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My Writing Life: Damian Barr

Damian Barr is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and host. Maggie & Me, Damian’s memoir about coming of age and coming out in Thatcher’s Britain, was a Radio 4 Book of the Week, and won Sunday Times Memoir of the Year and Stonewall Writer of the Year. His debut novel, You Will Be Safe Here, was a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and Book of the Year in the Observer, Guardian and Mail in 2019. His latest book, The Two Roberts, which reimagines the relationship between artists Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, is out in paperback now. For fifteen years, Damian hosted his own Literary Salon, sharing new works by some of the world’s greatest writers. He also hosted several series of the Big Scottish Book Club on the BBC and is a former RLF beneficiary.

1. What book should every writer read?

The more a book is recommended to me, the less inclined I am to read it. As a result, I am often five to fifty years behind everybody else. I also know how intimidating the writer’s TBR pile can be when you are already busy over-researching your new novel or avoiding reading anything but the side of the cereal box, because all it will do is confirm how terrible your own prose is. All that said, you can’t go wrong with Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

2. What is your typical writing day like?

There isn’t one. Today I have spent three hours fretting over three different book ideas with my husband before making a needlessly elaborate soup for our very late lunch. But if I am writing (and I should be) I tend to get out of bed whenever I wake up and go to my desk with coffee and not open emails or look at socials and just pick up where I left off. I have learned that this works best for me. I think Woolf said writing is closest to dreaming so I think bed to desk works (I draw the line at writing in bed).

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

My Mum. She taught me to read before I started primary school. She made me a word tin – it was a green-and-gold Golden Virginia Tobacco tin, the lid too tight for my wee hands. She had filled it with tiny strips of paper, rolled up into hundreds and thousands almost. Each one had a word on it. She would shake the tin up so the words pattered inside, and then it would release this big waft of leafy dry. She held it towards me and asked me to pick out a word, which I did, unrolling the scroll to reveal her handwriting. Then, between us, we sounded it out, and she helped me work out what it meant. So she made me a reader, and that made me a writer, and so she is in every word I write.

4. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your career as a professional writer?

That it is a privilege, but not only for the privileged – that it is work and I deserve to be paid properly for it, however lucky I feel to be doing it. That writing is not publishing. That editing can feel like flying. That writers are artists, and artists do not need to be tortured. That’s more than one thing.

5. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

Only you can say what you need to say.

6. What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?

Pride comes before a fall – why are you forcing me to tempt fate like this? As a gay working-class man, I did not grow up being told to feel or be proud of myself. I have had to learn to take pride in my achievements, the greatest of which is turning up at my desk, sitting down, writing, and believing that what I have to say is worth hearing. So I suppose it is this: learning to trust my own voice.

7. What are you reading right now?

I just finished Edmund White’s astonishing sex memoir and can still smell it on my hands. Now I’m savouring Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers – a doomed love triangle on a peacetime army base in the American South. She is never not surprising – a few pages in and a buttoned-down Captain has stuffed a kitten in a mailbox after a row with his wife.

8. Bookmarker or page-folder?

Folder, scribbler, lender.

This article originally appeared on our Substack.

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