‘I remember Paul Auster’: a tribute by Jonathan Lethem to his friend

The author of Motherless Brooklyn recalls his deepening relationship with the late author - from a chance book signing to becoming a confidant during tough times

• Paul Auster, American author of The New York Trilogy, dies aged 77
• Brooklyn’s bard: Paul Auster’s tricksy fiction captivated a generation

I remember the first time I approached Paul Auster. This would have been in 1987. I was an aspiring writer working at a bookstore in Berkeley and Paul appeared at another bookstore nearby, to read from In the Country of Last Things. It seems likely to me now that this was the first time a “major” publisher had sent him on a US book tour. The New York Trilogy was published in hardcover by a small publisher called Sun & Moon Press; up to that point he’d been a poet and translator. Paul signed a book for me. I never told him about this.

I remember that, when Music of Chance was published a few years later, I had the feeling I’d read something by a writer exercising an absolute freedom to do whatever interested him, and that at that moment he was the US novelist I most wished to be.