Maggie & Me, and a curious veil of fiction

IS DAMIAN Barr “Julian”? That’s what his friends keep asking: whether he has inspired the lead character in Transit, the latest novel by Rachel Cusk, the Canada-born writer of A Life’s Work and Aftermath.

Barr, pictured right, the Brightonbased author of Maggie & Me, a memoir of growing up in Motherwell under Margaret Thatcher, writes a fine Facebook post on this question. “Cusk’s veil of fiction is thin. Thinner than a thin thing. Diaphanous. Gossamer,” wrote Barr on a Facebook post, noting the book was not “even sparkling with a filament of irony”.

Barr and Cusk met at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2013. They talked wet T-shirts — as does Julian in the book — and discussed his family. The character, Julian, is “fleshy”. “I am indeed fleshy. I am alive.” There are a few differences, says Barr. “I have not, and nor will I ever, own a cravat — never mind a mauve one. And I have never said ‘There, there, duck’ except, maybe, to an actual duck. No gay man has said ‘duck’ since Kenneth Williams

IT SHOULDN’T happen to a Lord. Yesterday Norman Tebbit stood up in the House of Lords and complained about London’s air quality. “It sometimes takes more than an hour to drive from Parliament Square to the Tower of breathed his last.” But Barr is unhappy about the similiarities to his personal story, as told in Maggie & Me and Julian’s in Transit.

“It is true that my stepfather did ‘go to any length to underscore [his] inferiority’. But he points out, in his case, that it was not his ‘mother who dealt out the beatings’.”

Barr did not wish to comment on the post. Cusk’s publishers, Harvill Secker, were not responding to our messages this morning.

London,” he said. “That is being caused by the barricades which have been put up to assist cyclists who get in the way on the main road carriageways.” Cue Lords corpsing after a heckle from the Labour benches of “Get on your bike.”