Q&A with author Rick Gekoski

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Rick Gekoski was born in the US in 1944, and left in 1966 to do graduate work in English Literature at Oxford. He became a dual US/UK citizen in 2008, observing that he feels “equally ill at ease in both countries”. He taught at the University of Warwick for 15 years, then set up a business as a rare book dealer. Darke is his first novel. He lives with his wife in Salisbury and they have a home in New Zealand, overlooking the Tukituki valley.

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What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?

I recently reread PG Wodehouse’s The Clicking of Cuthbert, which was as funny as ever. The previous time I read it was on Eurostar and I got hysterical laughing, and ended up on the floor clutching my stomach in agony with muscular cramps.

What books are on your bedside table?

John le Carré’s The Pigeon Tunnel, which is fascinatingly evasive; Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, which is informative and likeable, though overwritten.

What book do you wish you’d written?

The one I am working on now. And then the next.

When did you know you were going to be a writer?

Never did. Still hardly sure, after six books. When I published the fourth I asked my editor if I was now a writer. “Nope,” he said, “you are a bookseller who sometimes writes books.” I recently put “writer” on an immigration form when entering New Zealand, and felt a bit of a fraud.

What are you scared of?

Heights. I sometimes think this is a metaphor but you can’t fall off metaphors. 

When were you happiest?

I don’t know, and even if I did, I would resist the question, because I would then be asked, by one of my loved ones, why wasn’t it some other time, with them . . .

Which literary character most resembles you?

That would be up to them to say. Perhaps someone or other in Saul Bellow or Philip Roth? Not Portnoy please.

Who would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?

Barack and Michelle Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Bernie Sanders . . . We could talk about the good old days, and cry into the soup.

When do you feel most free?

Occasionally I experience feelings of wellbeing. I could do with more of those. But as I get older I have regular spasms of anxiety about obligations, deadlines, relationships, money . . .  Yet I still have the remnants of my faculties, my hair, my health and my libido. I love and am loved. I’m lucky. So stop with the worrying already.

If you could own any painting, what would it be?

One of Monet’s “Nympheas”, a large one please, and a room big enough to hang it and sit in front of it for hours.

What does it mean to be a writer?

To be obsessively committed to recording the voices and thoughts in your head, and to be more heedful of them than almost anything else. This is not an entirely agreeable process either for the writer or for their loved ones.

‘Darke’ is published by Canongate

Photograph: Alamy

Letter in response to this Q&A:

Call yourself a writer (and then wait for inspiration) / From Sally Reid