People use literature in many different ways. Fran Lebowitz complains about the ‘philistine idea’ of teaching literature by asking, ‘How can you use this in your life?’ Andrew Relph has a different beef with academia: ‘“As though something fitted me” would have expressed my feeling about Sons and Lovers, though the English department helped filter such sentiment.’ He also makes the old complaint about killing beauty by analysing it; one writer he meets can no longer bear her ‘favourite’ poet since writing a PhD on her. In his own writing, he spurns the ‘defensiveness’ of irony for metaphor, ‘which connects us all and … allows us the space to bring ourselves to the story’.

Relph’s attitude to reading is as complex as any reader response theory, and, distressingly instrumentalist as it might seem to literary scholars, is a deep part of who he is. He believes that reading played a part ‘in my emergence from the scenery and crowd of extras … to take at last, the lead role in my life’. This is not a recommended reading list: some books – Sons and Lovers, Hamlet, Herzog – have worked for Relph in his own life, while different books will be significant for others, including his patients: ‘There is a relative worth in psychotherapy and a particular sort of reading.’ Not Drowning, Reading is a psychological autobiography through books; an absorbing meditation on the ways authors, characters, and readers can interact.