We're delighted to present a pair of extracts from Autobibliography, the new book by Rob Doyle, published by Swift Press.
In Autobibliography, Rob Doyle recounts a year spent rereading fifty-two books – from the Dhammapada and Marcus Aurelius, via The Tibetan Book of the Dead and La Rochefoucauld, to Robert Bolaño and Svetlana Alexievich – as well as the memories they trigger and the reverberations they create. It is a record of a year in reading, and of a lifetime of books.
Provocative, intelligent and funny, it is a brilliant introduction to a personal canon by one of the most original and exciting writers around. It is a book about books, a book about reading, and a book about a writer. It is an autobibliography.
There's a question hanging over this whole endeavour that I can’t put off voicing any longer: what kind of writer spends his time composing a book from other people’s books? More simply put, have I nothing better to do? Of course, I’m being somewhat facetious here. I like works that take existing materials and construct from them something new – in this case, a composite autoportrait in readings that has further become, quite unexpectedly, a report on how the end of the world as we know it is looking from my particular balcony. Nevertheless, I feel like answering the question: what kind of writer am I? If I were to snap a prosaic selfie, a pointillist screen-grab of who I am now so that I might slip out of him and into someone more comfortable, I might begin by saying that I am thirty-seven years old. That I have no children, and it’s probable I will never have any. That I’ve made one woman pregnant, that I know about. That when people tell me about their children, I don’t make enough of an effort to seem interested, and they stop. That I haven’t read Anna Karenina (though I would like to) or the novels of Jane Austen. That I’ve begun to regret not having had a happier life. That I’ve been to five therapists, the first for three years; the second for a few months; the third on and off for about a year; the fourth for a few weeks (in Berlin); and the fifth for a couple of months. That I feel I’d benefit from seeing a female therapist, but it hasn’t happened yet. That my attitudes are often reactions to what I perceive as other people’s moral self-flattery. That I was shouted at while stepping into a mosque. That I don’t recall being inside a synagogue, though I did take part in a ritual Jewish feast. That I suffer more from ageing than other people I know, because I fetishise youth more. That I’m encouraged to find that sexual desire evolves as you get older, becomes more versatile and diffuse. That after falling in love with an Asian woman and then losing her, I worried that Western women would thereafter seem coarse and corrupted. That I feel as though I’ve failed important tests. That I have little interest in telling stories – or reading them – as an end in itself. That I prefer the journals, the essays, the peripheral writings, to the novels and short stories. That I suspect when you’ve lived a certain amount of time, it’s impossible to entirely like yourself. That if, when it came to the end of my life, I was offered the chance to live it over again, exactly as it had been, I think I wouldn’t take it, though I don’t believe this means my life won’t have been worthwhile. That I’ve been in an earthquake – in Bogotá. That I’ve never been inside a slaughterhouse. That I’ve had panic attacks in various cities. That I once lived on the tenth floor. That I remember my first orgasm. That I don’t know the name of the first girl I went to bed with, nor how many women I’ve slept with. That I’ve never made love with a man, and though I’ve sometimes imagined what that would be like, I don’t feel I’ve missed out by not having had the experience. That I prefer the villain. That I have regrets, but only in an abstract sense, in that it seems to me life unfolds as it unfolds, we’re not in control of it the way we imagine ourselves to be. That there are things I never got over. That I believe the compulsion to write is intimately linked to a wound. That I’m receptive to the possibility of some form of continued existence after death, while accepting that death might mean total extinction. That if I were to name the 'writer of my life’, the way I once read César Aira doing (with reference to Lautréamont), it would probably be Friedrich Nietzsche, though I know he won’t speak to the second half of my life the way he did to the first. That I’ve never told someone I loved them without meaning it. That I fear obsolescence. That I fear humiliation. That I was on Facebook for several years, and after deleting my account never regretted doing so. That I’ve been on Twitter for almost a decade, with long periods of dormancy, and although I dislike it, I feel it would be imprudent to delete my account. That I’ve been on Instagram for a year. That I’ve never used LinkedIn or TikTok. That I have used Myspace and LiveJournal. That I have used Tinder and Bumble. That I remember cassettes, videos, CDs, LimeWire. That I’m moved when I think of Albert Camus’s definition of manliness: never humiliating anyone. That I’ve voted five times: twice in referendums,
