Lives in Writing

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This thoughtful and enlightening collection by one of our best-loved and most highly respected novelists and critics includes essays on Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Terry Eagleton, Muriel Spark and Alan Bennett, as well as pieces on John Boorman and the death of Princess Diana. It also gives insight into Lodge’s own writing processes and novels. Full of anecdotes and wonderful observations, Lives in Writing is the perfect literary companion.

Drawing on David Lodge’s long experience as novelist and critic, Lives in Writing is a fascinating study of the interface between life and literature.

I have combined creative writing with the practice of literary criticism for more than fifty years, and I think of myself as primarily a novelist in the former capacity, and a critic and theorist of the novel in the latter. But as I get older I find myself becoming more and more interested in, and attracted to, fact-based writing. This is I believe a common tendency in readers as they age, but it also seems to be a trend in contemporary literary culture generally. These essays variously describe, evaluate and exemplify different ways in which the lives of real people are represented in the written word: biography, the biographical novel, biographical criticism, autobiography, diary, memoir, confession, and various combinations of these modes. The book’s title has another meaning: with a single exception, all the subjects are or were by profession ‘in writing’ of various kinds (though one of them is primarily a film-maker). The connections between their personal lives and the work they produced make a thread that runs through all these essays. Nearly all contain autobiographical passages of my own, and some in the latter part of the book are framed as memoirs.

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