Our theme for the month of June is “confessions.”

When I was a kid, our family’s Christmas Day rhythm was as follows: wake up, eat cinnamon rolls, open stockings, open presents, clean up the wrapping paper, start watching NBA, and then curate a display of the gifts you wanted to show Grandma when she came over for dinner. My brothers and I would each take an area of the couch and artfully arrange a pile of clothes, books, candy, toys, etc. for her to appreciate.

There was always a bit of editing though. We’d go through our hauls with an eye for things that would be a lot of work to explain and then stash those gifts in our rooms—things like Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage! or a “I met Lil Sebastian at the Pawnee Harvest Festival” T shirt would be hidden away. She never shamed us for anything we got, we just truly didn’t want to have to explain some things.

This past Christmas I asked for The Unfinished Harauld Hughes.

It’s a book that tells the story of the making of a documentary about a writer, investigating the story behind his last (and unfinished) screenplay. Except the documentary is fake, as is the screenplay, and all of the characters making the documentary and being interviewed—and as is Harauld Hughes himself. It’s a completely fictional book written in the style of a very real, self-serious book.

This book would not have stayed on the couch.

I became a fan of the author, Richard Ayoade, when I found myself in a British panel show rabbit hole on YouTube during the pandemic. You may know him from The IT Crowd, Wes Anderson’s shorts that came out on Netflix last year, or as the forensic investigator who helps send Paddington to prison in Paddington 2. A few years back, I read his book Ayoade On Top: A Voyage (through a film) in a Book (about a Journey), in which he analyzes in unprecedented and unrequested detail the 2003 Gwyneth Paltrow film, View From the Top.

It’s a very funny book—perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s something I love about someone giving such attention to a topic no one expects. He’s a great writer with a superbly dry tone, and he uses footnotes to great comedic effect.

Despite my family’s knowledge that this was a road I had begun to go down, I felt quite bashful pasting the link to the book in our shared “Ribbens Cmas List” Google Doc.

“Guys…this is a niche one but bear with me. He’s written a book about a playwright who he completely invented. It’s sort of a parody of those angry, serious 20th century writers and the people who revere them. ‘Am I a fan of that genre?’ No, can’t say that I am. But I think it’ll be funny?”

But I held my ground and confessed that I do in fact want to own this book.

I had to triple check the link I shared though because Ayoade also published three accompanying books of Hughes’ poetry, plays, and screenplays. And that would be a bridge too far.

Just the main book is plenty of fun—he of course comes up with the character of Harauld Hughes (“a man immodest enough to admit that he knew, from an early age, that his name ‘would become adjectival’”) but also the narrator (a parody of “Richard Ayoade” but in a world where he stumbles upon a portrait of Hughes and, after realizing they have a remarkable resemblance, reads and becomes a fan of his work), Hughes’ first and second wives, his half-brothers, a director, a cinematographer, an art critic, and a few members of a documentary crew.

He includes excerpts from the diary of Lady Virginia Lovilocke (Hughes’ second wife) in which she quotes a letter from Leslie Francis (director of Hughes’ last screenplay) to Hughes, and a bit of Francis’ diary later on. He also wrote the introduction to a published edition of the screenplay by Augustus Pink, Hughes’ biographer, that includes a quote from a producer about Leslie Francis. And so on and so on. There’s whole interviews and articles and descriptions of archive footage in there.

I promise it’s only confusing when I try to explain it. While you’re reading it, it’s just a funny book about people who take themselves too seriously.

A few favorite quotes, if I may:

In 1917, the man who would become Harauld Hughes’s de facto father survived a German U-boat attack by clambering up to the crow’s nest and jumping onto a passing biplane, while he subsequently commandeered and used to destroy the submarine that had just sunk the ship. For this, he received two days’ extra rations and the option to do more work above deck.

 

Leslie needs writers and he hates that. He wishes he could write, and he certainly is a very good critical writer—of articles, monographs and so forth. He can bang out a hell of a foreword and a pretty decent afterward—it’s the stuff in between that eludes him. The ‘words’, I suppose you’d call them.

 

To a man like Mickie Perch, who said he couldn’t truly love any film unless it featured nunchucks, the word ‘patience’ was a red flag.

 

Often, something he initially thought might turn out long would end up being short, or vice versa. These moments were especially exciting: the air around him would positively thrum with electricity. ‘I thought it would be short, but it’s actually quite long!’ he would say, shooing a child back into the loving arms of a housekeeper.

 

I don’t even know that I’m trying to persuade you to read this book. I think I’m just confessing that I like it.

 

For Further Reading, works by Harauld Hughes:

Plays

Platform

Table

Roast

Roost

Prompt

Flight

Shunt

Dependence

 

Prose/pieces

Speech

The Sitting-Down Door (a play without words)

 

Screenplays

The Swinging Models

The Especially Wayward Girl

The terrible Witch

The Deadly Gust

The Glowing Wrong

O Bedlam! O Bedlam! (unfinished)