Interview: John Burnside, author

Published on Sunday 10 January 2010 10:50

JOHN Burnside's wife Sarah doesn't read his books. "She prefers John Grisham, Stephen King, Ian Rankin," he says, displaying no signs of hurt. "She likes thrillers, crime, stuff with a story, and I admire what these guys do, and how they're able to do it again and again, until they get to the point where they can retire."

Burnside is a very fine writer but he won't be retiring any time soon. He doesn't think he endears himself to the average three-for-two reader. "Every time I write a book I think how I could be doing it better to please people – a nicer book with nicer characters – but I just can't."

We're in a caf in Edinburgh; Burnside has come to me. After two failed attempts to get to him in Fife's East Neuk because of the snow, I feel a bit feeble, given the journeys he makes in pursuit of 70,000 words. Ten years in southern English suburbs sounds like a jail sentence; in fact it was his chosen life from 1984-94 as he searched for "a Surbiton of the mind" and some kind of balming normality after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness. This is the subject matter of Waking Up In Toytown, the poet's second volume of memoirs.

Burnside, 54, does himself down. Toytown has a story: he's a civil servant by day and a lothario of the M25 corridor by night. There's the potential for crime when a man he meets in a pub tries to get Burnside to murder his wife for him. And there's certainly suspense when we wonder if he's the father of married Adele's child; when workmates confront him over his relationship with Esme, just 15.

Old girlfriends are prominent in the book, hence my question about whether Sarah has read it, and he admits it could have featured many more.

"While I was working on the book I was travelling from Oxford, down through Surrey and on to Chichester – my old stamping grounds, basically – and I wrote this long passage about how I roamed around on the M25 and the local train service indulging in these pointless sexual relationships. There were loads of them; sometimes I had three or four on the go at the same time and the number of these women who were married went into double figures. I'd meet them at work, at conferences; there was a lot of money in computers back then. Always the gossip at conferences concerned the one person who hadn't committed adultery during the five-day residential course." Then "conference" became the lie the women would tell their husbands while Burnside booked a dirty weekend in a country house hotel.

It should be stressed that none of this is recounted in a boastful way. Indeed, Burnside is blushing and reducing his voice to a whisper. "And none of it has made the book. It read as boring and banal. My editor said it was like something from a men's magazine: how I bonked my way round the Home Counties. I'd been trying to convey the utter loneliness of this guy – me. He reminded me there was already plenty of that in the other chapters."

Burnside's first memoir, the award-winning A Lie About My Father, concerned his non-relationship with a drunken, violent dad. Although now the father of two sons, he went to the 'burbs convinced he didn't want children: "I didn't think, because of what my childhood had been like, that I would be an adequate father. Of course, I'd used having a dad like that to become a complete mess."

Still, he thought he might settle down with "someone nice". Instead he would wake up under "Crystal's crusty duvet", and one morning he opened his eyes to find her brandishing a knife. Gina would host orgies and drug her kids so she could go out for the night. Before I can say it, Burnside does: "My Surbiton seemed to belong in a David Lynch movie."

Maybe, though, he got the 'burbs he deserved. "I went there and thought I could live a normal life, but all the time I was talking down to the very idea with that boho contempt for normal people. I was an arrogant dickhead."

He didn't quite go ten years without talking to anyone but there was "hardly any meaningful conversation" in that time except, dangerously, with Esme. They met on a beach. "The people round here used to eat wading birds," she told him. She reminded him of Anna Karina, an actress he'd always loved. Then she said: "You look a bit lost. I think I'll hang around and make sure you don't get into any real trouble."

He didn't, not with her. The amour fou was broken off immediately following her first pleas for sexual intimacy. "I wasn't thinking straight," he admits. "I thought it was perfectly normal for her to be taking time off school and me to be bunking off work. But nothing would ever have happened."

Burnside has changed the names, especially those of the "homicidally inclined", and Esme comes from the other JD Salinger book, For Esme – With Love And Squalor. "There's a fight between the two things here," he says, "and I'm drawn to both love and squalor. I think most people, if they're being honest, would admit that."

Waking Up In Toytown (15.99, Jonathan Cape)

This article was first published in Scotsman on Sunday on 10 January, 2010.