The novelist and biographer tells Suzi Feay that writing about his own life took him in some unexpected directions.

Even on holiday A.N. Wilson is smartly dressed for our Zoom meeting: pink shirt, braces and, I have no doubt, smart trousers even if out of view. In the opening pages of his memoir Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises he recalls the verdict of a young female colleague at The Spectator, where he was literary editor: “I can imagine tearing off his three-piece suit only to find another three-piece suit beneath.” Novelist, critic, columnist, historian, biographer of Darwin, Queen Victoria, C.S. Lewis and Tolstoy, he has turned to his own life for the first time, although he’s written “memoir-ey” things in the past, such as an account of his friendship with Iris Murdoch. Confessions was, he explains, a project born unexpectedly during the pandemic.

“I was having a walk on Hampstead Heath when I met [publisher] Robin Baird-Smith and he said, ‘Why don’t you write your memoir?’ I thought that was a very good project for a lockdown because you don’t have to do any research.”
All the same, his initial reaction was to decline. “I said, I can’t possibly because it would upset everybody in my family. About a week later, I thought well, it will, but I still want to write the book. Being a newspaper columnist is a very good training for becoming an autobiographer, because you have to be a bit callous to write about yourself. Somebody’s always going to be upset about something.”