twice in Irish elections, and once in a UK election. That I’ve sometimes thought I can feel a purer love for a man than I can for a woman, because it isn’t complicated by sex. That I was bullied as a child for being weird, for having big ears. That several women told me I have a beautiful penis. That I used to tell myself I ought to read more poetry, but over the years the admonishment quietened. That I’m drawn to empty beaches and often they find their way into my books. That when I was a kid I wrote a letter to a Manchester United football player, and received a standard-issue card from the club in response, thanking me for my support. That I collected Panini stickers. That I played marbles in the schoolyard. That I was good at maths, at everything, till I got into drinking and bands. That I’ve made enemies. That in India a middle-aged Israeli woman told me that from the moment she saw my face, she knew I was filled with longing. That I’m ashamed. That I have no idea what my future holds, who will be around when I die. That I haven’t built much of a future. That I’m creatively happy. That I consider the arguments in favour of vegetarianism to be persuasive, though I continue to eat meat. That I’ve always been afraid of fish. That eels evoke in me a deeper emotion than fear, a primal horror. That I don’t believe I’m on the right side of history. That I don’t want to die, but if it were to happen I wouldn’t want it to be considered tragic. That I cried easily as a child, and when I cried in front of my father I felt humiliated and enraged. That I never wrote a book without salt and vinegar Pringles appearing in it. That I knew a girl in Colombia who left on her red silk scarf while we made love – and that I’d forgotten this detail until I read it in an old journal I found in a drawer. That in the same journal, I read about a sexual encounter I had at a writing retreat which I’d forgotten all about. That my early sexual experiences were humiliating, and I’ve never fully separated sex from humiliation. That my feelings towards liberated sex are complicated because I perceive sex to be indissociable from hierarchy and exclusion. That I hold women to a different set of standards to men. That there are people I haven’t forgiven. That the worse it gets, the better I feel. That in the mornings I like coffee from my moka pot, and smoothies made with bananas and oat milk. That I believe I’ve inflicted irreparable harm. That I remember the sound of a passing train while lying in bed on a childhood holiday. That I believe art can be a kind of redemption. That I’ve always had good teeth.
Throughout this book, by way of the novelists and philosophers I’ve endorsed, it strikes me that I’ve been acting tough, playing the punk, not missing an opportunity to let you know how hard-boiled and comfortless my world view has become. I talk a big game, but the truth is that long before reading Freud, Nietzsche and the splenetic malcontents recruited here, I was a good Catholic boy. Throughout childhood I went to mass every Sunday, prayed at night, knelt in the dark of the confessional one Saturday morning a month. I feared hell, crossed myself whenever an ambulance passed, hoped for heaven and assumed that’s where I was going. Then came puberty, punk, alcohol, drugs, wayward books, the fascination of evil. My boyhood devoutness fell away. Or so I thought until, a decade or so down the line, I underwent the commonplace realisation that the creed which shapes you runs deeper than any nominal repudiation can uproot. It dawns on you that your destiny on the earth is that of a being divided, pulled between the old world and the one that’s drawing us towards the horizon, not fully at home in either. In short, it hits you that in your bones and cells you’re a Christian, a Catholic, regardless of what you’ve told yourself or others you believe. It’s not even about anything so binary and literal as belief in a God; it’s about prejudice, outlook, the cast of your afflictions. And what are the marks, the stigmata of this phantom Christianity that groans under the floorboards? Well, for one thing, your relationship to sex will always be fundamentally dark, uneasy, lacking in lightness or innocence; it is not, shall we say, Mediterranean. Sexuality plays out within you as an inherited trauma. It is not separable from cruelty, harm, panic. More embarrassing still, you find in your core evidence of a humiliating cliché, a backward notion that you and everyone else really thought we’d have gotten over by now. It’s in your attitude to women, in whom you’ve never been able to reconcile the coexistence of a carnal, desiring, appetiteful body – just as selfish and heedless as your own – alongside that of a nurturing, kindly, gracious spirit. The virgin and the whore! You act all modern and you screw around, take what you can get, but in your mangled heart you don’t want female sexuality to be liberated; or you want it to be but only in your direction. All women have a priori betrayed you. They can never live up. They are not your devoted concubines or adoring slaves, therefore your relationship to them will forever lurch between tenderness and revulsion, desire and disappointment. Your attitude towards women as a collective will be tainted by fear, essentially adversarial. All of these are tormenting yet fertile contradictions, so you may as well become an artist. Meanwhile, the world being what it is, you must under no circumstances give voice to these awkward truths – not in the workplace, not online, not in books – because they are pariah attitudes, disdained by the crowd and by you too. You come to understand something of how it must feel to be a paedophile, racked by deplorable impulses you didn’t choose and can’t seem to uproot. And so you begin to go underground and live a double life, smiling up here on the surface, in daylight; but, down below, squinting and panting in the dingy cellar of the self, under busy streets from where you can hear the sound of footsteps and laughter, fascinated and appalled to realise that you’re a monster.
We're delighted to present an extract from Autobibliography, the new book by Rob Doyle, published by Swift Press.
