probably, madness. What you have to realise is that, if you met some of the people in person who didn’t like your book, you’d actually be kind of horrified if they did like your book. But if you generally want to think the best of each new human you encounter until proven otherwise - the kind of outlook that no doubt made Carol Shields create the characters she did - that’s probably a little harder to remember. Reviews, I increasingly feel, good or bad, are none of my business.
What I didn’t get into in my answer to the question - because it’s a potentially massive topic and the Waterstones event manager was starting to glance at her watch - was the increasing role of the internet in making those reviews your business. Carol Shields surely had a deluge of feedback to potentially mess with her head when she published The Stone Diaries and the almost-as-brilliant Larry’s Party and The Republic Of Love in the 1990s but the technology of the time meant it would have been much easier to hide from than it is for a far less well-known writer than her in the present day. There was no Booktok, no Amazon customer reviews, no Instagram, no GoodReads, no Facebook. Social media, always so keen to tell people who they are without actually knowing them, is, for authors, like living with some gossipy goblin in the corner of your front room who constantly reminds you that everything will fall to bits if you don’t hear everything everyone everywhere has ever said about your books. “Be more interested in yourself and what people think of you!” it tells us. “Ego is where it’s at. That’s the world now. Deal with it.” Even if you’ve deactivated social media and you’re doing your best to avoid everything that’s been written about your book, your efforts can still feel futile. This morning I went on Amazon because I’m trying to get the non-existent earlier version of Everything Will Swallow You removed from there: the one my ex-publishers made it look like they’d released even though they hadn’t. Because of this, I saw a reviewer slagging my book off because it has the word “shit” on the first page. My impulsive response, upon seeing this, as well as to recoil at an outright lie the reviewer had told about how I’d presented the book, was “I hope some people who actually read the book and enjoyed it post some reviews to counterbalance the idiots and raise its star rating.” But then I checked myself. I was being made to feel, falsely, that this is what my book is: that it is solely the noise it creates on the internet in the weeks following its release. In truth, I found out what my book was when I had finished writing it. I will find out more about it in a year or two when more people have had time to properly digest it, including me. (This, I think, is even more the case with novels, especially twisty, character-driven ones: the internet made me feel like people hated Villager during the month it came out. It wasn't until many months later that it started to sink in that a lot of people loved it.)
Digital culture fills our head with lint and cheap twatty wool, distorts who we are, what we want, the facts about how long we are here on the planet for, what the most important elements of life really are. Step away, and it doesn’t take long for the fuzz to lift. A day after I’d deactivated all of my remaining social media accounts - Facebook, Instagram and Bluesky - just under a week ago, I began to see a clear narrative: that narrative showed me why I had been on social media a lot lately, and why there had been no avoiding that, and that I shouldn’t reprimand myself for it, but why I also now need to be off it. I deleted my Twitter account forever - after a couple of lengthy periods of deactivation - way back in summer 2023. At that point, I was very sure that I wanted, soon, to live with zero social media. But then something not quite foreseen happened: my publishers collapsed. That left me many thousands of pounds out of pocket, with a fearsome number of books from a warehouse in Swindon dumped on my driveway. I had to do what I could to survive: I had to use social media as a place to speak out about the injustice that had been done to me and Unbound's other authors, to shift the books, to rescue the fate of my new novel, to steady the ship. With years of work suddenly, cruelly snatched from me, I used what I had. Social media helped. Or rather, people on it did. Then I stayed at it, because, even though I’m stubborn, I’m also a people pleaser, and I wanted to make my new publishers happy. Events, reviews, launch dates: there is an enormous amount of pressure to share things on social media during a book’s publication period. And every bit of sharing exacerbates everything that’s overwhelming about it, means more is coming at you, more messages and requests. More awareness of your own fortune, your own supposed standing in the hierarchy of something that almost exists. I like that it’s been a direct line to people who actually read my books. But there is so, so much of it I dislike. One of the things I most vehemently dislike is the lie it presents that the internet is where books live. Books do not live on the internet. They live in quiet rooms and, joyfully, in people’s non-ruined, non-scrolling heads.
The exhaustion has been off the scale this year. It’s been a snowball, made out of one publisher’s gigantic fuck-up and my subsequent, superhuman, health-damaging attempt to clean up after it. I don’t want to talk about it any more and that’s why I’m talking about it here, for what I hope is the last time. I can only do so much; the rest is up to the books. When does the exhaustion end? I don’t think it does, unless I make the decision to create that end point. I am a person who, when he has made a mental list of what he most wants out of the rest of his life in recent years, has frequently begun that list with “Not to be on social media any more.” I’ve tried it before and not been brave enough to commit long term. I’ve let worries about my future security intervene. But by letting those worries get in the way I’ve lied to myself about my priorities, what I want, how far into my life I am, about how much I actually care about knowing how the world feels about my books (which is certainly “a bit” but not even close to what the internet wants me to). I posted my first ever tweet in spring 2009. Although I’d been on Facebook for a while before that, my first engagement with Twitter is what I think of as the beginning of the Social Media Era: the bit where everyone pressed the fast forward button and started to lose their marbles and think that all the things meant to enhance our real lives were our real lives. I remember first talking about how much I hated the effects it was having on my brain on a walk with some friends in Norfolk in January 2012. In autumn 2018, I went for an initial meeting with a counsellor because I was struggling with how many people wanted to talk to me on social media, but also felt trapped because of how dependent on it my career had become. That year - the year after I started to realise the person I'd repeatedly dismissed to friends as “not a real-life, scary stalker” was a real-life, scary stalker - I’d had recurring nightmares about a never-ending line of strangers coming into my house. But what I realised from the meeting with the counsellor was that I didn’t need counselling; I just needed to not be on social media. Since then I have managed blissful, epiphanical periods of abstinence. But then it’s always the same. I decide I need to suck it up to survive because I’m not Zadie Smith or Barbara Kingsolver: not so special that I get to be exempt from all that. Maybe it will be easier this time, I think. And it is for a while. And then it isn’t. And I begin, once again, to realise that it has absolutely zero to do with the life I want to live and that I vastly resent the time it steals from me.
