Friendship gets patronised on the page. It’s treated like emotional garnish: a loyal sidekick, a bit of banter, the warm proof a damaged man is “still human.” Or it gets packaged as comfort reading—chosen family, healing vibes, a tidy little moral about showing up. Andrew O’Hagan took that whole sentimental scam and set fire to it. He writes friendship as a force with consequences: messy, hungry, status-soaked, sometimes tender, sometimes cruel, always political.
You can feel where it comes from. O’Hagan grew up working-class in Ayrshire with the kind of early life that teaches you loyalty is never abstract. It’s practical. It’s what you cling to when institutions don’t bother. It’s also what turns sour when you realise loyalty is a currency—spent, withheld, flaunted. That tension runs through his work: friendship as shelter, friendship as trap, friendship as the only thing that resembles love when family is compromised and the state is a joke.
Mayflies is the obvious touchstone, and not because it’s “moving.” Plenty of books are moving in the way a pub storyteller is moving after the third pint. What O’Hagan does is insist that male friendship isn’t automatically noble just because it’s loud. He writes the teenage rush—the Manchester pilgrimage, the music, the swagger—as a kind of shared invention, a way of building a self out of noise. Then he makes you look at what happens when the body stops cooperating and the old myths about “the lads” can’t cover the fear. If you came for nostalgia, he drags you into adulthood and makes you admit how friendship becomes care work, and how care work exposes every cowardly habit you’ve been calling personality.
Friendship isn’t a cosy alternative to romance in O’Hagan; it’s the place where people learn what they’ll sacrifice and what they’ll pretend not to notice.
The thing is, O’Hagan doesn’t only write friendship when it’s the headline. Our Fathers is about family and housing and the wreckage of idealism, but look closer and you’ll see the same obsession: who carries whom, who gets written off, who earns forgiveness by sheer persistence. He’s vicious about the fantasies men build—progress, pride, authority—and he’s just as vicious about the way other men collude in those fantasies because it’s easier than being honest. Even when he’s writing fathers and grandfathers, he’s writing the friend-shaped hole people try to fill with drink, politics, religion, or work.
And then there’s the nonfiction. The Missing isn’t a cosy “true-life mystery.” It’s an enquiry into absence that refuses the comforting story arc. People vanish; the world shrugs; families rot with not-knowing. That’s friendship too—the way a missing person leaves a crater in the social fabric, the way everyone adjusts their lives around a gap they can’t name without sounding melodramatic. O’Hagan understands that disappearance isn’t just a plot device. It’s a social wound.
His essays sharpen the point. When he wrote about ghostwriting Julian Assange, the story wasn’t just literary gossip. It was a portrait of proximity and manipulation: how being “let in” can be a performance staged to control you, how charisma and paranoia rewire a room, how loyalty gets demanded as tribute. O’Hagan doesn’t romanticise access. He shows the reader the ugly truth publishing hates to admit: relationships are often power arrangements with better vocabulary.
On Friendship lands in that context, and it’s exactly why it matters. Eight essays might sound like a soft pitch—radio-friendly reflections, a bit of memoir, the usual parade of significant encounters. But O’Hagan’s best instinct is still there: he won’t let friendship be reduced to wellness advice or social nostalgia. He insists it’s a serious subject because it’s where people actually live. Not in grand romances. Not in patriotic myths. In the daily negotiations of loyalty, shame, admiration, resentment, and need.
The “friendship book” trend wants reassurance; O’Hagan writes the unpretty truth that friendship can save you and still ruin you.
This is where you can spot the difference between literature and branding. The market loves “friendship” because it sells decency without asking anything hard of the buyer. It’s a way to feel warm while staying untouched. O’Hagan won’t play that. He makes friendship physical. Temporal. Haunted by class and ambition and the long echo of who got chances and who didn’t. He doesn’t go soft because he won’t let you confuse affection with innocence.
If you want friendship as a gentle theme, you’re reading the wrong writer. O’Hagan writes it as a reckoning: the chosen bonds that hold when everything else collapses, and the chosen bonds that expose what you really are. Keep calling it “heartwarming” if you want, but don’t expect him to hand you comfort for free.
