Failure!” says Ian Brown. “Big failure.”

The feature writer and broadcaster is talking about his failure — to write a book he still owes Random House, the chronicle of a car high-jacking and kidnapping. We’re well into our conversation that began about an hour earlier, just after 8 a.m., when he burst through the wooden doors of Bar Mercurio, an Italian restaurant in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, and ordered a mushroom omelette, side of potatoes and coffee. “I don’t usually eat this much in the morning,” he explained. Later, in his car, Brown will look in the rear-view mirror, see that the heavy folds beneath his eyes are puffier than usual, and say, “Jesus! Oh fuck! I look like I didn’t go to bed last night.”

 On this chilly October morning, Brown wears only a suit; he forgot his overcoat at the International Festival of Authors’ “opening blowout” the previous evening, where there were “writers, drinking constantly. I end up drinking too much and having hangovers.” He liked the party, but it was depressing, he says, returning to the subject of failure: “Because you’re surrounded by people who have just written really successful books.”

At 53, Brown is a Canadian media mini-celebrity. His talent and big “I” charm come through in all he does: his newspaper and magazine writing; his books, Freewheeling and Man Overboard, plus editing and contributing to What I Meant to Say, a collection of essays by and about men; and his broadcasting, as host of CBC Radio’s Talking Books and two TVO documentary series, The View From Here and Human Edge. By any measure he has had major career success. So why does he seem so fixated on failure?

Brown will admit to worrying about measuring up to the great nonfiction writers he admires, such as Nicholson Baker, Tom Wolfe and Garrison Keillor. A long-time friend has said of him, “He wants to be among the best, anywhere.” But when I ask Brown what he wants to be remembered for, he begins by saying: “I’d like [my daughter] Hayley to remember me nicely. That’s most important. To be good company. Good in bed — that’d be nice.” Reflective pause. “It would be nice if someone remembered me as a good writer. I’d much rather they kept reading me. They pick up the book. They read something, ‘Oh, that’s good. Oh, that’s Brown.’”

Much of what he writes is good, really good; nearly every person interviewed for this feature can recall a favourite Brown piece, a few citing newspaper articles 20 years old. However, even some of his biggest boosters say that, lately, his writing is too often superficial and lacks great import.

Brown’s high school English teacher says his student was “a natural,” blessed with a “golden tongue.” Toronto Life called him a “legendary journalist” by age 35. He was, in many ways, the golden boy of Canadian journalism: articulate, smart, with an equally accomplished spouse and a large circle of friends. But what most people didn’t see was the hell he put himself through while writing. Then, in 1996, came the event that would forever change his life: the birth of a severely disabled son, Walker, who a friend describes as Brown’s “great grief, his great madness.”

Now he is about to embark on the writing challenge of his life: a book-length memoir about Walker. It could be the work that puts him right up there with Baker, Wolfe and Keillor, as well as other favourites, John McPhee, Ian Frazier, Calvin Trillin and Joan Didion.

But Brown, the natural born writer with a strutting kind of confidence, is no Norman Mailer when it comes to public braggadocio about his work. He often seems to prefer to hide behind a façade of self-deprecation. Of his book on Walker, Brown, sipping the morning coffee that may ease his hangover, says simply: “I don’t know if it’ll be interesting to anybody.”

One week earlier, in a crowded north Toronto eatery called Grano, Brown attends the book launch for colleague John Allemang’s PoeticJustice, a new collection of verse by The Globe and Mail’s “Book-a-Day” columnist. The room is filled with Globians. Among them: Brown’s wife, Johanna Schneller, who also writes for InStyle and Premiere, and hosts TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies; Liam Lacey; Beppi Crosariol; and Cathrin Bradbury, who oversees the feature sections at the Globe, and with whom Brown’s family went to Argentina last year. The day before, over the phone, a prickly Brown wanted to know what I’d be doing at the launch, worried that I’d interview people about him in his presence. At Grano, though, a softer, more obliging Brown is present—as is the Brown who likes to put on a show. “So what do you need here?” he asks me. “You want scenes? Okay, let’s make a scene.” In a corner of the restaurant, he proceeds to strike up a conversation with Allemang’s 24-year-old son, Sam. “Your father refers to you in the most covert way in the book,” prompts Brown.

“Oh, yes,” Sam replies, “the epigraph about me being a demented drunkard or something. Once in a while I indulge in ostentatious debauchery.”

