Why your more successful friends will drop you

You might have noticed the numerous glowing pieces by friends of Salman Rushdie about their ‘brave’ and ‘brilliant’ friend. I too would like to write a glowing piece about my brave and brilliant friend Salman Rushdie, but there’s one little problem: I’m not a friend of his. In fact I don’t have any famous novelist friends.

I used to. There was the occasional lunch with Nick Hornby and the odd debauched evening with Will Self. I’ve drunk whisky with Norman Mailer and smoked pot with Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (And I have a lovely thank-you letter from Edward St Aubyn – does that count?) The fact is, I could never be friends with Rushdie or Amis, Zade or Rooney, because successful writers can only be good friends with other very successful writers.

That sounds cold and cruel, and it is. And that’s why writers pretend it isn’t true; but it’s the basic thermodynamic law of literary life. Successful authors stick to their own kind; they go to the same literary festivals, drinking clubs, award ceremonies and dinner parties. For all their championing of egalitarian ideas, they constitute an elite that is based on success. The American critic Terry Knight once wrote a funny account of going to a dinner party that starred Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson and the artist Marina Abramovic. Knight was treated like the invisible woman, unspoken to for the entire evening – even by her good friend Sontag – because she was not a successful person.

No one likes to believe that success – in whatever field of human endeavour – is going to change them fundamentally. Who could be so superficial as to dump a good friend because of their lack of success? After all, you share a history. You were best friends at university. You were the best man or a bridesmaid at their wedding. You support the same football team and love the same writers and the same bands. You’re even a godparent to one of their children. So why should anything change when one of you becomes a big success?

And then their book gets published, is a massive hit, and everything changes. Not at first, but incrementally. At first you’re so happy for your friend. And then along comes hit book number two, which receives critical praise and wins various awards. That’s when the little voice inside your head says: hold on, it’s not that good a book! That little voice will grow over the years into a Munch-like scream with each new bestselling novel by your successful friend.

Meanwhile, your book came out and bombed – or it got some polite notices. (And you can’t help but notice that successful friend’s blurb for the cover of your book was rather perfunctory: ‘Really good.’) Your second book – the best thing you’ve ever written – can’t find a publisher. Every time you meet your successful friend they ask ‘Any news?’ as if your book is in hospital undergoing treatment for some curable illness, like terminal failure.

Time passes and with it the possibility that your book will ever find a publisher. Your book has become an awkward topic of conversation for both of you. Then one day they stop asking about it. Are they, you wonder, being sensitive to your plight – or are they just so self-absorbed, the way successful people are, that they’ve forgotten you have an unpublished book?

The dumping of a less successful friend is not a conscious decision; it happens organically and spontaneously. You’ve stopped writing and are teaching a course in creative writing at the University of No Hope. You and successful friend start to move in different circles. They go to the literary parties you used to be invited to. At first, successful friend will ask you to come along, but you decide it’s too awful going as the successful author’s best friend. You go to a book launch and some sexy PR girl gushes all over your friend and then turns to you and says: ‘And what do you do?’ And you make some lame joke about being the successful person’s personal assistant, which makes everyone feel awkward.

Then you start seeing less of each other. Successful friend has so much work on, including finishing the screenplay of his fifth bestselling book, which Netflix has bought the rights to. You have the odd catch-up lunch where successful friend just talks about his success and meeting famous writers and his new best friend Salman Rushdie. And you wonder: were they always this self-obsessed?

And then it hits you: this should be the subject of your next novel.