A conversation with the writer Geoff Dyer

'I honestly consider myself very lazy or at least very reluctant to do anything I don’t feel like doing, but I have often felt like writing, fortunately.'

I’ve known Geoff Dyer and his wife the art curator Rebecca Wilson for just over a decade. I can’t remember the first time we met but I do remember the second or third occasion. It was a drinks party in the lobby of swish hotel, lots of palm fronds and women in drippy earrings, something to do with books. Geoff announced he and Rebecca were relocating to LA, where she was heading up the US arm of Saatchi Art and he would later be taking up a high profile teaching post. I congratulated him warmly, and in turn, announced I was pregnant with my first child. Geoff responded by making a sour face and saying, “Christ really? I’m sorry to hear that.”

Up until then I’d admired Geoff as a writer and warmed to him as an acquaintance, but after that I adored him. I mean, seriously, who says shit like that?

(Geoff.)

Come to think of it, saying shit like that (by which I mean the kind of stuff people often think but can barely admit to themselves, let alone give voice to) in the form of iconoclastic, mordantly funny and acute observations about everything from cinema to art to music to his own pettiness and relentless exasperation with the world, is an accurate description of what makes Geoff’s work so original. His book about DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, is a first person account of his own struggle to write a book about DH Lawrence, and Zona, his genre-defying off-piste meditation on Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, was famously commissioned as a book about tennis. I first encountered Dyer’s work writing in 2011 at the Banff Centre for the Arts when my friend the writer Jason McBride loaned me a tattered copy of Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered — a kind of irascibly cranky and existential travel memoir. The following day I went to the Arts Centre library, took out everything Geoff Dyer had published to date, and spent the rest of the six-week-intensive-writing fellowship in my cabin Rockies reading. I did not write a single word.

Geoff was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958, educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford and is currently Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He shares an immaculate, child-and-shoe-free home in Venice Beach, a beautiful place he inexplicably loathes, with Rebecca, whom he sensibly adores. He’s the author of four novels, a towering stack of essays and criticism and you can read the eye-watering list of all the awards he’s won here. His latest book is below. It’s sort of about tennis but not really.

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LM: Geoff. You’re a legend — one of the great literary innovators of our time. Did you set out to be a legend? Also, does it irritate you when people (say, like me) call you that? 

GD: How strange that I should be the last to hear this very welcome piece of news. I was under the delusion, until you broke the story, that I was just another mid-list middle-aged writer. But maybe if the idea of the legend has some element of falsity about it – as in ‘Print the legend’ -- then the claim you’re advancing on my behalf probably contains an untruth which reveals, in turn, a deeper truth: that I’m not a legend at all. 

LM: I’ve been reading back over some of your early essays and criticism (Berger, Jazz, Yoga) and marvelling at how distinctive and unmistakably YOU your authorial voice was, right from the outset — intellectually rigorous but also wildly tangential, playful, funny, humane. Where did you get the confidence to write like that off the mark? (Apart from being a tall, clever, handsome white guy who went to Oxford.)

GD: Actually that first book of mine, the boring, entirely pointless book on Berger (1986), is almost entirely devoid of what I think of as my voice. And actually, again, I realise that the book was not entirely pointless in that it got that kind of sub-academic way of writing out of my system, preparing the way for the emergence of the recognizable voice you mention. Also, I seem (to me) to sound more like myself with every passing year/ book. 

LM: Your most recent book, The Last Days of Roger Federer, is a meditation on beginning of the end of things. Mortality, ageing, loss… the bittersweet downward slope to the beyond. At times I found it rather gut-wrenching read — not because it’s particularly emotional about any of these subjects but because of how dry-eyed, cool-headed and unflinching it is. Was this intentional? Also, was it difficult to write?

GD: Again, how strange! I don’t recognize those qualities at all.  I guess the paradox at the heart of the book is that   it was a joy to write, each day offering proof that I was not at the end of my creative life. In particular I was able to sort out all the complications of its structure which posed quite a cognitive challenge. So the book is a record of a period of sustained happiness and fulfilment.

LM: How’s your tennis game these days?

GD: I am in the midst of this great comeback from elbow surgery last October: a real triumph of the human spirit. I say ‘am’ but that should be ‘was’ Everything was going so well but then I somehow jarred and hurt my knee playing our mutual friend, that yobbo Andy Anthony, the other day and I'm once again reduced to  licking my wounds. 

LM: You’ve won a shitload of gongs (deservedly IMO). The list is exhaustive and intimidating; I just checked it on Wiki and I’d forgotten half of them. Do you hunger for awards, if so which one(s) and why? Also: How have your feelings about prizes evolved over the years at all, if so how?

