David Nicholls: the book that saved me

PJ Kavanagh’s classic memoir The Perfect Stranger tells of an uncertain young man seeking adventure and finding love. The author of One Day and Us first read it when he was a failing actor and bad bartender – it changed his life

‘Sally is smart, direct, optimistic and gregarious – a startling contrast to the rather sceptical and doomy writer’ … PJ Kavanagh. Photograph: Carcanet

David Nicholls - The Guardian

Some books seem to come along at just the right moment, and become so entwined with memories of a particular time and place that you revisit them at your peril.
PJ Kavanagh’s fine memoir The Perfect Stranger was published to acclaim in 1966, the year I was born, and reissued in 1991. By then I was pursuing a career in acting, which is to say that I was working as a bartender, making some of the worst cappuccinos available in London at that time. Occasionally I would get an audition, or play a small role in a fringe production but while I was always enthusiastic there was a growing realisation, on my part and the audiences’, that I couldn’t really do it, and that I’d committed myself to a profession for which I lacked not just talent and charisma, but the most basic of skills. Moving, standing still – things like that.

My anxiety grew, shading into panic, and a good friend gave me The Perfect Stranger, solemnly handing it over like a prescription. “You should read this,” he said, and it didn’t take long to understand why. The book is a rite of passage, following would-be writer Kavanagh from the “commonplace brutalities” of a third-rate boarding school straight out of the Molesworth books, on to a season as a moody Redcoat at Butlin’s holiday camp, and through various dead-end jobs in postwar Paris, where he dabbles in acting and longs for Hemingway-esque “experiences”. Reluctantly, he returns to Yorkshire and Northern Ireland for national service and is then posted to Korea. Now an incompetent and unenthusiastic officer, he stumbles into the first skirmish of the bloody battle of the Imjin river, where he is wounded. Recuperating in Japan, he decides that it’s time for an education and returns to study English at Oxford.

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