As a boy growing up in working-class suburban North Ayrshire, Andrew O’Hagan would sit late at night at his bedroom window, click his torch in a flurry of secret code, and wait. Sure enough, a torch from a window across the way would answer with its own combination of flashes – a signal in the dark.
These exchanges were part of the “private language” O’Hagan developed with his “first best friend”, Mark Macdonald. With a talent for mischief, the pair discovered a world beyond the “constraints of home and homily”, a world full of laughter and, in their teenage years, punk rock. For both of them, their friendship became a way to expand their sense of who they were and might want to be. “I learned from Mark,” O’Hagan writes in On Friendship, “that friendship was one of the vehicles to independence.”
Part memoir, part manifesto, O’Hagan’s new book is a paean to the joys and power of friendship. In a series of short essays, the author and editor-at-large for the London Review of Books – whose latest novel, Caledonian Road, appeared last year – recounts the friendships that have formed him, from his boyhood alliance with Macdonald to relationships forged in the literary world with the poet Seamus Heaney and novelists Colm Tóibín and Edna O’Brien, among others. “Romantic love gets all the headlines,” O’Hagan writes, “but just as often it is strong friendship that properly describes the shape of your life.”
For O’Hagan, the promise at the heart of every friendship is the promise of freedom. If the family is “where we start knowing people”, as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips puts it, then friendship is where we begin choosing the people we want to know. This choosing, O’Hagan argues, is a “creative act, a bold differentiating effort of the soul”. Friendships cannot remain as carefree as they were in childhood, and many of the essays grapple with the difficulties that accumulate in adult friendship. But friends are always, he suggests, practising a kind of intimate world-making, creating more or less sophisticated versions of the private language he invented with Macdonald.
O’Hagan joins a long tradition of thinking of friendship as central to a good life. His book shares its title with Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Friendship”, in which the Renaissance philosopher esteems friendship above all other relationships. Unlike the relation between parents and children, siblings, or spouses, friendship is defined not by “law and natural obligation”, Montaigne writes, but by “voluntary liberty” – a relationship of pure freedom. A true friendship is an end in itself rather than a means to an end, Montaigne tells us: it doesn’t make much sense to talk of a division of labour or materials between friends, because it wouldn’t really be a friendship if one were keeping score. With true friends, each belongs so wholly to the other that “there is no more sign of the seam by which they were first conjoined”.
Of course, friendships aren’t always seamless – the 19th-century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson was sceptical that they could ever be so: “Friendship,” he wrote, “like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.” Montaigne acknowledges that much of our lives are made up of less-than-perfect friendships, where affection mingles with self-interest and admiration with rivalry. But the promise of true friendship is of a relationship above the fray and beyond explanation. If one were to ask him why he loved his friend, Montaigne writes, he could only answer: “Because it was he, because it was I.”
The philosophy of friendship goes further back, to Aristotle. “Without friends no one would choose to live,” he writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, “though he had all other goods.” My friend is my “second self”, in the philosopher’s well-known phrase, not because they are my double, but because it is through our friendship that I am able to imagine the possibilities of selfhood afresh. “A great friend”, as O’Hagan puts it, echoing Aristotle, can summon “the beginnings of a new person for you to be”.
But friendship for Aristotle isn’t only a matter of self-discovery; it has a political dimension as well. “Friends seem to hold states together,” he writes, suggesting that the ties of friendship might be the best model for the bonds of citizenship. It’s an idea that’s been taken up by many thinkers over the centuries. In her personal life, Hannah Arendt was said to have had a “genius for friendship”, but it was also central to her political philosophy. Friendship isn’t private, Arendt wrote, “but makes political demands and preserves reference to the world.” When EM Forster made his famous statement about hoping, if push came to shove, that he would have the guts to betray his country rather than betray his friends, he was saying something similar: friendship might not be a withdrawal from politics, but rather an alternative foundation for it. It’s an ancient and radical idea.