Sometimes you need to check your dates, hard. Spring 2009, when I posted that first tweet, is sixteen and a half years in the past. Sixteen and a half years from now I will be almost 67 years old: almost a decade older than Chet Baker was when, with a toothless lined face that most have to wait at least another couple of decades to earn, he fell to his death. This is not child’s play. No, I’m not on heroin or cocaine - I’m an in-bed-by-half-nine introvert who no longer even drinks coffee - but destructive forces in your life come in many disguises and I’m not fucking about and lying to myself any more.
“But how will your books survive without it?” an acquaintance asked the other day. Someone always asks me this when I deactivate social media or threaten to. But I think I’d like to make a bolder, more patient effort to find out the answer. I mean, if it’s brought me to the point where I sometimes feel so trapped and corroded by it that I feel like I don’t want to publish books any more (which it has, on several days, recently) then I think it’s worth a go.
So after I’d deactivated all my social media last Monday, I thought I’d go back to the 1990s for a while: the place where the much-adored but much-misunderstood but probably quite clear-headed Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Carol Shields lived. I discovered the place was better than I remembered: better, because as well as having the same books and films and music, there was no Instagram, and I was less of an idiot than when I lived through the 1990s the first time around. On the way, I had a chat with Nora Ephron, via I Remember Nothing, the book she published in 2011, just before her death. Nora Ephron turned out to be just the person I wanted to talk to. Her essays are like tubes of Pringles without the salt hangover and lingering remorse. She didn’t live to see the worst of it, but she knew the score, knew what devices were already doing to our lives. At the book's poignant finale, she makes two lists: one of the things she won’t miss when she is gone, the other of the things she will. In the first list, she includes not only “email” (twice), but “technology in general”.
I decided to make 1998 my ultimate destination, not because it was better than any other year in the 1990s, but because it was the first one, travelling backwards, that I remembered as containing plenty of space (I moved to London in 1999). Yes, I’d got email by then, but it still felt like some quirky add-on, like a nose ring I was temporarily experimenting with - not a whole dictatorial new way of life. I read Birds Of America by Lorrie Moore, just as I had meant to that year when it first came out, and loved it. I rewatched Point Blank - which is actually from 1967, but which I decided in 1998 was my favourite film of all time - and it was every bit as psychedelic and unique as I remembered, and, with the changes that were already happening in my brain as a result of not logging into social media for several days, I was able to enjoy its pace, and devote myself entirely to it, just as I was, subsequently, to the dreamy, languid Chet Baker documentary Let’s Get Lost, with its dreamy, languid young people, dancing on Californian beaches and looking forward innocently to the future, blissfully unaware that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg had already been hatched and were already growing, in evil subterranean pods, not far away. At this point my 22-year-old self walked into the room, which was a surprise for both of us. After he’d got over his initial horror at discovering I enjoy jazz, he asked me some stuff about the future and what it was like, and I did my best to give him an outline, although I really didn’t know where to begin. I told him that I’d written three novels and twelve other books and he seemed excited, and kind of flabbergasted, about this.
“I’ve not become well-off or what most people would define as successful because of them, though,” I told him. “Why are you saying that like it’s an apology?” he asked. “You must know me better than that.” I told him that I just thought he might have hoped I’d be a bit more secure by this point: own my own house, have a pension, that sort of thing. I said I was feeling a bit low at the moment, because I’d been ill recently, in hospital a bit, and publishing a book is always a bit of an anticlimax, but that I was working on it. Just the last few days, in fact, had been better. Something was in the process of lifting. I told him I’d made some big decisions, about being able to devote more time to creativity, have a more peaceful mind, not push myself so savagely hard and getting away from the digital pressure to be more interested in success, but that even though I knew those decisions were right and were going to be good for my health, the way society was set up in the third decade of the 21st Century had a way of making me feel like by making those decisions I was doing something destructive and self-harming.
“But you say that you have this newsletter that goes out directly to your readers, where you can write about anything you want? And that people pay to support your writing through it?”
“Well, yes. That’s one thing that makes me extremely thankful for technology and its recent advances.”
“And you work hard on it? And now you’ve got rid of that other stuff you feel like you’ll be able to give even more focus to your writing? You’re working on another book? And you’re planning to self-publish a fanzine, like I used to do a couple of years ago, as well?”
“Yep. All of that.”
“Well, that sounds absolutely brilliant to me.”
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