How to have a conversation with a book

On reading and being read

Over the last few days, I have been having a conversation with a friend’s forthcoming book: scribbling in its margins, registering delight or dissent via underlinings and exclamation marks, riffing into notepads.

This feels particularly appropriate because it’s a book about conversation (to be precise, it’s DO/Conversation by Robert Poynton, and you should probably pre-order a copy). But I do something similar with many of the books I read—as I have ever since I started out on postgraduate study, two decades ago, and found myself struggling with the gap between reading and writing.

I loved books. I wanted to be a writer, whatever that might end up meaning. Yet studying great texts too often ended up being a form of dissection, snipping into fragments whatever made them vital. I didn’t want the business of writing to be about demonstrating cleverness or superiority. I wanted to capture the electrical uncertainty of first readings and first-person preferences: to hang onto the energy that came from losing and then finding myself in others’ words.

After several false starts, something shifted when I gave myself permission to scribble all over my books. Gradually, I realised that what I wanted was to talk and listen to books like they were people; to train myself to interrupt, interject, exclaim, beg explanations, disagree, give voice to honest admiration.

As I did this, I began to let go of some stifling intellectual habits: trying to sound wiser and more certain than I was; regurgitating received wisdom and prefabricated sentiment. Conversation, not argument or oration, was the model. As Rob puts it, in a passage titled “Don’t be too sure of yourself”:

Relax your grip on certainty and make ‘not knowing’ part of your practice. Allow yourself to be confused and to acknowledge that. Be prepared to contradict yourself—changing your mind is one way to expand it. Life is not a debating society. Conversation is not an argument you are trying to win.

One reason Rob’s book has struck such a chord is, I think, that I’m only a fortnight away from the publication of my own new book, Wise Animals. Predictably enough, I'm worried, elated, uncertain; and trying to find ways of sharing and harnessing these things.

So far as possible, coping with the ecstatic uncertainties of publication means letting go of the delusion that you know or control what’s going to happen. But this is just the beginning. If you’re lucky as a writer, a book is a conversation-starter: an offer; a gesture in the direction of things you find interesting, amazing or urgent. To make an offer in good faith, you need to trust those you’re offering it to. Then, if they’re willing to offer back something of their own, you need to learn and listen.

This is a point Rob makes beautifully. Life itself is an improvisation. There is no script. And many of the best things in life are a dance of offers, counter-offers and careful attending. What’s most precious, in any meeting of minds, is “a field of possibility” within which mutual attention remakes the ordinary into something fresh:

Thinking goes on between us as well as within us. It is not only, or even primarily, an individual capacity… The immersive, connective, playful and improvisational nature of conversation generates a kaleidoscopic kind of thinking that is collective and connective.

One of the greatest pleasures of being a writer is the occasional times when, unheralded, a message arrives from someone for whom my work has meant something above and beyond a few hours’ diversion. Like a glacial form of speech, these exchanges can be years in the making. Yet there is still connection, a thrill, discovery.

I have, I realise, written a series of reflections upon conversation without including any actual speech. Am I missing the point? I hope not. I received a message from Rob during the writing of this newsletter. I have just read his new book; he is working his way through mine. At some point, we’ll meet up and talk, with no agenda beyond discovery. “For me,” he writes:

…the hallmark of a good conversation is that something appears which was not there before. That is what brings it alive. We are not just passing sealed packages back and forth, or signalling to each other, we are weaving something together that takes on a life of its own.

At their best, this is what reading and writing feel like—at least for me. To work with words is to work with the stuff of others’ minds and lives. It is to risk being misunderstood; to misunderstand, slightly and always; to ask a question whose answer is never definitive. It’s to make an offer in hope.