How can you resist an author who proclaims on his dust jacket: “Guy Kennaway lives for pleasure, producing books only when all else has failed”? He’s someone I’ve been running into at parties for years (he is friends with Jay Jopling of White Cube and the artist Mat Collishaw), but I never once suspected he was a writer. I thought maybe he was an art dealer of some sort, or possibly a collector – he was too well-dressed and socially assured to be an artist, still less a writer. That’s fine, he says; he doesn’t hang out with writers, because he thinks they are rather dreary, bitter people – he prefers artists because “they know how to have a good time and they’ve got money.” But it turns out he has published five books, and his new book, Time To Go, is a corker which should keep book clubs arguing for years.
It is both a serious discussion of self-euthanasia – which is how the publishers seem to be billing it – and a darkly hilarious account of his tricky relationship with his mother, Susie. It starts with her asking him to get her some heroin because she wants to be able to kill herself when the time comes. She is 88 and her husband, Stanley, is even older. They are both getting frail and she fears they might end up in some ghastly care home. Also, they live in France and are worried Brexit might mean an end to free healthcare. So it would be nice if she and Stanley could die together, in their double bed, at a time of their own choosing. How sweet, you might think, how sensible. But then you don’t yet know Susie. She is “certainly no Mrs Tiggy-Winkle,” Guy warns us, but “a woman of passion, anger and determination. She still relished revenge and had many scores to settle.” He thinks one of the scores might be with him and that she is plotting to get him busted for heroin.
Then Stanley dies, of natural causes, and Susie is left alone. She seems to have forgotten the idea of killing herself, though Guy notices she is stockpiling tramadol. He and his sister visit her as often as possible and he fills the time by writing a book about her. Naturally she demands to read it, and is hideously upset when she does. She quite wants to sue him, but also thinks it would be fun to come to the launch party, give interviews denouncing him, go on Woman’s Hour running rings around Jane Garvey, perhaps make a film… As the book ends, she is still undecided.
So I dashed down to Somerset to ask Guy what is happening – will his mother come to the launch party? He met me off the train and drove me to his home in Pilton, but wouldn’t be bounced into answering questions – nothing so vulgar. He spent the whole drive ranting about how this part of Somerset has been gentrified – he found sushi for sale in the local garage! And Hauser & Wirth has opened a gallery in nearby Bruton – “They’ve come with their flash, international culture and smeared it all over Somerset. Our culture was fine: cider-drinking, drug-taking, lazy, and now we have to know who Thomas Scheibitz is!”
This rant keeps him going all the way to Pilton, where he switches to praise for Michael Eavis, who gives all the locals free tickets to Glastonbury. We drive down a steep farm track to a clutter of outbuildings which look most unpromising until we go round to the front, which reveals his home to be a beautiful three-gabled stone manor house, with a lawn stretching down to the river. Inside there are more surprises – several book-lined sitting rooms and a big, bright modern kitchen.
He says he hopes I like lamb because: “I killed some lambs for you – took them to the abattoir, said goodbye to them, and brought them home in boxes.” He pours wine, checks the Aga, chats about books, chats about art, and finally, when I’m almost screaming with impatience, sits down to answer questions.
So what made him decide to write Time To Go? “Well, I had that conversation with my mother. She said, ‘I’ve had a really interesting life, much more interesting than yours, but I’m planning to leave the party and I want you to get me some heroin.’ And I wrote it that day in my diary and thought afterwards: ‘That’s the best paragraph I’ve written in years. So maybe I should try to write about her, instead of plodding away at some silly novel. More fun.’”
So how is his mother now? Not well, it turns out. She spent New Year in hospital after a fall, in exactly the helpless situation she wanted to avoid. And he thinks maybe his book is to blame. “To be honest, when she first read the book, she was so shocked that I saw a real decline. And my sister rang me and said: ‘Well done Guy, you killed Mummy!’ and I felt really guilty. I mean, I wanted to write the book, but I didn’t really want to kill her! She said: ‘Why can’t you write only the nice things about me?’ I said: ‘Because then we’d only have a four-page book, Mummy.’’’ Anyway, it seems pretty doubtful that she’ll come to his launch party.
Guy Kennaway lives in considerable style. He has the house in Somerset, a flat in London and a house in Jamaica. So does he make lots of money from writing? “God no,” he laughs, “hardly any.” But his parents were quite well off. His father, James Kennaway, was a novelist and screenwriter who wrote Tunes of Glory but died in a car crash when Guy was only 11. Then his mother married another rich man, Brian Young, who was a successful advertising mogul, and then Stanley, who was a showbiz accountant. Also, Guy married a rich wife, Portia, from the Moores family who founded Littlewoods Pools, and she bought him this house when she divorced him in 2008. “I can’t talk about Portia,” he says, “but she’s a really generous and kind person.” So one way or another there was quite a bit of family money sloshing around. But also: “I make my living from buying old houses, doing them up and selling them at a profit. I’ve been fortunate enough to live at a time [he is 61] when it was almost impossible not to make money out of property, however stupid, lazy and idiotic you were. I’ve always got a building site on the go. At present I’m turning that garage at the back into a barn conversion.”
