My Patron

In 1988, I was thirty-one years old. I was a writer in all the senses that count, apart from one: I hadn’t sold a thing, and there seemed to be no real prospect of me selling anything, either. I was working as a teacher in a language school in Soho, London; it was, I feared, exactly the sort of job you drifted into at that age, when you had no real chance of doing the work you really wanted to do. I was afraid of the future—of telling younger colleagues in the year 1999 or 2009, age forty-two or fifty-two, that I was a writer, but a writer whose stuff never got made or published. In the kinds of jobs I had been doing, I met people like that all the time, writers, actors, the occasional ancient musician. They scared me. Meanwhile, the friends I had made at university were all on a career ladder. They were academics or diplomats or journalists or accountants, and they were starting to make money. When I arranged to meet them, I was embarrassed by my own lack of ­advancement—embarrassed, too, that evenings out couldn’t involve food, because restaurants were too expensive.

If someone had told me that I was a couple of years away from being given a book contract that would change my life, then of course I’d have been happy enough to sit and wait it out. (And I’d have been amazed, too. I’d hardly written a paragraph of prose—all my efforts hitherto had gone into scripts, terrible things intended for the movies but which could just as easily have been performed on the radio, consisting as they did of a handful of conversations between two people.) But I didn’t know that. My suspicion was that I was kidding myself, and that the smart thing to do would be to give up the writing and find myself a proper teaching job, if only so that I could pay for my own pizza sometimes.

The principal of the language school was a few years older than me, a smart, dry, interesting man who, years later, for reasons too involved to explain here, became my psychoanalyst, a job he has held down to this day. He was still training for the shrinkhood back then, although it seemed entirely indicative of our respective prospects that his make-do, pay-the-way job was as a principal of a school, and mine was as a part-time, non-contract teacher. One day he offered me a little bit of extra work at the offices of a large Asian trading company that had just set up in London. “They’ll pay well,” he told me, and he was right: they offered me...