The novelist on making Philip Larkin his fictional father, why writing has become a battle, and his new work about race in the US
Martin Amis, 71, is the author of 15 novels, two story collections and seven works of nonfiction, including a memoir, Experience. His latest book, Inside Story, out in paperback, is a “novelised autobiography”, loosely centred on the narrator’s affair with an escort named Phoebe Phelps. The New York Times called it an “unstable and charismatic compound of fact and fiction… that includes some of Amis’s best writing to date”. He spoke to me over the phone from his home in Brooklyn, where he has lived since 2011 with his wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca.
Why did you conceive Inside Story as a novel rather than a straight sequel to Experience?
It’s a very solipsistic book – to make it interesting to write, I needed to give the imagination some play. Phoebe Phelps is in some ways an anthology of women I’ve known, but she’s 100% made up.
The narrative turns on a letter, sent on 12 September 2001, in which Phoebe says your father isn’t Kingsley Amis but Philip Larkin…
I had to cook up an identity crisis for myself – I’ve never really had one – and I thought it had to be seismic, as September 11 was. If you’re my age, you had the cold war, but nothing that involved oneself personally, as September 11 did involve everyone personally, in the psychological sense, in the emotional sense. I felt that discovering that someone else was your father would roughly correspond to those feelings of having to doubt everything you had previously assumed.