John Lanchester: ‘My mother was a born storyteller. It is often a form of misdirection’

The first time I was meant to interview John Lanchester, we sat in two Zoom rooms waiting for each other – a modern case of Missed Connections. It was an apt mishap for an author intrigued by the ghosts in the machine: his last book, Reality and Other Stories (2020), featured devices such as phones, audiobooks and selfie sticks with minds of their own.

In Look What You Made Me Do, a twisty dark comedy, Lanchester puts people back in the driver’s seat. Kate Hittlestone is a woman in her mid-50s living in north London with her architect husband, Jack, whom she met at Oxford. An art historian, Kate now devotes her time to charity work. She is among the “smug-marrieds”, pleased that her husband looks like “the ‘after’ character” in Viagra ads, until her life is upended by his sudden death.

While Lanchester didn’t set out to write about his father, who died at the age of 57 when Lanchester was 21, “that must be one of the reasons [the book] popped out fairly fully formed”, he tells me from his home in Clapham, now that we’re in the same Zoom room. “On some level, I’d been thinking about it, or processing it, or thinking of ways of making it into a story. Because actually, when someone dies suddenly, it isn’t a story. It’s just this terrible, random thing.”

While Kate is in the throes of grief, the “bigger horror” is yet to come, when a buzzy Netflix series, Cheating, becomes the talk of the town.