ANDREW BILLEN
Martin Amis: ‘Were my life to end tomorrow I’d think fair enough’
The author was an idol to a generation of young men. Andrew Billen recounts his encounters with him but asks was his hero-worship misplaced
Martin Amis in 1987
ULF ANDERSEN/GETTY IMAGES
The Times
For 25 years up to the end of the last century, an interview with Martin Amis was a summit that most feature writers wanted to climb. For acidic female journalists the challenge was to defeat him. Rarely would they forbear to mention that, as summits went, the 5ft 6in Amis was not a very high one. Yet he was notoriously attractive to women and had bedded the best of them. Why were these women profilers so hostile?
Because, they said, of his novels’ misogyny, evident they argued from his very first, The Rachel Papers, which was about a young Amis doppelganger’s hideous treatment of his first “love”, Rachel, who was fired in the end for two crimes: she menstruated and she excreted. Five years