The house is stuffed with books and he’s obviously a great reader, but he didn’t go to university until he was 24. His mother’s second husband, Brian, told him university was a waste of time and he should come and work with him in advertising, so he did. “As with so much of my life, I was totally in the right place at the right time, but I was the wrong person. I was coining it and had a flat in London people would die for, and I was taking clients out, getting drunk on expenses. Those were definitely the glory days. But I didn’t really like the people – advertising just seemed a bit flimsy to me – so I thought I ought to go to university after all.”
He went to Edinburgh (where he shared a flat with Jay Jopling) to read English, but before he did, he published two novels – I Can Feel It Moving and The Winner of the Fooker Prize – which he now prefers to forget. “But I remember the vibe – to see your book in print is a nice feeling – which gave me the impetus to keep on writing. Unfortunately I became quite pretentious and basically wrote shit. I had a lot of books rejected – rightly so. But then I wrote One People [1997] about Jamaica and thought: ‘Oh you can do it!’’’
He and his wife had a house in Jamaica and had been going there for years and knew all the locals. So he wrote a book about the inhabitants of a village he called Angel Beach. It got rave reviews at the time, but might now be accused of cultural appropriation, because he wrote it all in Jamaican patois.
His next book, Sunbathing Naked and Other Miracle Cures, was a memoir about his youthful battles with psoriasis and all the cures he took. And when he did finally get cured – by sunbathing naked beside the Dead Sea – he became a sex addict instead and had to go on a cure for that. His last book, Bird Brain (2011), was a very funny novel about a keen sportsman who dies in a shooting accident and is reincarnated as a pheasant. You do go in for dangerous subjects, I tell him. “Yes. If I was a brilliant writer, I wouldn’t need to.”
A propos Sunbathing Naked, he says his psoriasis still comes back occasionally and, “It’s bound to turn up for my book launch – it likes to make the big engagements in my life.” But meeting other, much worse-afflicted “flakeys” by the Dead Sea taught him to stop worrying about it. But then he started worrying about being a sex addict. He thinks his father was one, too, but in those days it was just called shagging around. But it became obsessive – he masturbated constantly and couldn’t look at a petrol nozzle without imagining a penis. “There was something going on that was quite scary and uncontrollable, and it had to get really bad before I put my hands up and said ‘I need help.’ I remember crying and just feeling absolutely sick of myself and sick of the bullshit I had to create in order to weave this crazy lifestyle.”
Finally he ’fessed up to his wife and she arranged for him to go on a sex addiction rehab course in Arizona, which worked. He also got God – I noticed a well-worn Bible on his bookshelf – and he says yes, he doesn’t go to church because it’s boring, “but I was on my knees this morning, asking God to tell me: ‘Just simmer down.’”
Is he addicted to anything now? “Food! I wish I could get addicted to work, but I can’t unfortunately. But food is quite a friendly sort of addiction and not harmful to other people. Like now I think: ‘Oh my book is coming out. I might be shamed in the national press. I know what I’ll do, I’ll go and buy four pork pies, two scotch eggs, a jar of mustard and eat the lot and that will solve the problem. But that’s the worst that happens now: I head for the fridge. I don’t even head for the bottle.”
Is his basic problem that he’s had life too easy, so he has to sort of invent complications? “Yes. I was very lucky and then I married someone who had a lot of money and I lost sight of decent values like hard work. I needed to learn humility and to stop thinking that everything revolved around me. These are all good things to learn – but sometimes I forget!”
In Time To Go he mentions a girlfriend, Amanda, but he is now unattached. What happened to her? “She was so lovely,” he sighs. “But I knew what she was going to say next. And then she started trying to be interesting, which is the worst. I’d moved her in here at one stage, but I thought maybe I should talk to a lawyer as there might be financial implications, and he asked what date she moved in. So I went to my diary and found: ‘Amanda is moving in today. It’s going to be so sexy. She’ll be in my bed. This is wonderful.’ That was in March or whenever it was. And then I happened to look at the next entry and it said: ‘The coffee’s been moved, the sugar’s in the wrong place, I don’t know if I can deal with this. I have made a massive mistake.’ And that was the next day!”
Hmm. At the end he asks how I think the interview has gone and I say it was a very nice lunch. I still can’t get the hang of him. He is terrifically amusing company, but he’s also very arrogant. I can’t stand the way he describes women as “sweet”. But actually he doesn’t really care what other people think. I remarked at one point that he must be much in demand as the spare man at dinner parties, but he said on the contrary, he is never asked because he’s so rude. “I feel most alive when I’m enraging people at a boring dinner party. I feel the evening has not been wasted.”
Time To Go will probably enrage many people because it dares to make jokes about self-euthanasia. As he says on the book jacket: “Some things in life are too serious to joke about. Assisted suicide is not one of them.” Unfortunately, Ipso, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, disagrees and has made the subject of assisted dying almost taboo for journalists, so I can’t quote any of his jokes. All I can say is read the book – but, be warned, you need a robust sense of humour. Guy Kennaway is not for the faint-hearted.
Time To Go is published by Mensch at £14.99
