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Wish I Was Here
'Is M John Harrison the best writer at work today? He's certainly among the deftest and most original, producing immaculately odd sentences in any genre he chooses' Olivia Laing, Summer Pick of 2023, Guardian
' Wish I Was Here by M John Harrison is a revival of the writer's memoir ... slippery and fascinating as any of his fiction' Jonathan Coe, Summer Pick of 2023, Guardian
M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. But is there even an M. John Harrison and where do we find him?
This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of 'A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.'
Are these notebooks, or 'nowtbooks', records of failed presence? How do they shine light on a childhood in the industrial Midlands, a portrait of the young artist in countercultural London, on an adulthood of restless escape into hill and moorland landscapes? And do they tell us anything about the writing of the books, each one so different from the last that it might have been written by another version of the author?
With aphoristic daring and laconic wit, this anti-memoir will fascinate you and delight you. It confirms M. John Harrison still further in his status as the most original British writer of his generation.
' Wish I Was Here by M John Harrison is a revival of the writer's memoir ... slippery and fascinating as any of his fiction' Jonathan Coe, Summer Pick of 2023, Guardian
M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. But is there even an M. John Harrison and where do we find him?
This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of 'A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.'
Are these notebooks, or 'nowtbooks', records of failed presence? How do they shine light on a childhood in the industrial Midlands, a portrait of the young artist in countercultural London, on an adulthood of restless escape into hill and moorland landscapes? And do they tell us anything about the writing of the books, each one so different from the last that it might have been written by another version of the author?
With aphoristic daring and laconic wit, this anti-memoir will fascinate you and delight you. It confirms M. John Harrison still further in his status as the most original British writer of his generation.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2023
54 people are currently reading
1,032 people want to read
About the author
M. John Harrison
112 books785 followersaka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews
October 17, 2023
‘These memories aren’t Proustian. They are hardly even memories. They are more like glitch art or soft errors – vague unhelpful frissons, flashes of recognition in which the real object remains hidden—.’
Felt like a 4*, but then I went and re-read the lines I had ‘highlighted’ in the book — and now I’m convinced it’s very much a 5*. It’s pretty fucking brilliant. He’s just the sort of writer that I feel I could listen to him talk for hours and hours. Pretty mad that he’s not more read/read more. This is the first time I’ve read anything by him even though he’s more well-known for other stuff. Want to get my hands on a copy of Climbers though, which is about ‘obsessive’ mountain-climbing(?). Don’t really know what to say about this book because it’s literally a collection of (brilliantly written) personal essays. Some that I highlighted and like a little more than others, below :
‘London in the rain, the beauty of it was this: you didn’t even have to be taking the heroin, you just had to look fragile & wounded by things. You just needed to be walking up Camden Parkway to Cecil Sharp House with your hands in your pockets, twenty-one years old and screwed up to screaming pitch and perpetual panic for no reason, or every reason, and waiting for the moment when Roy Harper’s thin wobbly falsetto would bring you some kind of calm and focus and lift you transiently into something past yourself. I abandoned that solace like everything else, and it would take a decade to find the next thing that worked.’
‘I have a professional interest in how fantasy propels or catalyses our casually saturated intimacy with illusion; but – while I have no difficulty reading out ‘floating wheelie bin’ from the picture, and indeed have lost all surprise at the absurd realism of an idea like that – it remains a picture and I really have no interest in what might be expressed thoughtlessly as the ‘possibility’ of a floating bin. I think it’s that, by now, I don’t care if a bin could float.’
‘I read Peter’s Room by Antonia Forest, in which the comfortable middle-class Marlow children discover Gondal, the obsessive fantasy world of the Brontë sisters, fail to learn the lesson of it, and as a result suffer all the psychic comedowns and consequences you would expect. To play with fantasy, Forest’s narrative warns, is to play with a loaded gun.’
‘—weird reading habits of mine can only be understood as a corrective, a retrospective manoeuvre: they back-informed an earlier self – that quiet, alienated boy whose family, entry-level middle class, went in awe of 1930s suburban Tudor – let alone the real thing – as a goal they knew they could never aspire to. By the time I was thirty I wanted to make certain he knew – I wanted that boy to understand perfectly – that it was no longer my job to escape, or to yearn, or to facilitate anyone else’s yearnings, including his.’
‘—near a National Park, this version of me could relax. In fact, he couldn’t relax any other way. Drugs had never worked. ‘Being a writer’ had never worked. Sex had never worked. It was a feeling that might be lost later in the day for any number of reasons, but for now the venue itself – the upland outdoors – acted like a tranquilliser and an antidepressant. It was mental health on a stick: Mental Heath.’
‘Never favour plot. Story is fine, but plot is like chemical farming. Closure is wrong. It is toxic. Work into a genre if you like, but from as far outside it as possible. Read as much about Hollywood formalism as you can bear, so you know what not to do. Break the structures – don’t just look for new and sly twists on them. Never do clever tricks with reader expectation. Instead be honest, open and direct in your intention not to deliver the things the reader expects. You won’t always be successful in that, because it’s harder than it looks. After all, you used to be a reader too—You aren’t a reader any more. You’re a writer, so don’t try to get reader kicks from the act of writing. Never tell yourself a story. That romantic relationship is over for you. From now on the satisfactions will be elsewhere.’
This tickled me through in the most (in every sense of the word) mental way. And especially so after reading Didion’s ‘fiction’, and not feeling/developing any emotional resonance with/about it. To clarify, I don’t always agree with his ‘ideas’, but even when I don’t, I am still able to enjoy the way he introduces them, and the way he just goes on and on about them. Maybe it’s his tone, the style, or something-something — vibes? Shoegaze(y) vibrations and murmurs to my silly heart.
‘Structures broken or fallen, structures bricolaged on to one another, bits of structures banged and bolted together using the most and the least sophisticated of techniques, wilful structures which don’t just undercut expectation but which seem to make nothing you can know. Instead they struggle to imply there’s something different – some different way of describing things – to be had—There is just enough of a common motive to keep the relationship going, keep up the exploration of the territory. Writer, reader and text struggle off into the distances they have constructed together, gesticulating and out of sorts with one another, yet bound by the idea that something can come of all this. Characters: layer up the deep terror of these characters, whose lives are sustained like a very thin iridescent membrane around nothing—All stories should be ghost stories, in this sense.’