GD: Oh my thirst for awards rages unabated. The ones I have won have been encouraging or consoling rather than life-changing. Perhaps that is not such a bad thing. More generally, it was a catastrophic mistake to open up the Booker to American books. The financial support available for writers in that country is so enormous there’s no reason why we should have to dig in to our meagre ration of resources to help feed them up too. With regard to this year’s Booker in particular, I'm boycotting it in the sense of not reading the shortlisted books because Tessa Hadley’s Free Love was not even long-listed. 

LM: You’ve been mostly in LA for going on a decade now but still retain your connection to London. How do the two cities/countries compare in your mind at this point? Also, what was it like living through the Trump years?

GD: This is too huge a topic to address adequately. I've never liked LA, but it does have the advantage of being in California which I’ve always loved. California had, for many years, an aspect of the promised land, where I longed to be; once I began living there that aspect of it melted away and it just became the place where I lived, to which I'd lugged my habitual discontent. As a result England has acquired a kind of Blakean glow and allure: a remembered and regainable Jerusalem. The Trump years were dreadful, of course, but my own day-to-day life was relatively unaffected by him.

LM: You’ve been a writer in residence and teacher for some time now. Do you enjoy teaching and/or consider yourself a natural mentor to younger aspiring writers? Any words of wisdom from on high?

GD: In America writers tend to begin teaching the moment they’ve published a couple of stories. I'm glad I came to it later; it’s been stimulating, and in Iowa and Austin I had tremendous fun hanging out with and becoming friends with the grad students. It was rejuvenating. That hanging out doesn’t happen so much in LA because of the immense distances involved. I hope I’ve nudged some of my grad students away from a kind of academic writing that I used to find boring but which I’ve now changed my mind about in that I find it entirely worthless.

LM: Your image (particularly early on) was very much that of a self-taught/styled enfant terrible possessed of an unapologetically omnivorous intellect… but I’m curious to know, did you in fact have any established teachers or editors who mentored you and/or changed the course of your career? If so, how so? If not, why not?

GD: Well, if it makes sense for someone who read English at Oxford to say they are self-taught then that is sort of true in my case. None of the people who ‘taught’ me at Oxford had the slightest influence on me but I was the beneficiary of the tutorial system and of chomping my way through that old, venerable and unreconstructed syllabus. That was the perfect foundation. As I've said many times before, it was in the period after university, living on the dole in Brixton, when I really came into my own intellectually – and fell under the spell of the work of John Berger, who became a huge influence and a friend.

LM: You often go on about how lazy you are which is a bit rich given your prolific accomplishments and output. How much of it is a self-deprecating/disarming British pose, or conversely, are you one of those true loafer types who ponces about for months then one day sits down and churns out an opus? (Either way it’s both charming/mildly annoying.)

GD: I honestly consider myself very lazy or at least very reluctant to do anything I don’t feel like doing, but I have often felt like writing, fortunately. 

LM: You were one of the first writers I ever encountered who wrote openly and unapologetically about not wanting to have children. It seems strange to say this now, given the upsurge of “childfree” Millennial creative-types, but at the time it felt defiant, almost shocking. Do you think you were pioneer in this regard?

GD: I'm sure I'm not! 

LM: How badly do you regret it? (Come on, you can tell me. I’m a Mum.) 

GD: Regret not having kids? You  must be joking. I rejoice at not having anything to do with these ghastly creatures every single day. And don’t get me started on the parents!

LM: If you hadn’t become a writer what do you think you might have done? For work, I mean, but also with your life in general… is there a non-writer Geoff out there living a parallel life in another dimension? Is he happy? What does he look like?

GD: Impossible to say. I always think the big transformation was becoming a reader and keen student under the influence of one of my teachers at Grammar school – another reason why I was surprised by how rubbish the ‘teaching’ was at Oxford. Beyond that, I dunno… 

LM: What sort of stuff are you reading/watching/listening to at the moment? Any new exciting jags? You always have the best/weirdest/surprising reccos.

GD: Reading: Elizabeth Taylor! Earlier this year I finished reading everything she had written. It was a phase of pure and protracted bliss. Listening: my album of the year so far is Oren Ambarchi’s Ghosted which in turn has led me back to the band that his two collaborators on that album (Andreas Werlin and Johan Berthling) are part of: Fire! Gig of the year: Natural Information Society at Café Oto. I should add that I owe both of these discoveries to my friend Matthew Specktor in LA. Watching: nothing I’ve seen recently has come close to filling the void left by watching all five seasons of Le Bureau -- twice.