In recent decades, however, friendship has “taken a bit of a battering”, O’Hagan argues. Studies indicate that friends play a far smaller part in our lives than they once did. A landmark survey in 2021 found that the percentage of US adults who have no close friends has quadrupled since the early 1990s. In an essay titled “Friending”, O’Hagan blames social media and celebrity culture: we’ve become more interested in followers than friends, and our echo chambers and algorithms have made it more difficult to forge meaningful relationships. The damage is mirrored in our political culture, where a discourse of alliance and cooperation has given way to one of quid pro quo and intimidation, even among so-called friendly nations. “Looking at Trump’s America”, O’Hagan writes, one sees “the wholesale dominion of those who confuse friendship with assent”.
In these “straitened times for fraternity”, O’Hagan urges us to rediscover the art of friendship, in terms that often closely recall Montaigne and Aristotle. The good friend is someone who “will only require you to fulfil all aspects of yourself”, he writes, an “alternative self” whom “you repay for not wanting to possess you”.
There’s a gentle politics at work here, too. O’Hagan describes how the friendship of Seamus Heaney and the LRB editor Karl Miller “encompassed territories larger than themselves”, the men’s loyalty to one another allowed them to reach across their Irish and Scottish backgrounds as they journey together on a literary road trip. O’Hagan’s account of the slow hours he spends in the company of these older men – and his admiration for what he calls “the two-mindedness of my friends”, their resistance to “resolution” – feels like a riposte to the shallow immediacy and partisanship of internet culture.
There are other echoes of Montaigne. Written in response to the death of his great friend, the poet and classicist Étienne de La Boetie, Montaigne’s friendship essay was also a work of mourning. In fact, the great literary works on friendship are often really about the passing of a friendship – think of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”, his grand elegy for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died at 22. As the literary scholar David Halperin puts it, “death is to friendship what marriage is to romance”. The literature of friendship is a literature of consolation.
O’Hagan, too, knows that “friends don’t only flourish, they die”. The book’s centrepiece is a long, moving tribute to the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien. Their friendship began with a chance meeting outside O’Hagan’s publisher, which quickly led to a lively dinner at the Wolseley. (“Ask for the corner table. Lucian Freud’s table,” O’Brien instructed. “If he’s not there, they always give it to me.”) A warm friendship of many years followed, in which the two shared manuscripts, laughter, and a good deal of Champagne (“I think we can finally say, Andrew,” O’Brien solemnly announces, “that the great enemy is Prosecco”). O’Brien could be funny and cutting, O’Hagan tells us, but also insecure and anxious. Late in her life, the pair toured County Clare together and visited O’Brien’s childhood home; but her thoughts had turned to what she called “the very, very final thing”. “What frightens you?” O’Hagan asks her. “The unknown. The nothing maybe.”
Another essay tells the story of Keith Martin, a friend from O’Hagan’s teenage years, who gets in touch decades later to ask for help: he’s terminally ill and wants his old comrade to ensure he dies with dignity. The experience became the subject of O’Hagan’s 2020 novel Mayflies, an ode to boyhood friendship, full of the music of O’Hagan and Martin’s youth but also a rumination on the duty of care friends continue to have to one another. “The adult friendship,” O’Hagan writes, “may contain expectations we never bargained for in the pasture of youth.” Martin joins the ranks of “the ghosts of friendship” who companionably haunt these essays.
For centuries, philosophers held that we might judge the quality of someone’s life by the quality of the friendships they enjoyed, and that we might understand something of the state of a society by studying how well friendships thrive within it. If these are, as O’Hagan suggests, difficult times for friendship, then his amiable book reminds us of all we stand to lose if we lose the knack of making friends.
Michael Kalisch is the author of “The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction” (Manchester University Press)
On Friendship
Andrew O’Hagan
Faber & Faber, 160pp, £12.99
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This article appears in the 08 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The truth about small boats