‘So what is the function of the novelist? Not to fellate the audience in the hope of delivering a more exciting product. At the moment I can’t think of anything more positive than that, because most other possibilities define the novelist as a philosopher, ideologist, politician, news reporter, historian, single-issue social engineer, creative writing professor, stand-up comedian, whatever. Most quoted but woolliest of all possibilities is to be an entertainer—The last thing you want to do is ‘tell stories’. Everyone claims to be doing that, from scientists to brand managers. As a result the whole thing has become nauseating. When asked, I now reply: I make things up, like everyone else in this very doomed & self-fictionalising culture.’
‘I redeem the old cat’s ashes from the vet’s on White Hart Lane—imagine falling over a curb and dropping him—having a broken hip and being covered in addition with the remains of your pet would be irretrievably uncool even in East Sheen—‘I know we’re in a weird place with this,’ I tell him. ‘For you it’s a transitional place. I appreciate that.’’
‘Like silence. Love a pork pie. Feel frail, although that’s probably not the case yet but an imaginative casting-forward. Often employ the rhetorical question ‘What am I like?’, meaning how can anyone be this fucked up, absent-minded or late. Keep some parts of myself severely to myself, am thus able to maintain a deep fruitful disjunction between the real world of the internet and the real real world of the real world. Always a fiction. Seventy-seven years old this year. No heroes. Will read for cash.’
I just think his nowtbooks are quite orrighttt you knoww.
'Q: Do you identify as a science fiction writer?
A: No, I identify nightly, or at least every second night or so, as someone who would like to be rusting under the Thames.'
February 17, 2024
13th book for 2024.
An interesting, frustrating, beautiful book: part ruminations on a life lived; part observations on society both small and large; part discourse on the craft of writing; part thoughts about advancing age with all the subtle regrets for the loss of a brighter past you can't reenter.
This is a short book, but dense. I was too tired/distracted/stupid to extract everything I should have from it. It's my fault. Mea Culpa. I am not a writer and this book is a book about writing. Not a Steven King book about writing. This is something darker, more mediative, subtle—not something that can (or should?) be parsed by someone who hasn't already struggled at the art.
Perhaps next time around I'll be able to parse the sentences and the threads of thoughts better.
4-stars.
An interesting, frustrating, beautiful book: part ruminations on a life lived; part observations on society both small and large; part discourse on the craft of writing; part thoughts about advancing age with all the subtle regrets for the loss of a brighter past you can't reenter.
This is a short book, but dense. I was too tired/distracted/stupid to extract everything I should have from it. It's my fault. Mea Culpa. I am not a writer and this book is a book about writing. Not a Steven King book about writing. This is something darker, more mediative, subtle—not something that can (or should?) be parsed by someone who hasn't already struggled at the art.
Perhaps next time around I'll be able to parse the sentences and the threads of thoughts better.
4-stars.
June 21, 2024
Definire questo “Vorrei essere qui” in poche parole può risultare complicato, nonostante la sua (relativa) brevità: libro di memorie, manifesto di una poetica, manuale di scrittura, confessione di un pensiero.
Harrison racchiude nel testo una storia decennale, una vita passata a osservare il mondo e a metterlo su carta, e lo fa con la stessa visione che abbiamo trovato nei suoi romanzi, in un’esplosione weird e immaginifica tra il suo passato e ciò che la vita ha saputo trasmettergli.
L’autore riflette a ruota libera, spesso alternando gli argomenti e donando ritmo.
In perfetta linea col suo passato, Harrison non conduce lungo una via precisa e uniforme, ma preferisce spaziare: troveremo quindi un aneddoto sui suoi esordi, condito dal come sia giunto a elaborare una saga fantasy (ricostruita e decostruita a posteriori, proprio grazie a queste riflessioni), ai confronti col panorama letterario, alle tappe di una trasformazione tanto umana quanto stilistica.
Impossibile non restare affascinati dal tormento che strugge l’autore nella sua ricerca verso e attraverso la parola scritta: un avvicinarsi, per certi aspetti, a uno struggimento quasi romantico.
La mancata linearità di cui si accennava è rintracciabile anche nello stile: fluido eppure articolato e marcatamente, fieramente weird, secondo un’etichetta che Harrison non rifugge, ma che nemmeno rivendica a denti stretti.
Trattandosi di un sentiero che è stato percorso sin dagli albori in quanto necessità di vita prima ancora che di scrittura, è possibile percepire la semplicità con cui i messaggi trasudano dalla pagina: non vi è forzatura in questo stile solo di primo acchito respingente.
Basteranno poche pagine per venirne assorbiti e goderne in quanto tale, al di là del contenuto.
“Vorrei essere qui” riesce a narrare una storia pur non avendo, nella sua premessa iniziale, la pretesa di farlo: non sceglie quale percorso seguire, ma dona libero sfogo ai pensieri di uno scrittore che viaggia tra esperienza e capacità di stupire.
Non pensate di legare questa lettura al vostro genere preferito: ne sminuireste il valore.
Che siate aspiranti scrittori, curiosi indagatori del pensiero altrui o semplici appassionati della parola scritta, in questo testo riuscirete a trovare qualcosa in grado di donarvi soddisfazione. E questo, per un buon libro, è forse il pregio più grande di tutti.
Harrison racchiude nel testo una storia decennale, una vita passata a osservare il mondo e a metterlo su carta, e lo fa con la stessa visione che abbiamo trovato nei suoi romanzi, in un’esplosione weird e immaginifica tra il suo passato e ciò che la vita ha saputo trasmettergli.
L’autore riflette a ruota libera, spesso alternando gli argomenti e donando ritmo.
In perfetta linea col suo passato, Harrison non conduce lungo una via precisa e uniforme, ma preferisce spaziare: troveremo quindi un aneddoto sui suoi esordi, condito dal come sia giunto a elaborare una saga fantasy (ricostruita e decostruita a posteriori, proprio grazie a queste riflessioni), ai confronti col panorama letterario, alle tappe di una trasformazione tanto umana quanto stilistica.
