I never really expected to meet my literary idol Geoff Dyer. He’s something of an enigma in the sense that while he has been lauded as ‘possibly the best British writer alive today’ until recently many of his books were not available in Australia and he is not very well known here.

In principle I’m not a big fan of writer talks. Most writers are much better on paper than in the flesh and often not attractive enough to keep an audience even mildly diverted while they read endless passages from a book many of us have already read. But when I saw Geoff was speaking at the 2012 Sydney Writer’s Festival – I booked without hesitation and, as you can see from above shot, was so close to the stage I could have practically kissed his feet if I was so inclined.

Well, he’s ‘adorkable’; the thinking woman’s Hugh Grant with an awesome vocabulary and therefore ideally equipped to articulate his (many) neuroses.

I could relate to so many things he discussed. He told the story of acquiring a new publisher and being asked what books he had in the creative pipeline and, because he was passionate about tennis at that point, he said he was going to write a book about tennis. He subsequently got a contract to write about tennis which had the immediate effect of making him not want to write about it and spend all his time hand-wringing about not writing it. Fortunately it didn’t put him off tennis.

I’m with him on this one. I understand that career writers thrive on deadlines and contracts (I envy them) but the combination of those two would be the kiss of death to me. Like Dyer, I have to be fascinated enough with my subject to want to spend a couple of years exploring it, immersing myself in it and unravelling it. If the energy fades or the interest just isn’t there, it’s just not going to happen.

He found a wonderful audacious way around it and went on to write something that, on the surface of it, only a handful of people could be interested in – a book about the Andrei Tarkovsky film ‘Stalker’ -with which he has an obsession – entitled ‘Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey into a Room.

In a lesser writer’s hands or even worse an academic’s, this could be beyond dreary but, from what I could glean from the film clips and accompanying snippets he read, his inimitable Dyerfication of the subject had created an erudite and amusing journey.

I’m currently reading my (signed) copy of ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ and in this book he is very much the writer’s writer. He turns procrastination and indecisiveness into a spectator sport, and it is so easy to relate to the elaborate delaying tactics and bargaining that are the secret machinations of the writer’s mind.

If you’re new to Dyer and don’t know where to start, I’d suggest ‘Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to do it.’ or ‘But Beautiful’.

Every book is very different, you don’t need a feel for the topic just an admiration for this great writer and an affinity for his particular brand of humour

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