‘Have you read this?’ my tutor asked, lobbing a copy of The Great Gatsby into my lap.
I started it that night and didn’t bother to go to any lessons the next day because I wanted to finish it and then spend time thinking about the knot of excitement that it had left in my stomach.
This, I decided, was who I wanted to be – Jay Gatsby. There was the immense personal fortune, the mysterious past, the magnificent parties, the mansion, the wardrobe full of pink suits – who could ask for anything more?
It is not surprising I was so transfixed, because it was exactly the sort of effect F. Scott Fitzgerald had wanted to achieve. ‘So he invented,’ he wrote of Gatsby, ‘just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a 17-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end. ’
Although I was deeply attracted to the idea of getting inside the lives of people like Gatsby, I also wanted to be sure I could walk away before things turned nasty. After a while it dawned on me that it was the narrator, Nick Carraway, that I really wanted to be. He was a writer staying in a cottage in the grounds of the mansion. He became involved with the dissolute lives of the main characters, uncovered the very stuff of their souls and then went back to the solitary safety of his home to write his story once things got dangerous.
‘I was within and without,’ Carraway wrote, ‘simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.’
That, I decided, was what being a writer would be like.