Impossibile non restare affascinati dal tormento che strugge l’autore nella sua ricerca verso e attraverso la parola scritta: un avvicinarsi, per certi aspetti, a uno struggimento quasi romantico.
La mancata linearità di cui si accennava è rintracciabile anche nello stile: fluido eppure articolato e marcatamente, fieramente weird, secondo un’etichetta che Harrison non rifugge, ma che nemmeno rivendica a denti stretti.
Trattandosi di un sentiero che è stato percorso sin dagli albori in quanto necessità di vita prima ancora che di scrittura, è possibile percepire la semplicità con cui i messaggi trasudano dalla pagina: non vi è forzatura in questo stile solo di primo acchito respingente.
Basteranno poche pagine per venirne assorbiti e goderne in quanto tale, al di là del contenuto.
“Vorrei essere qui” riesce a narrare una storia pur non avendo, nella sua premessa iniziale, la pretesa di farlo: non sceglie quale percorso seguire, ma dona libero sfogo ai pensieri di uno scrittore che viaggia tra esperienza e capacità di stupire.
Non pensate di legare questa lettura al vostro genere preferito: ne sminuireste il valore.
Che siate aspiranti scrittori, curiosi indagatori del pensiero altrui o semplici appassionati della parola scritta, in questo testo riuscirete a trovare qualcosa in grado di donarvi soddisfazione. E questo, per un buon libro, è forse il pregio più grande di tutti.
Read
June 4, 2023This delightful, insightful, stubbornly peculiar “anti-memoir” by Mike Harrison is my book of the year so far; I can’t see anything overtaking it, frankly.
The writing is as luminously sui generis and haunting as his best work, although there’s so much in that category to render the superlative clumsy. Wish I Was Here is also fictively tricksy, memory standing in for the undeniable, unreliable narrator, the weight of evidence such that each of us is essentially no more than palimpsest, dense overlays of misrememberings and dismemberings.
Perhaps it’s a book about writing, about not writing, about an escape to and from writing: I don’t really know, and don’t need to know; I just absolutely loved its brilliance and its ghosts.
Perhaps it’s a book about writing, about not writing, about an escape to and from writing: I don’t really know, and don’t need to know; I just absolutely loved its brilliance and its ghosts.
April 24, 2024
Šī bija kaitinoša, izaicinoša, mulsinoša, brīžiem nesaprotama, brīžiem interesanta lasāmviela. Anti memuāri, kuros autors sasviedis kopā dažādus atmiņu fragmentus, pārdomas, fantāzijas, literāro ideju skices, sevis meklējumus un eksistenciālas skumjas. Iespējams, ka šī grāmata krietni vairāk uzrunā citus rakstniekus, tāpēc viņi arī tik dikti saslavējuši (ļoti daudz slavas dziesmu uz vāka un iekšlapās). Kā vienkāršam lasītājam man anotācija šķiet maldinoša.
June 8, 2023
Your brain works in wondrous ways, Michael.
It was a genuine pleasure to spend some time with you.
It was a genuine pleasure to spend some time with you.
December 27, 2024
It's not the book for a lot of people, and maybe you'll give up on it quite soon? I hope I'm wrong, because I often fear I can only get at my own self the same way, wrenching up armor plates and translating what something scratched on the underside (or what might be marks from my pliers), and hoping someone is patient enough not to leave the room immediately while I'm in one of my efforts. Metaphor, and self-consciousness, and constant shifts of perspective. He's not doing it to be clever, he does it because it's the most honest attempt he can make to tell you about his life without falling down a well of lies. It seems he was anxious once that he would believe the lies, but the real danger is just smearing the truth into unrecognisability. Or perhaps hating himself; that's what happens to me when I try to answer people's questions with a realist response, a shorthand or a narrative they are expecting.
I have a different review written out. And I have dozens of underlined passages and sticky bookmark arrows. Incorporating his attempt into my attempt. But there's the self-consciousness again, and the "puerile self-pity" named by that beloved critical voice in Harrowhark's head, and the retreat from the puerile which is the repression of emotion, and the writing to try to return the repressed... it's a complicated place up here. I'm trying to let it be messy.
My patron saint won't admit to a name or identity or sainthood, but he writes a lot of M. John Harrison's books and rarely shows up anywhere else. I pulled his words and his meanings apart from all over this book and stuck them back together here. That's a terrible thing to do to someone's book but this writer is a very spacious and populated place; maybe he'll understood the need for me to invent a new perspective in there, one who can give me a comforting invocation. (I'm also trying to care more about myself more than about imagined authors.)
"Those who have failed to regulate the self
Those whose behaviors enact a medicating fiction
The unsoothed. The dysmorphic. The unconditional.
Those who have little connection with the scenes in which they find themselves
Those who believe they are haunted but are the haunting
Those who stuff a live part of themself into a box and shut the lid
People who never learn to kick ass
People whose diseases aren’t, after all, going to be cured
People whose motives aren’t clear
People who look for a private metaphor
Anyone in a state of warm dissociation interrupted by brief moments of political rage
Anyone fostering an incomplete relationship with themself
Anyone who needs each book to be a different demon
All of us who puzzle through our lives in a dream, suspecting it's not a dream, or in a fog in a foreign, war-torn country, whether or not we know it
You are always with us. We are always here!"
If you see yourself in any of that, let me know. I could use some company.
I have a different review written out. And I have dozens of underlined passages and sticky bookmark arrows. Incorporating his attempt into my attempt. But there's the self-consciousness again, and the "puerile self-pity" named by that beloved critical voice in Harrowhark's head, and the retreat from the puerile which is the repression of emotion, and the writing to try to return the repressed... it's a complicated place up here. I'm trying to let it be messy.
My patron saint won't admit to a name or identity or sainthood, but he writes a lot of M. John Harrison's books and rarely shows up anywhere else. I pulled his words and his meanings apart from all over this book and stuck them back together here. That's a terrible thing to do to someone's book but this writer is a very spacious and populated place; maybe he'll understood the need for me to invent a new perspective in there, one who can give me a comforting invocation. (I'm also trying to care more about myself more than about imagined authors.)
