‘It’s Better To Be Alone Than Alone At Parties’

As a young author, slightly well known, I was invited to many parties. This was twenty years ago, when people still read novels and novelists were not yet nearing, as Pankaj Mishra once put it, ‘cultural irrelevance’. These invitations were loaded.

I wanted to attend. But I was single, and barely leaving the solitude from which my writing emerged. My new world was not only literary but also high society – hostesses invited the decorated writer who might offer something witty or insightful at a long table of tax defaulters and minor league sex offenders, with second homes in Bali.