Personality by Andrew O'Hagan has just been published in hardback by Faber and Faber, priced £16.99
For a writer whose first two books have been shortlisted for numerous awards including the Booker, and whose new book is hotly tipped to take that prize this year, Andrew O'Hagan's background appears unusual.
First off, he is still only 34 - a kindergarten age for a novelist. He was born in inner city Glasgow in 1968, the youngest of four brothers in a Catholic working class household.
And yet O'Hagan is now one of the most respected figures in British literature, a contributing editor of the influential London Review of Books and of Granta magazine, who has already left behind a job as the Daily Telegraph's star film critic.
He lives with another well-known writer, India Knight, and is helping to bring up her two young sons.
Although he is known in the books world as a gregarious and lively fellow, this has not stopped some interviewers from portraying him as a figure from tragedy, doomed by his terrible past. O'Hagan says that such journalism "seems to be about someone else, really".
O'Hagan's experience of being misrepresented is, of course, a common one for those in the public eye. The fact that our culture quite enjoys it when the famous turn out to be damaged is in fact the subject of O'Hagan's remarkable new novel Personality.
It is an invented story, but it is also clearly inspired by the tragedy of Scottish-Italian child singing star Lena Zavaroni. O'Hagan's heroine Maria Tambini is a little girl with a huge voice. She lights up before an audience, and is propelled to fame after a run of wins on TV talent show Opportunity Knocks.
Using a rich and varied set of characters, the novel watches as the talented 13-year-old is snapped up, in 1977, by showbiz and is carried along on a daunting promotional conveyor belt. It gradually becomes clear that Maria is very sick: like Zavaroni she has galloping anorexia nervosa.
In order to think himself into the mind of an anorexic, O'Hagan spoke to eating disorder expert Susie Orbach and a number of sufferers.
"They always thought they were being looked at, sized up, refracted through other people's opinions," he says, and - oddly - that "they enjoyed being looked at and wanted more eyes on them."
Maria's harrowing illness has deep roots in her past - but O'Hagan also suggests that her illness is an acute expression of a wider malaise in society. "The mass media have made this problem more acute," he says. "They have made the possibility of being universally looked at infinitely more possible."
Speaking with some of the passion which makes Personality such a powerful read, O'Hagan adds: "There's something wrong with 'celebrity' culture. It seems to be about vicarious enjoyment, it seems to be about adoration, but actually what it's mainly about is an enjoyment of the inevitability of disaster."
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