"Those who have failed to regulate the self
Those whose behaviors enact a medicating fiction
The unsoothed. The dysmorphic. The unconditional.
Those who have little connection with the scenes in which they find themselves
Those who believe they are haunted but are the haunting
Those who stuff a live part of themself into a box and shut the lid
People who never learn to kick ass
People whose diseases aren’t, after all, going to be cured
People whose motives aren’t clear
People who look for a private metaphor
Anyone in a state of warm dissociation interrupted by brief moments of political rage
Anyone fostering an incomplete relationship with themself
Anyone who needs each book to be a different demon
All of us who puzzle through our lives in a dream, suspecting it's not a dream, or in a fog in a foreign, war-torn country, whether or not we know it
You are always with us. We are always here!"
If you see yourself in any of that, let me know. I could use some company.
July 6, 2024
È la magia di Harrison, il suo essere nel mondo, il suo sguardo e la sua volontà di raccontare ciò che lo circonda, il pensiero che lo attraversa, l’inquietudine dei suoi ricordi. Questo libro incanta perché è una breccia nelle riflessioni di uno scrittore, mi ha fatto sentire privilegiata nel poter scorgere scintille del processo creativo di scrittura. È una vita nell’amigdala, fatta di istinti, imprevedibilità. Nessuno stimolo e la sovrastimolazione, la soglia del non-detto, l’ipernarratività di ogni avvenimento come se veramente lo si potesse cogliere quello stato d’animo là. Quell’incanto che non sai se lo stai vivendo davvero o è solo un sogno d’intensità bruciante.
L’arrampicata, con il suo dover pensare alla mossa successiva e mai a quella passata, diventa metafora di un incentivo a vivere l’attimo, a togliere sovrastrutture.
Resto profondamente scissa e frammentata nei confronti di ciò che sento, penso, vedo e il restituirmi domande di questo testo fa sì che io non abbia rimesso insieme i pezzi ma ne abbia fatti alcuni ancora più piccoli.
Ho slegato memorie e intrecciato sensazioni.
È stato bello.
L’arrampicata, con il suo dover pensare alla mossa successiva e mai a quella passata, diventa metafora di un incentivo a vivere l’attimo, a togliere sovrastrutture.
Resto profondamente scissa e frammentata nei confronti di ciò che sento, penso, vedo e il restituirmi domande di questo testo fa sì che io non abbia rimesso insieme i pezzi ma ne abbia fatti alcuni ancora più piccoli.
Ho slegato memorie e intrecciato sensazioni.
È stato bello.
June 20, 2024
An odd assortment of thoughts from Mr Harrison, mostly derived from his notebooks it seems.
There's a small sprinkling of events from his life which leads him off on various tangents.
His experiences climbing during the 1980s (which led itself to his novel Climbers) also provides rich source material.
He also gives what sounds like quite good advice for prospective writers.
There's a small sprinkling of events from his life which leads him off on various tangents.
His experiences climbing during the 1980s (which led itself to his novel Climbers) also provides rich source material.
He also gives what sounds like quite good advice for prospective writers.
August 20, 2024
Erm, what was that? What have I read?
June 1, 2023
Wow, that was brilliant!
He’s getting more deeply strange and flat-out odd with every day (or book) that passes.
And what an amazing journey to becoming a writer! Nowadays, you assume that no-one could ever have become a writer without an MFA or MA in Creative Writing, or indeed without a trust fund. Harrison seemed to just fall into it. He seems almost fully-formed (as they say) from Day One. Of course you can see development in his work, but, for someone who was published young, he’s writing beautiful sentences with the full MJH flavour from the get go. He doesn’t seem to have gone through that process of doing really bad, deeply embarrassing, derivative work.
In one sense, you could say that the Blog entry is the perfect form for him (keeping in mind that he’s anti every form he works with). Even without the internet you feel MJH would have arrived at this form at this time. The condensed mixture of diary entry, direct observation from life, aphorism and prose poem. Also, the importance of collage and montage. His writing is starting to resemble a Phillipa Barlow sculpture. Something so knocked about, kicked about, and repurposed that it starts to become almost random or accidental.
There’s one hilarious (it tickled me) note that he wrote for himself years ago. “Keep saying no.”
Of course, “Keep saying yes” (Saying yes to the opposite of no) or even “Follow your heart/bliss/etc” would have been equally accurate, but wouldn’t have described the arsey, aggy, ‘anti’ nature of the project. Maybe anger is good fuel because it’s durable like styrofoam.
Harrison portrays himself grimly recording the grim things he sees, but his writing also uses lyricism, open-hearted, wide-eyed sweetness and vulnerability (It’s one of the elements that under-cuts his representation of masculinity in Climbers.), but he can use it like early Johnny Vegas as a challenge to the audience or to himself. He sometimes uses exclamation marks like that guy from the fast show; Greyhounds? Brilliant! Chipped enamel sinks! Brilliant! Generally speaking the more mundane the object, the bigger the exclamation mark. And this is a writer who can do wonder better than anyone. He doesn’t need exclamation marks. He’s using them (you think) because he’s in some way bored.
Or, there’s always the danger of boredom. I have an ADHD friend. If you’re in a restaurant waiting for your order he starts playing Jenga with all the cutlery and water glasses. He likes the anxious glances from people close by when a glass hits the floor. In the same way you can feel MJH behind the book getting bored of you, getting bored of this (characters? story? yawn). He would like to turn writing into an extreme sport. Another funny episode in the book is when he becomes excited that an Anthony Gormley exhibition he’s visiting is unsafe. He loves the Gormley show, but, you’re left thinking, would have loved it even more if there was the possibility it could kill him or, at least, leave him seriously injured.
He’s getting more deeply strange and flat-out odd with every day (or book) that passes.
And what an amazing journey to becoming a writer! Nowadays, you assume that no-one could ever have become a writer without an MFA or MA in Creative Writing, or indeed without a trust fund. Harrison seemed to just fall into it. He seems almost fully-formed (as they say) from Day One. Of course you can see development in his work, but, for someone who was published young, he’s writing beautiful sentences with the full MJH flavour from the get go. He doesn’t seem to have gone through that process of doing really bad, deeply embarrassing, derivative work.
