When your hometown's literary hero becomes your creative enemy
Joe Dunthorne on developing an allergy to Dylan Thomas and finding his own voice
What happens when the writer everyone expects you to worship makes you want to stop writing altogether?
Joe Dunthorne grew up in Swansea, where Dylan Thomas looms over everything like literary fog. "Growing up in Swansea, I developed an allergy to Dylan Thomas," he tells The Guardian. It's the kind of confession that makes perfect sense once you hear it but feels almost blasphemous to say out loud.
I think about this whenever I'm in a place saturated with one particular writer's ghost.
Dunthorne's real turning point came from his sister's copy of Trainspotting. Not from the Welsh literary establishment or university reading lists, but from Irvine Welsh's raw, uncompromising voice. There's something perfect about that. The book that made him want to write wasn't the one his hometown claimed he should revere.
This connects to something Donna Tartt does brilliantly in The Secret History. The way she shows how Julian Morrow's students become so obsessed with ancient Greek culture that they lose themselves entirely. They're trying so hard to inhabit someone else's aesthetic that they forget to develop their own. Dunthorne seems to have recognized this trap early.
But here's what I keep wondering about: is developing an "allergy" to your hometown's literary saint actually a form of influence? Maybe the strongest way Thomas shaped Dunthorne was by teaching him what kind of writer he didn't want to be.
Dunthorne also mentions being "duped by Donna Tartt" in his reading life, though the article doesn't elaborate. I'm honestly not sure what this means, but it suggests even our literary disappointments shape us as much as our discoveries.
The Alfie stories detail is what gets me though. Dunthorne describes how reading Shirley Hughes to his own children suddenly transported him back to his "attic room in Swansea 40 years ago, watching my dad turn the same pages." That's the real inheritance. Not the famous poet everyone expects you to claim, but the quiet moments of actual reading that happened in your actual childhood.
Maybe the writers who matter most aren't the ones on the plaques around town. They're the ones whose books find you when you're ready, even if that readiness comes from rejecting what everyone else insists you should love.
The Secret History and The Goldfinch are both available on papr, if you want to see what Tartt was up to that apparently duped a young Dunthorne.
