You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast.

This week's episode was recorded live at the London Review Bookshop,

where the psychoanalyst and critic Adam Phillips was in conversation with the biographer and critic Hermione Lee

about his recently published book on Giving Up, which grew out of an essay for the NRB.

So it's a great treat and a great challenge for me to be in conversation with Adam Phillips,

who if not exactly a national treasure, is certainly a notable treasure house of life, thought, and language.

And as you've just been told, and I'm going to tell you again, Adam is a psychoanalyst, a literary critic, a visiting professor at York,

the editor of the Penguin Classics Freud,

and a writer of very extraordinary, many very extraordinary books,

which absorb delight and sometimes in rage,

which change what we know about ourselves,

and which once broached are extremely hard to give up or to give up on.

This book, possibly his 26th, has a recognisably Philipsian title on giving up, part proposition, part provocation.

And I think it belongs with some of the other essay titles and book titles,

just mentioned, as if you've been dwelling on this theme for a bit before writing this book,

on wanting to change, on needing to know when it's over, on getting better, talking nonsense and knowing

when to stop.

So no nonsense is going to be talked here, but could you start by telling us what this theme

of giving up here, what it means to you and why it's something that keeps perhaps coming back here and

in different ways in our books. And maybe a tiny reading to start with if that helps.

Should I read now? I should just say that my, as you can hear my voice is going, which is not

promising, but I think it'll last for the event.

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