In one sense, you could say that the Blog entry is the perfect form for him (keeping in mind that he’s anti every form he works with). Even without the internet you feel MJH would have arrived at this form at this time. The condensed mixture of diary entry, direct observation from life, aphorism and prose poem. Also, the importance of collage and montage. His writing is starting to resemble a Phillipa Barlow sculpture. Something so knocked about, kicked about, and repurposed that it starts to become almost random or accidental.
There’s one hilarious (it tickled me) note that he wrote for himself years ago. “Keep saying no.”
Of course, “Keep saying yes” (Saying yes to the opposite of no) or even “Follow your heart/bliss/etc” would have been equally accurate, but wouldn’t have described the arsey, aggy, ‘anti’ nature of the project. Maybe anger is good fuel because it’s durable like styrofoam.
Harrison portrays himself grimly recording the grim things he sees, but his writing also uses lyricism, open-hearted, wide-eyed sweetness and vulnerability (It’s one of the elements that under-cuts his representation of masculinity in Climbers.), but he can use it like early Johnny Vegas as a challenge to the audience or to himself. He sometimes uses exclamation marks like that guy from the fast show; Greyhounds? Brilliant! Chipped enamel sinks! Brilliant! Generally speaking the more mundane the object, the bigger the exclamation mark. And this is a writer who can do wonder better than anyone. He doesn’t need exclamation marks. He’s using them (you think) because he’s in some way bored.
Or, there’s always the danger of boredom. I have an ADHD friend. If you’re in a restaurant waiting for your order he starts playing Jenga with all the cutlery and water glasses. He likes the anxious glances from people close by when a glass hits the floor. In the same way you can feel MJH behind the book getting bored of you, getting bored of this (characters? story? yawn). He would like to turn writing into an extreme sport. Another funny episode in the book is when he becomes excited that an Anthony Gormley exhibition he’s visiting is unsafe. He loves the Gormley show, but, you’re left thinking, would have loved it even more if there was the possibility it could kill him or, at least, leave him seriously injured.
November 20, 2024
Me encanta cómo Harrison ha escrito este libro. Un caso práctico de lo que entiende por una memoria, un conjunto de textos muchas veces inconexos que comienzan amagando con una biografía formal (infancia, padres, adolescencia, aprendizajes...) para después convertirse en lo que es para la mayoría de nosotros una mirada al pasado: una sucesión de recuerdos sin un rasgo de arco dramático. Algo que Harrison se preocupa de dejar negro sobre blanco cuando en varios momentos cuenta su visión sobre la narrativa, su frustración con la literatura de taller, su búsqueda de contar nuestro tiempo con la estética de nuestro tiempo y no con los legajos de los recursos que se crearon hace un siglo para contar una época bastante diferente.
Por ese motivo, para quien busque (como yo en algún momento) una biografía disciplinada que cuente lo que era vivir en el swinging London de los 60, moverse en el fandom de la época, su percepción de la new wave, la evolución hasta la actualidad... puede ser frustrante. A ratos para mi lo ha sido. Parece que el tío Zip nos ha colocado entradas de su blog. Sin embargo, entre los fragmentos en los que se pone político, acribilla al género zombie, invita a mirar con otros ojos la nostalgia y revela lo salvadora (y vacía) que fue el descubrimiento de la escalada en roca, hay imágenes de una cotidianidad desarmante que invitan a descubrir lo maravilloso en la experiencia cotidiana mientras se acerca a la posmodernidad, el caos, la decadencia... iluminadas con una prosa hermosa que invita a ser releída. También porque muchas veces cuesta pillarle el sentido en la primera pasada. Y disfrutar del humor con el que cuenta las cosas
"'Q: Do you identify as a science fiction writer?
A: No, I identify nightly, or at least every second night or so, as someone who would like to be rusting under the Thames.'"
Por ese motivo, para quien busque (como yo en algún momento) una biografía disciplinada que cuente lo que era vivir en el swinging London de los 60, moverse en el fandom de la época, su percepción de la new wave, la evolución hasta la actualidad... puede ser frustrante. A ratos para mi lo ha sido. Parece que el tío Zip nos ha colocado entradas de su blog. Sin embargo, entre los fragmentos en los que se pone político, acribilla al género zombie, invita a mirar con otros ojos la nostalgia y revela lo salvadora (y vacía) que fue el descubrimiento de la escalada en roca, hay imágenes de una cotidianidad desarmante que invitan a descubrir lo maravilloso en la experiencia cotidiana mientras se acerca a la posmodernidad, el caos, la decadencia... iluminadas con una prosa hermosa que invita a ser releída. También porque muchas veces cuesta pillarle el sentido en la primera pasada. Y disfrutar del humor con el que cuenta las cosas
"'Q: Do you identify as a science fiction writer?
A: No, I identify nightly, or at least every second night or so, as someone who would like to be rusting under the Thames.'"
October 15, 2023
I confess that I bought this book on the strength of how much I enjoyed The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which was my first experience of Harrison. Perhaps I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from something billed as An Anti-Memoir. Flashes of genius and, well, other bits.
I enjoyed the start with its concept of nowtbooks. The little insights into the writing technique and the making of notes.
There is a feast of small paragraphs laden with observations and gems. I loved this observation of first reading J G Ballard:
Harrison dispenses writing wisdom in section 2 which is titled Understanding Maps.
I really enjoyed these observations about flashbacks, because so often there is something that you saw that made you want to write, but what, and how to make a second-long vision into a story let alone a book:
My criticism of the whole endeavour is that I’m still not sure what Harrison set out to achieve. To write a book about writing, or to make an autobiography? His snippets about his early life were interesting, as were some of his observations about writing and technique. Did the book need to be one or the other? Perhaps not. But the success depends much on what the reader is looking for.
I enjoyed the start with its concept of nowtbooks. The little insights into the writing technique and the making of notes.
When I was younger I thought writing should be the struggle with what you are. Now I think it’s the struggle to find out who you were.