The back-and-forth between the two unfolds in front of a small crowd, Brown’s rhythmic voice projecting throughout the restaurant. Brown is a great storyteller, but also a great actor, and an audience—particularly of women —follows wherever he goes.

Gary Ross, who has edited Brown, says of the writer, “There’s something about that cock-eyed nose and cock-eyed grin that set hearts a-twitter.” When Brown was single, he was a notorious flirt. Tonight, as the crowd thins, he seems engrossed in conversation with a middle-aged blonde woman. Afterward, he will whisper to Bradbury that the woman was “a bore.” Sometimes when a party bores him, he invents “Brown’s myths.” One involved convincing Bradbury that his wife’s aunt’s very large backside became sealed to an airplane toilet seat in a loss of altitude. Schneller doesn’t have an aunt.

Bradbury’s husband, Globe city columnist John Barber, says, “Women go ape for Brown” because “he plays the part of befuddled lost soul to perfection.” According to Barber, Brown is “a role player” and “gets kicks from putting on various masks.” A telling example can be found on Open Letters, a website devoted to personal non-fiction, which Brown co-founded in 2000 with current New York Times Magazine staff editor Paul Tough. In one posting, Brown discusses his own longing for drugs: “Anything to take his consciousness away, anything to relieve his self-loathing.” To hear Brown talk about himself, at times, he’d have you believe he was incompetent. His reporting: a catastrophe. His writing: even worse. What’s behind such public self-deprecation puzzles many. One explanation comes from Allemang, who says, “Brown has afflicted himself with self-doubt, then there he is, all over the page. But if you are filled with self-doubt, you begin to wonder why you belong in the story.”

Earlier, Brown’s wife had made motions that she was ready to leave the launch party and head back to their Annex home. Their 13-year-old daughter, Hayley, just had her braces removed. She wants her mom. Schneller had tapped Brown on the shoulder to tell him she was leaving.

No response.

“This is my marriage,” she said, grinning.

Finally, her husband answered, “No really? This early?”

Schneller left and Brown remained; she has said he is often the last man standing at parties.

Two parking lots away from the Globe and nine steps below ground is Rodney’s Oyster Bar. It’s been five weeks since the book launch at Grano and Brown is sitting on a wooden stool at the bar facing Bradbury, a glass of white wine for each. The two are finishing a discussion about a story on lobsters, which is late. After Bradbury departs, Brown explains his difficulty with the piece, an odyssey that takes him and stockbroker brother Tim from Boston to Halifax. “You would think it would be a pretty simple thing to write about,” says Brown, leaning forward. “But the problem is two things: one is that I already did a story about eating clams, so it can’t be like that; and B, it turns out there’s a certain level of indulgence. David Foster Wallace wrote an 8,000-word story about the lobster and how you shouldn’t eat it. It hurts the lobster. I think that’s an indefensible position myself. Then there’s the problem that there’s a war on. Everything is serious. Then here I am eating a lot of lobster, so there is a certain level of frivolity.”

This is how Brown’s brain works. He circles a story from every imaginable angle, tortured with the notion that he couldn’t possibly capture something fresh.

Brown then proceeds through a series of questions to himself:

“How indulgent is it?” he asks.

“It’s extremely indulgent,” he answers.

“What is the point of extreme indulgence? Liebling eating in Paris. Was that indulgent? I don’t think so because now I get to read about Liebling eating oysters in Paris.”

In the hour at the oyster bar, he makes nearly 30 references to other writers and their works. He is steeped in books and characters from stories. At about 12, he read Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” Of the main character, Nick Adams, Brown has said, “He goes fishing by himself, shattered from the war. He comes back. He goes to Michigan. He hikes, he sets up camp, catches the fish. He makes himself a sandwich out of bread and onions. Bread and onions.” This is like being, Brown thought. He later stated: “There was a strain of loneliness I could relate to, a loner quality, self-sufficiency without being a hardass; a guy who thought about things but liked physical things, too; a guy who had to tell himself to take it fast and slow at once, one thing at a time but everything into that one thing….”

