Mortification

As we are entering the season of goodwill and panto, I thought I would kick off today with some audience participation. Before moving on to the next paragraph, I want you to recall the single most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to you at work. Thought of something? Feeling suitably nauseous? Then we can continue.

I have been dwelling upon, or, rather, squirming upon, the subject of workplace faux pas ever since I was sent a copy of Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame, an anthology in which various authors recount their most embarrassing experiences. Contributors include the likes of Jonathan Coe, who describes crawling out of a television panel discussion on his hands and knees in order to catch a train, Michael Holroyd, who confesses to giving a 40-minute lecture “in a very large, totally empty hall”, and Simon Armitage, who recollects finding one of his books in a charity shop. “It is a signed copy. Under the signature, in my own handwriting, are the words, ‘To Mum and Dad’.”

However, as entertaining as the stories are, I struggled with the book’s premise that the world of letters, because it requires authors to present private thoughts in public, offers “a near-perfect microclimate for embarrassment and shame”. This is not true….

Read atTimes Online