I liked a notebook spiral-bound: it was easier to police. I couldn’t bear hasty scribble, interlinears, strike-through, muddle. If I thought of a better sentence, I was compelled to tear out the whole page and begin again. I wanted notes to be notes: I also wanted them to be pristine, finished, absolutely articulate little gems. Soon I was keeping two sets of accounts, the rough and the smooth, the instant and the perfected. Some notes didn’t seem worth the effort of polishing. These I labelled ‘nowts’, experiencing a vague resentment if I ever caught sight of them again. In the mid 1980s they would be transferred laboriously into their own computer files: dumped. Years after you abandoned it, a note like that takes on a new, often uneasy semblance of life. The file is as warm to the touch as the radioactive container at the end of Robert Aldrich’s 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly: lift the lid and you could swear you hear, in a voice composed of both a whisper and a roar, the continuous repetition of a word.
There is a feast of small paragraphs laden with observations and gems. I loved this observation of first reading J G Ballard:
Who has the right of way in these rites of passage? They fuck you up, but though you feel like the victim, you give as good as you get. I was a disaster area of rage and worry, and I admire the courage of people who felt they should try to bring some aid and order to it; they could have built a fence around me and walked away. I did. Back then, I was reading J. G. Ballard for the first time. That line of his, ‘Most of us were suffering from various degrees of beach fatigue, that chronic malaise which exiles the victim to a limbo of endless sunbathing, dark glasses and afternoon terraces’: I remember the frisson it gave me at sixteen or seventeen years old, the sense of being sucked into the heart of some point of view so oblique, so feverish, that it was obliged to clothe itself in the matter-of-fact. I was still trying to contract beach fatigue a decade later.
Harrison dispenses writing wisdom in section 2 which is titled Understanding Maps.
I hate concepts. Having a concept isn’t having something to write: having something to write about is having something to write. Never favour plot. Story is fine, but plot is like chemical farming…
The struggle to say anything is always the struggle to reinvent the wheel – to distinguish the description of an experience from all the other descriptions of it that might seem similar.
I really enjoyed these observations about flashbacks, because so often there is something that you saw that made you want to write, but what, and how to make a second-long vision into a story let alone a book:
Unpredictable flashbacks, so brief they vanish as they arrive. Hard to grasp, impossible to trace. Prompted by the weather, the light, a sound, a thought about something else entirely, or – finally and worst – without any stimulus at all: leakage from someone else’s project, as if some unrelated occupier of the self is editing footage of your life for purposes of their own. Fields, hills, foreign cities. Sometimes a voice. Always objects in light. A figure or two, not many, glimpsed from across a room or a street. You can’t call these memories. They don’t last long enough. No events seem to be involved , or even implied. They don’t seem to have happened to you, only to have been recorded. Single images if you like. Mostly like photographs, but snatched away in the same moment they’re presented. Hardly registering on your real-time present. Too short a time to remember anything through. Absolutely non-narrative…
My criticism of the whole endeavour is that I’m still not sure what Harrison set out to achieve. To write a book about writing, or to make an autobiography? His snippets about his early life were interesting, as were some of his observations about writing and technique. Did the book need to be one or the other? Perhaps not. But the success depends much on what the reader is looking for.
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April 19, 2024"An anti-memoir", which at times feels like as much of a fig leaf as 'anti-folk', but elsewhere you can see what he means, Harrison so fed up of everyone from scientists to estate agents insisting on a story that he's now adamant writers should go the other way, stop providing accounts that pretend the world makes sense, instead deliberately play up to how little resolution reality tends to offer (appropriately, I read a library copy whose lower page edges have a mysterious red splatter, the source of which clearly relates to p157, but the full explanation of which I am certain never to know). Naturally, this segues into writing advice, which often reads like Steve Aylett's Heart Of The Original played straight, and a couple of times like Molesworth; between the two, the latter may be less unsettling. As with all manifestos, it probably shouldn't be taken too seriously; I'm not even sure all of Harrison's fiction complies, and in almost anyone else's hands it would tend to produce the most incomprehensible, alienating, over-experimental yet also old-fashioned wank. But equally, in a world where every fucker is enjoined to chop their material about to fit straitjackets like McKee's Story, at least this is some kind of counterbalance. And at the back of it all, there remains a certain unexpected kinship with the last literary memoir I read, by the far more conservative Machen (an author mentioned here once, in passing, not altogether fondly*), Harrison still frustrated and fascinated by how impossible it is ever to fully record or convey the sensation of looking at even something as simple as a staircase, or curling smoke, much less the moments that make up the lost past.
*It's a delightfully catty book in general, in a specifically Midlands way, though I'd struggle to put my finger on what I mean by that.
*It's a delightfully catty book in general, in a specifically Midlands way, though I'd struggle to put my finger on what I mean by that.
June 27, 2023
Ever read a book so good you’re embarrassed by your inability to say something smart about it?
This is an anti-memoir but possibly the only memoir I know I'll read more than once. Harrison has no interest in a by-the-numbers chronicle of his life, or the transitions of his life, and refuses to impose an order on the chaotic events of his life lived as a writer. This chaos is fascinating.
I’m not sure if Mike would approve of the word ‘deconstruct’ to describe what he does here with regards to his writing. He talks about memory and its importance, he gives his takes on various facets of literature, and blends/blurs truth and fiction compellingly. I’ve read a few of his novels and they make so much more sense using the keys he’s provided here. But still at a distance.
All tortured writers should read this.
This is an anti-memoir but possibly the only memoir I know I'll read more than once. Harrison has no interest in a by-the-numbers chronicle of his life, or the transitions of his life, and refuses to impose an order on the chaotic events of his life lived as a writer. This chaos is fascinating.
I’m not sure if Mike would approve of the word ‘deconstruct’ to describe what he does here with regards to his writing. He talks about memory and its importance, he gives his takes on various facets of literature, and blends/blurs truth and fiction compellingly. I’ve read a few of his novels and they make so much more sense using the keys he’s provided here. But still at a distance.
All tortured writers should read this.
May 26, 2024
really connected with it despite not getting like 1/2 of what it says. i felt sooooo dumb
August 19, 2024
Best book I've read for ages. It's part memoir and part philosophy. Sort of the opposite of a creative writing guide. It's like anti-writing advice and all the better for it. I liked the bits about his cats. Part memoir, part process guide, all M John. Cannot recommend this book enough.