Born in Montreal, the writer attended the 142-year-old Trinity College School, then an all-boys, private high school in Port Hope, Ontario. His British father, a metal trader, started at boarding school at age four and thought his sons should go, too. Tom Lawson, the English teacher who coached Brown on Trinity’s debating team, which included two other future writers, Ian Pearson and David Macfarlane, says, “My idea was basically to generate in my students the capacity and courage to think for themselves, to say what they mean rather than what they think will get marks.” Lawson remembers Brown pushing himself so hard at a cross-country running meet that he literally ran himself into the ground. “That’s the way for Ian. When he does something, he really does it.”

But not always. There was one debate for which Brown did not prepare, and it made the “A” student realize he had to work hard and not rely on natural ability. “His strength as a writer,” adds Lawson, “is he always had the gift of clarity and he always had this golden persuasive touch, right from the beginning. Speaking and writing. Some people are born with it and some people develop it. He had too much of it too early.”

What he didn’t have too early was expertise in the subject area of his first job in journalism: business. Brown’s oft-repeated story about his first assignment sounds a bit like a comedy sketch. Freshly graduated from the University of Toronto, and back from Radcliffe’s summer publishing course, Brown joined the FinancialPost in 1976. Wearing a new, “shit brown,” three-piece corduroy suit, he set off to report on a new Brampton development over lunch with the businessmen behind it. At the end of the meal, after far too much coffee, Brown asked his first question: “How much money do you guys make?” The men stared at him, cold stares, the kind that shrink you in your seat. Brown grabbed some sugar to add to his coffee. His hands shook and the sugar flew — everywhere. “I get up and just leave,” he says. “I am a fuck-head. It’s so bad I’m gonna get fired.”

Of course Brown wasn’t fired. Instead, his editor, Dalton Robertson, said, “Good story. Write that.” Robertson was a man, Brown says, “with a first-class mind, always surrounded by a semi-static cloud of smoke.” Now 79, the retired editor remembers: “Brown’s character is such that you knew he would be a good journalist.” He wasn’t “a figures man” but “an offbeat generalist.” His strength, according to Robertson, is the ability to write about almost anything and make it interesting. But it would have been “extremely interesting” if he developed specialties within his range of interests — a suggestion of promise unfulfilled. From the Financial Post Brown moved to Maclean’s in 1978 to be the associate business editor. A colleague, Ernest Hillen, remembers Brown: “I’m seeing a face that’s perspiring.” Brown would pluck madly on his typewriter, hair a mess, shirt out of his trousers, tie hanging loose. “You might meet him in the men’s room and he’d be so preoccupied he wouldn’t even see you.”

High school mate Pearson says what drives Brown is a great fear of failure, and that he “always wrote like he thought it’s the most important article in the world.” And he wrote everything down, and still does. His black notebooks are well worn, with crumpled and bent pages covered in squiggly script. He pulls them out everywhere: while walking, on the streetcar, while driving.

In 1984, Brown got a coveted job, writing features for the Globe. Among his subjects: skinheads, the Senate, business magazines, bioethics, artificial insemination, and an often cited exposé of 1980s excess, illustrated by the wedding of a wealthy couple who obviously did not know the journalist’s angle. In 1989, he left the Globe to freelance and host his own local CBC Radio show, Later the Same Day. He left that to move to L.A. in 1991, where Schneller took a job at GQ as a senior writer, and where Brown wrote Man Overboard in anticipation of Hayley’s birth. They returned to Toronto four years later and for nine more years Brown freelanced for newspapers, magazines and radio. In 2004, he went back to the Globe. His mission: tell stories and write more. “I want to know if it’s as important as I think it is.” If finances weren’t an issue, Brown says he would just write forever: “As long as you have your mind it’s okay. That’s why you have to stop drinking and stop doing those things. You have to preserve your mind.”

Brown is an idea machine. His wife constantly reminds him he is very lucky to have “a thousand ideas a day.” This plethora of ideas, though, often means false leads and bafflement about which to pursue. When Brown settles on an idea, it usually hatches like this: he goes into a Globe story meeting and exclaims theatrically, “I don’t want to say this. It’s a stupid idea. It’s so stupid!” But, as Allemang says, “I’ve never seen Ian at a meeting where what he says doesn’t fly. Ian could say anything, anything at all. People wouldn’t just be interested — they’d be on the edge of the seat, waiting.” Allemang claims 19 of Brown’s 20 “stupid” ideas are accepted. Brown claims his editors are thinking, “Weiner. Weeeein-ner! Can you get more superficial than that?” But then he says, “I know I will write a piece they will read. I know I will talk more about human desire, life, than any of their important stories combined.”

