Author of the week: Pico Iyer

last updated 8 January 2015

Pico Iyer can’t get Graham Greene out of his head, said the Los Angeles Review of Books. For years, the British-born essayist has been noticing small coincidences that link his own life to the late novelist he calls his “literary godfather”: Iyer checks in to a hotel in Cuba only to find that Greene stayed there 35 years before; he reads of Greene confessing to a priest whose name was Father Pilkington—the same as Iyer’s boarding-school housemaster. “When there are so many correspondences, across such a wide canvas, you start to imagine that they might speak for connections of a deeper kind,” Iyer writes. His new book, The Man Within My Head (titled, playfully, after Greene’s novel A Man Within), probes the powerful influence Greene has had on his writing and his life.

Though the book is ostensibly about Greene, Iyer sees it as a hybrid form of biography, said Rolf Potts in The Atlantic. “In exploring Greene, I was really exploring the parts of me I saw in him,” he says. By re-reading Greene’s work closely and writing about the reasons it resonated personally, Iyer was able, he says, to discover hidden corners of his own subconscious. Now, he envisions doing similar writing about how other writers speak to him. “I’ve learned a lot about myself, not always flatteringly, from reading Philip Roth and John le Carré and Derek Walcott and even President Obama’s two books,” he says. “I do believe, as this book suggests, that we can see ourselves more clearly in the books of others, often, than in our ‘real lives.’”