Meg Mason explores how readers can form intense bonds with favourite authors
Meg Mason has reflected on the lonely teenage reading experience that turned Nancy Mitford’s fiction into a lifeline — and, in her words, an imaginary friend. In a new essay, she and other writers consider why books can produce a particularly strong kind of parasocial relationship, and why that matters for readers and authors alike.
When Meg Mason opened Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love during the summer before university, she was living through a period of acute isolation. Her family had moved countries at the start of her A-levels, and the gap before university felt defined by a loneliness so overwhelming it bordered on panic. In a piece that links her own reading life to a wider cultural phenomenon, the Sorrow and Bliss author says that what began as a teenage refuge became something more enduring: a lasting sense that Mitford herself remained a companion in her life.
The essay traces that feeling back to Mason’s mother, a keen reader who used to tell her: “When you’ve got a book, you’ve got a friend.” Mason says that line did not resonate when she already had real friends, but it took on new force once those friendships disappeared. Reading Mitford, then seeking out the rest of her novels, Mason found not only humour and comfort in the books’ sadness, but a populated fictional world that offered company. Over time, that company extended beyond the characters to the writer behind them, to the point that Mason says she still finds it hard to believe Nancy Mitford is not actually a friend.