M John Harrison, 77, is the author of seven story collections and 12 novels, including Nova Swing, which won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction in 2007, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, winner of the Goldsmiths prize in 2020. His new book, Wish I Was Here, is a fragmentary work of autobiography about reading, writing and, among other topics, rock climbing, a longtime pursuit that inspired Climbers (1989), which Robert Macfarlane has called “the best novel ever written” on the subject. Harrison, speaking from his home in Shropshire, told me he took up the activity in his 30s to “blast myself out of writing and into what I thought of as the real world. Because if you let go from 50ft up, the consequences are real. The mistake I made was to immediately sit down and write about it.”
What drew you to the subtitle “An anti-memoir”?
I wanted to talk about how I perceive memory, and especially the writing down of memory, to be a failed device. You make a note about something you want to remember and all you end up with is a fiction or a hyperbolic representation of what happened. And the moment you use it for any purpose, it goes through further transformations, and by the time you’re finished with it as a 77-year-old author, the memory you have when you look at the note isn’t really a memory at all. But you can’t really call it a fiction – it’s a hybrid thing. That’s what I wanted to produce. Calling it anti-memoir isn’t a form of trolling; it’s saying, let’s think a bit more about this complex business of relating what we think of as a self to what we think of as a past.