Getting his stories on the page involves what Schneller describes as an “incredibly laborious process. First draft is 10,000 words. Then, in there, is a story.”

Stephen Brunt, Globe sports columnist, met Brown in the ’80s when he was “a young, hotshot, world-at-his-feet guy.” Before deadlines, Brunt says Brown is like “a caricature of someone working a deadline, blood dripping from his temples.” He paces the newsroom, talks to himself, swears at the computer screen, and darts up and down the flight of stairs to the editors on the third floor.

One of the third-floor editors, Carl Wilson, says Brown reports and questions every bit of a story until the last moment: “He has so many thoughts and impulses,” he says, he needs an editor to help him find the thrust of the story. Brown’s drafts often reflect this comment. At the top, they are usually writerly and tight. Then, says Wilson, “It’ll start to degenerate”: erratic typing, capital letters, questions, second-guessing the direction of the piece and whether the lede is right. Mix in ribald humour, and a smattering of odd facts and there you have a classic Brown draft.

“Even though the process itself can be explosive and cause conflict and frustration for everybody,” says Wilson, “he’s very grateful and generous afterward so there is a real sense of accomplishment.”

Despite seven national newspaper and magazine awards and praise from his colleagues at the Globe and elsewhere, there are rumblings in media circles that Brown is coasting, not living up to his greater potential. The biggest criticism: way too many superficial pieces with himself, that big Brown “I”, at the centre. Since his return to the Globe full time, a notable exception was the three-part series in 2005 about Toronto health care, a moving picture of life and death crashing into each other in grey hospital hallways.

According to Wilson, the cinematic structure of the hospital pieces didn’t require Brown’s presence; it would have sentimentalized the stories. This lack of “I” is now uncommon for Brown, which irks National Post columnist Robert Fulford. In an email to me, Fulford wrote that Brown is “a talented, bright guy who unfortunately suffers from a peculiar maladie, Globe Columnist Disease. He writes about himself far more than is healthy for a boy his age.” In a follow-up phone call, Fulford explained that he thinks Brown’s reporting has gone soft over the years. “He’s got a great theme that he keeps going back to, but he never quite gets it: what is it like to be a man in this era?” Fulford then added, in a mocking tone: “Oh God, it’s so hard to be a man, a white man in Toronto.” And followed with: “If you’re born into a half-decent family here, you’re among the richest three per cent of people in the world and the last thing you should be doing is whining about it.” According to Fulford, personal journalism is just not fresh or revealing anymore. He thinks Globe editors probably encourage the first-person stuff: “It’s easier. They get more copy out of you.”

Brown’s other lighter fare, like roundtable conversations about food and fashion that appear in the Globe’s Style section, are to Gary Ross “a fairly convenient way of not really writing. It’s a shorthand approach to filling a newspaper.”

Long-time friend Hillen shares this view: “I personally find them sort of peripheral. I know that he does them with the same intensity. It’s not worthy of him anymore.”

Near the end of our interview at the oyster bar, I ask Brown about his soft stories, like last summer’s “The Leech” series about freeloading, of which Barber says, “I praise Ian for being outré and for taking an unconventional look at things. And one of the consequences is that it can be about nothing, like Seinfeld.”

From Brown’s perspective, he’s just doing what other, more celebrated writers do. Take Susan Orlean, he says, “one of the best writers of her generation”—she’s written about such topics as girls’ underpants and show dogs.

Then he says: “All that separates you from an animal is frivolous. Extra.” He answers partly with his hands, trying to express the “Extra” that isn’t coming out in words.

“All we really need is bread and water.”

Next: “I see [the critics’] point; it is true. I should write about things that are bigger than a pair of running shoes.”

A grin. “Everybody has a little sideline.”

Pause. Forehead wrinkles, drawing up the excess baggage beneath his light blue eyes. “I do write about some important things. I wrote about the hospital, I wrote about Africa.”

Laugh. “I sound pathetic. What a whiner.”

He admits that he regrets the piece about men wearing kilts, which justice reporter Kirk Makin posted on a Globe filing cabinet to show his disdain for such flippant writing. But Brown argues that it’s hard to know what will resonate until you write it. His wife says, “Like everyone else, you’re drawn to the easy story or the quick thing, which he pulls off really well. But as much fun as those things are for him to write, in the end, he wishes he hadn’t been seduced by them.”