April 5, 2024
Absolutely brilliant.
August 5, 2024
!!!!!!!!!!!
There are some really brilliant bits of this book, lots of them, but just as much of it I found difficult to read. Which I think might be some of the point. He's always running away from himself and the prose is always running away from you. Then it waits for you to catch up then it starts running again.
I like the stuff about climbing a lot, particularly the friendships. This is because I also climb and those friendships are just like those old climbing documentaries. I really liked the line about the cheese sandwich being the gritstone madeleine. I really liked all the descriptions of gritstone.
My favourite part was probably pp.187-188. I think this was a really brilliant illustration of how we age and interact with ourselves through time. And it was playful (important).
I didn't mind too much that I didn't understand all of the book. It was heavy on the impression. I guess it was heavy on the impressionism. It is the kind of book I would like to revisit and revisit.
I like the writing about self-storage. I like how the political bleeds through, particularly in the section about who has the rights and assertions to where you can walk. The trusts and the agencies and the quangos. The secret push and pull of power. And the same on a more interpersonal level, with the interaction in the train carriage.
The thing I liked the least was how male & patriarchal the book felt (maybe he would say, yes but I am a man). This included a lot of the writing about writing. The way M. John Harrison writes about writing has a lot of 'you must' do x, or 'you have to' do y. There were a lot of assertions about the right way to write or be a writer. It kind of felt the sort of opposite to when Maggie Nelson, in The Argonauts, says she has a problem with feeling an assertion about most things. Which I think shows that the you musts and the you have tos are not needed to write brilliantly.
I also got really bored during the bit about birds but maybe that is just personal preference because I find birds really boring.
Anyway. This book makes me think differently about how to read and how to write. And I really laughed out loud at his vision of his own death, it was the phrase 'in front of everybody'.
There are some really brilliant bits of this book, lots of them, but just as much of it I found difficult to read. Which I think might be some of the point. He's always running away from himself and the prose is always running away from you. Then it waits for you to catch up then it starts running again.
I like the stuff about climbing a lot, particularly the friendships. This is because I also climb and those friendships are just like those old climbing documentaries. I really liked the line about the cheese sandwich being the gritstone madeleine. I really liked all the descriptions of gritstone.
My favourite part was probably pp.187-188. I think this was a really brilliant illustration of how we age and interact with ourselves through time. And it was playful (important).
I didn't mind too much that I didn't understand all of the book. It was heavy on the impression. I guess it was heavy on the impressionism. It is the kind of book I would like to revisit and revisit.
I like the writing about self-storage. I like how the political bleeds through, particularly in the section about who has the rights and assertions to where you can walk. The trusts and the agencies and the quangos. The secret push and pull of power. And the same on a more interpersonal level, with the interaction in the train carriage.
The thing I liked the least was how male & patriarchal the book felt (maybe he would say, yes but I am a man). This included a lot of the writing about writing. The way M. John Harrison writes about writing has a lot of 'you must' do x, or 'you have to' do y. There were a lot of assertions about the right way to write or be a writer. It kind of felt the sort of opposite to when Maggie Nelson, in The Argonauts, says she has a problem with feeling an assertion about most things. Which I think shows that the you musts and the you have tos are not needed to write brilliantly.
I also got really bored during the bit about birds but maybe that is just personal preference because I find birds really boring.
Anyway. This book makes me think differently about how to read and how to write. And I really laughed out loud at his vision of his own death, it was the phrase 'in front of everybody'.
August 29, 2024
I've started this note a couple of times, addressing it in a completely wrong way. Trying to define this book is a waste of time, absolutely useless. Therefore, I will keep it simple: Such a delightful exercise of putting into words a whole world, with its abstractions, maps and issues. Full of layers and what it might look like chaotic thoughts, Harrison's book lead us into the essence of specific experiences, images and memories. Everything about it is profoundly intimate and it still makes sense. Probably, due to his prodigious and cynical prose.
Perhaps this book, since doesn't necessarily follows a linear narrative is what all memoirs should look for.
I feel blessed to see that my favourite books so far this year are somehow about the act of writing.
Perhaps this book, since doesn't necessarily follows a linear narrative is what all memoirs should look for.
I feel blessed to see that my favourite books so far this year are somehow about the act of writing.
November 16, 2024
A rag bag of reminiscences, thoughts about reminiscences, thoughts about writing (his own and as a general activity), fragments of stories, reflections on identity, climbing, growing old and much else. Probably only of much interest if you know and like Harrison's previous work (as I do) to which this comes as a fine companion piece.
June 22, 2023
Review coming..
February 5, 2025
Decisamente non era il libro per me, peccato.
April 2, 2024
No, I don’t buy this. While some (some) of the (auto)biographical material is OK, the second section, discussing the nature of literature, is simply tedious – a half-baked idea dragged back and forth for far too many pages.
I’d rate this as 3.5, but because so many others have over-rated it I’m marking it down as a 3.
I’d rate this as 3.5, but because so many others have over-rated it I’m marking it down as a 3.
March 21, 2025
Great writing style, but too fragmented for me and with parts I had no interest in.
July 30, 2024
Oh to be inside the head of a writer! The author thinks so deeply about writing that he manages to mix it with his own life and it's well a story of him but through the way he imagines words. And lives and the stories that are important to him.
Interesting, daring and honestly so cool
Interesting, daring and honestly so cool
June 8, 2023
M John Harrison breaks rules to create prose with what is a seemingly chaotic mania, but at second glance is really a deep understanding, a mastery of his craft, allowing his stories to defy genre norms.
Reading Light was the most unique science fiction experience I've ever had: intelligent, mad, and trippy, and the same level of shock shines through in this memoir, or as Harrison befittingly calls it, antimemoir.
"... all stories are stories of ghosts."
Wish I Was Here is as much a work of art as it is a memoir. Between snapshots of his own life are stories of others, people he knows, characters he's made up all in a story of their own. It is as though the study of these people is an ongoing observation for the sake of observing; isn't that what creatives are, anyway? Observers? In an obsessive way? This structure gives the reader the sense that we are reading a collection of short stories, thus leaving the norms of autobiographical work at the door. I think fans of fiction, such as myself, are thankful for this approach.
