Brandon Taylor: ‘Writing is the most fun I’m capable of having’
Brandon Taylor writes quickly. “I can type almost as fast as I can think,” he says. The first draft of his debut novel, the Booker-shortlisted Real Life, took him five weeks; last June he challenged a writer friend to a race. The friend had been 30,000 words ahead on his book, with Taylor going from a standing start, but by August, Taylor had finished, while his friend was still ploughing on.
Since Taylor says that “everybody in my family dies young”, one might assume that this is a rush to seize the day. But writing, he says, is also “the most fun I’m capable of having”. When he discovered the internet aged 12, via his parents’ dial-up modem in rural Alabama (the web being “this beautiful land that I could only visit temporarily because somebody wouldn’t pay the phone bill”), Taylor used to
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