Brown then starts to talk about his son: “Everything about Walker I want to write about: the way his eyes go dull, the way he smiles, the way he laughs. Everything.”

Did Ian tell you about the night Walker broke every wine glass at our friends’ house?” Schneller asks, smiling in the kitchen of their home on a dark Sunday morning in December. “We call it Krystalnacht.” While they ate dinner, Walker escaped from a playroom and, suddenly, there was a “Bang, bang, bang!” from upstairs. The little boy was surrounded by shattered glass, unscathed.

Of Walker, Brown has written, “He can’t speak, or reason, or walk too well, or protect himself, or eat without a tube in his belly. At nine, he has the body of a four-year-old and the mind of an infant…. He is something to look at, though I have never been ashamed of him.” The boy is one of about 100 people in the world with a genetic disorder called Cardiofaciocutaneous (CFC) Syndrome, which is characterized by heart malformation and skin abnormalities, as well as delayed growth and mental retardation. When Walker was seven, he moved to a group home in Pickering, a suburb east of Toronto.

This weekend, Walker is back to visit. He usually comes home every other weekend and sometimes mid-week. But lately, Walker is here more often; it’s helpful to have him around to get Brown “geared up” to write the book, for which he has started gathering notes, assembling a table of contents and examining old medical records. Tomorrow, Brown will bring Walker to Sick Kids Hospital for a dentist appointment, “a very involved process.” Before his son left for the group home, Brown has explained, he and Schneller “were both insane. Now when he comes, you would think you want him to sleep through the night but, really, what I want to do is wake him up and bring him into bed with me. And I can put him to sleep and I can go to sleep.” These are the feelings he wants to articulate in the book: “To be moved, and to figure out why you were moved, and to actually recreate for somebody what moved you, and to move them in the same way: that’s being alive to me.”

Brown says Schneller “did most of it, more of it,” when it came to attending to Walker’s numerous appointments each week and often biweekly ear infections. But they rotate the task of Walker night-watch. Last night was Brown’s turn and his son woke at 3 a.m. “You gotta make sure he’s okay because he can’t swallow and he doesn’t know how to cough,” he says. Sleeping with Walker is an involved process: Brown contorts his body as he sits on a kitchen chair, showing how he has to hold the boy, “arms around him, leg across his leg,” to keep him from hitting himself, which started when Walker was about three. Night after night of this took a physical toll: Brown says it may have caused arthritis in his neck.

Maybe because it’s the weekend and he’s more relaxed, Brown is a little more forgiving of himself today, less “on.” He mentions that he talked to a friend recently about his regret over the yet to be completed crime book. The friend reminded him the book was due around the time when he hardly slept. Brown says, “I’m not blaming Walker or anything,” and adds, “Now that I think of it, if I had had more sleep during those years, then I would have been able to make the leap of faith,” and write the book even though key players were not complying with interview requests. Brown says not producing the book and keeping the advance was “just not a good thing to do… it always takes a bit away from you. It always, you know, it’s....” He pauses, then adds: “I hesitate to say failure. I don’t really think there are failures. If you’re smart about it, everything fails in a way because nothing is as good as you want it to be because you always learn from what happens and then you move on.”

It’s time for Hayley’s ballet class and his daughter bounds down the stairs. Minutes later, Walker comes down the stairs, flanked by his mom and the nanny, Olga. The tiny, delicate boy with sparse, brown curly hair bursts into the kitchen and goes for his dad, swinging his “macho Popeye arms” at Brown. Schneller calls his arms “Popeye” because of the fleece-lined, modified Pringles containers that beef them up beneath his red flannel shirt. They cost $300 and protect him from hitting himself. His mom says, “He’s a skinny guy but every inch of him is muscle.”

Walker can never be left unattended: he constantly explores, wanders into the fridge, puts his face against the stove. Brown and Olga feed Walker breakfast via syringe into a valve in his smooth, white belly as he stretches on the kitchen floor, humming. His feet kick around, protected by red socks, which were knitted by Brown’s mom.

The father is concerned about his son’s ear. It’s oozing a little. “When I go to the hospital tomorrow I have to see if I can get him a recommendation for an ear, nose and throat specialist. If he had another sinus it would be easier; he would have more drainage possibilities.” Brown then changes Walker’s bib, and says in wonder: “The amount of stuff that comes out of his head: the colours, the foaming….”