In the end, this is a book about writing; a book about being an observer, forever obsessed, therefore I'm going to make the assumption that Wish I Was Here is a love letter to art, and to life itself.
And did I mention: it's properly funny.
10/10
Reading Light was the most unique science fiction experience I've ever had: intelligent, mad, and trippy, and the same level of shock shines through in this memoir, or as Harrison befittingly calls it, antimemoir.
"... all stories are stories of ghosts."
Wish I Was Here is as much a work of art as it is a memoir. Between snapshots of his own life are stories of others, people he knows, characters he's made up all in a story of their own. It is as though the study of these people is an ongoing observation for the sake of observing; isn't that what creatives are, anyway? Observers? In an obsessive way? This structure gives the reader the sense that we are reading a collection of short stories, thus leaving the norms of autobiographical work at the door. I think fans of fiction, such as myself, are thankful for this approach.
In the end, this is a book about writing; a book about being an observer, forever obsessed, therefore I'm going to make the assumption that Wish I Was Here is a love letter to art, and to life itself.
And did I mention: it's properly funny.
10/10
July 16, 2023
Enjoyed the memoir type parts that revolved around writing and was a little less enamored with the random thoughts and ruminations out of Harrison’s observational journal.
July 3, 2024
My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Saga Press, for an advance copy of this new book that serves as both a memoir, a history of consciousness, and a guide to art of writing ,by a person who has always tried to never be similar, or complacent in his art.
I read a lot of memoirs, but I have come to treat many of them as fiction in a way. I can't remember what I had for dinner two nights ago. A memoirist can remember a conversation in a crowded recording studio about the origins of a song, or why a member of the band wanted to leave, sitting in front of a huge pile of cocaine, at 4 in the morning. As humans we write in the gaps we have with what we think might have been, either making us the hero, the villain of the bystander depending on our moods. Memoirs have a main character, one that gets all the focus. Maybe sometimes too much focus. For what if the person being written about, wasn't really there? Wish I Was Here, is a memoir, a technique guide to the life of a writer, and a look at a time that has passed, by M. John Harrison, a writer of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative works.
The memoir is based on the notebooks that Harrison has kept since he was a child. Though sometimes that is not enough to prove that these are true or not, even to himself. Harrison grew up in the Midlands, feeling that he didn't fit in, not smart, not handsome, and not ability to craft things, except for the one year he made a model plane that beat all the other kids, kids whose parents worked in aeronautics. Harrison took to skipping school, using the library as a sanctuary, not for the books but for the peace that he was able to get wandering freely among the stacks, and taking in the titles. Harrison's first job outside of school was cleaning out stables, a job that helped in his later writing career. Leaving finally he came to London, where as a man too old to start he took up climbing, one that gave him more peace, and comfort than all the writing he was doing and drugs that were around at the time of peak counter culture. Harrison talks about his life, but also discusses his works, the ideas and conscience of a writer, and how as a writer, he wonders how much of himself he has constructed, and what is nonfiction around him.
A super dense book for its small size, with lots of references, allusions, maybe even a song or two hidden in the text. That might be just me. This is a book that one reads slowly, taking things in, and wondering why one would write this. Or wonder that someone else has had the same thoughts and continues to go on. I read Harrison years ago his earliest trilogy, in paperback that makes one think of the 80's but with writing that takes on out of time. Which is similar to this book. Just little things, like a discussion about hitchhiking, Harrison couldn't find a car to take him out of town, but when he gave up and decided to go home, cars appeared almost in a line to get him there. I'm not sure if this will inspire writers, except to remind them that writing is a task that one must think about constantly, as I did this review while helping customers and sorting out a messed book display. Though this is a book that writers should read, just for the sheer enjoyment.
I read a lot of memoirs, but I have come to treat many of them as fiction in a way. I can't remember what I had for dinner two nights ago. A memoirist can remember a conversation in a crowded recording studio about the origins of a song, or why a member of the band wanted to leave, sitting in front of a huge pile of cocaine, at 4 in the morning. As humans we write in the gaps we have with what we think might have been, either making us the hero, the villain of the bystander depending on our moods. Memoirs have a main character, one that gets all the focus. Maybe sometimes too much focus. For what if the person being written about, wasn't really there? Wish I Was Here, is a memoir, a technique guide to the life of a writer, and a look at a time that has passed, by M. John Harrison, a writer of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative works.
The memoir is based on the notebooks that Harrison has kept since he was a child. Though sometimes that is not enough to prove that these are true or not, even to himself. Harrison grew up in the Midlands, feeling that he didn't fit in, not smart, not handsome, and not ability to craft things, except for the one year he made a model plane that beat all the other kids, kids whose parents worked in aeronautics. Harrison took to skipping school, using the library as a sanctuary, not for the books but for the peace that he was able to get wandering freely among the stacks, and taking in the titles. Harrison's first job outside of school was cleaning out stables, a job that helped in his later writing career. Leaving finally he came to London, where as a man too old to start he took up climbing, one that gave him more peace, and comfort than all the writing he was doing and drugs that were around at the time of peak counter culture. Harrison talks about his life, but also discusses his works, the ideas and conscience of a writer, and how as a writer, he wonders how much of himself he has constructed, and what is nonfiction around him.
A super dense book for its small size, with lots of references, allusions, maybe even a song or two hidden in the text. That might be just me. This is a book that one reads slowly, taking things in, and wondering why one would write this. Or wonder that someone else has had the same thoughts and continues to go on. I read Harrison years ago his earliest trilogy, in paperback that makes one think of the 80's but with writing that takes on out of time. Which is similar to this book. Just little things, like a discussion about hitchhiking, Harrison couldn't find a car to take him out of town, but when he gave up and decided to go home, cars appeared almost in a line to get him there. I'm not sure if this will inspire writers, except to remind them that writing is a task that one must think about constantly, as I did this review while helping customers and sorting out a messed book display. Though this is a book that writers should read, just for the sheer enjoyment.
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