I’d had no idea how much of it I recalled. When I came to describe my younger self’s chronic deficit of insight and intuition, Matthew 13 came to mind: ‘I hadn’t had eyes to see or ears to hear.’ At a rough estimate, the book probably contains between 100 and 200 references to the Bible. Jesus’s dictum about the impossibility of one man serving two masters aptly summarized the monomania of the addict as drugs slowly took precedence over everything else. And I’m closer nowadays to a final edit than a first draft.īut often I simply found biblical imagery coming to me uninvited, and I threaded it into my sentences, borrowing its resonance and poetry. And just as I may wish to be influenced by my friend Jasleen’s preternatural kindness and my friend James’s voracious intellectual curiosity, the truth is my character was fundamentally shaped long ago by influences in my childhood I was too young to be conscious of. But, of course, you don’t enlist your family-you inherit it, for good and ill.

Perhaps you’ve already noticed the confusion inherent in my earlier image for how influence was supposed to work: a “little family” of writers you “enlist”. So were those books my major influences? Only (I now see) in the most trivial of senses. When I wrote at home, I tended to use it several times a day. The shelf was, it turned out, one of my better ideas. And some monoliths of the canon- Middlemarch, American Pastoral-were there for the many days when I couldn’t recall the point of writing a book, or why literature mattered at all. Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club possessed not so much a technique I coveted but a personality trait I intended, frankly, to plagiarize: a way of writing about a fucked up family with unflinching honesty and unfailing love at once.

If I wanted inspiration to write gorgeous prose, I’d reach for Hollinghurt or Cusk my go-to for imagery was either Nabokov or Denis Johnson for character, Adichie or Franzen for dialogue, Rooney or Zadie Smith. I know precisely which titles they were because I’m looking at them now. While writing my first book I even put this idea into practice quite literally: I put a shelf above my writing desk, filling it with the 30 or 40 works from which I hoped to siphon the most influence as I worked. I once believed influence was largely a matter of choice, as though your task as an author was to enlist a little family of writers to support you as you worked.

All my days are written in your book