The first time Brown mentioned his Walker book to me was on a late summer morning at a Queen and Spadina café patio. Over the sound of honking cars, the writer with the lived-in face talked about authors he admires: McPhee, Frazier, Trillin, Didion, et al. He admires them not only for their hard work and skilled reportage, but for their “venturesomeness,” that willingness to tell off-beat, memorable stories. “These guys live in his mind,” says Schneller. “And it’s not a coincidence that they’re all journalists.”

But all “these guys” have major books that have placed them in the pantheon of literary journalism in North America. Brown’s book on Walker has the potential to garner acclaim similar to Didion’s 2005 memoir of love, death and grief, The Year of Magical Thinking.

“You have kids,” Brown has said. “That’s like writing. You write them into existence, except it’s more fun. Sex: you get a kid. You unite. You actually finally come together. You have a kid. With luck, tragedy, happiness. Horrible, moving, so moving, it’s terrifying, too much moving, it’s like too much moving. And then writing, I think it’s the same thing. It’s trying to make a record of ‘this is what it was like.’” Brown wants to write about Walker and write him so clearly that he understands what his son is thinking. Plus, says Brown, he must write the book, “because there are things in your mind, in your life, that you’re resolving I guess.”

In Man Overboard, Brown explored that recurrent theme of “what it’s like to be a man in this era.” This theme also laced through the essays in What I Meant to Say. In each of these books, and also in the kitchen with Walker, Brown quotes from English philosopher, statesman and essayist Francis Bacon: “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.” For Brown, it seems that part of being a man is making necessary sacrifices for something greater than yourself: like children.

On Open Letters, though, Brown wrote something seemingly contradictory, that he’s “the kind of man who drinks and drugs and marries and wanders and possibly even fathers mainly to escape the anxiety of being his own flawed self, a being he despises and can never please.” It’s hard to reconcile this with the Brown who explains how he protects Walker in his sleep. But as Wilson points out, “Often what Ian provides as a voice in a story is another level of complexity: having a really intelligent and sensitive narrator who takes something that would have seemed like a more isolated phenomenon, but brings a level of contradiction and nuance that wouldn’t have been there.” And as his wife has said, “Part of what makes him who he is, is that he resists as much as he explores. That tension and ambivalence is always in him, and always was in him. Even though I might not like when he writes about his ambivalence, I respect his honesty, I respect his way to describe. He writes what a lot of people are thinking, when it comes to things, when it comes to fatherhood.”

Brown’s essay in What I Meant to Say focused on fatherhood and Walker. He took a bold approach and compared his own voyeurism at strip clubs to the gaping stares his son faces. He wrote: “It was in that grey time, after we knew Walker would be leaving but before he actually left, that I began to visit strippers again. This time the urges were sharper, more impatient, but also shorter lasting, and less satisfying when indulged. At least it wasn’t Internet porn, that sterile repetitive motion machine. At least these women were living flesh and real.” The essay evoked strong reactions. Allemang, who never read it, said: “Having a handicapped son and feeling a need to go to the strip club, I just don’t want to see the connection. I don’t want to know what your family life would be like the next day.”

Schneller’s response: “As a wife, it’s not my favourite thing to read. And as a reader, I recognize how good it is.”

Brown has said one of the reasons he became a writer was “to figure out what it is you feel and what you think.” Yet Brown, the expert communicator, will never really be able to tell Walker what he feels or what he thinks.

Hillen says of his friend with the “leaping mind”: “Knowing the pain of knowing that you can’t entirely comprehend your own child must be hard to bear.” But Brown can attempt to write about it and no doubt that big “I” will play a prominent role — and the critics be damned.

In 1994, Brown defended personal writing in a Ryerson Review of Journalism column, and in a phrase worthy of Mailer, pointed out that “history doesn’t remember impersonal journalism.” He also wrote that, as he ages, he finds it “near impossible to write anything that isn’t personal,” that first-person writing is “most likely” better and that it helps him improve the odds of writing fairly about his subjects because they are measured against the one thing he thinks he knows best: Ian Brown. “I notice the flaws in great people, strength of character in criminals, and ambiguity in everything.”

And, Brown could have added: the flaws, strength and ambiguity in himself.