Nasty Lucky Genes 
Andrew O’Hagan
Elizabeth Smart was browsing one day between the wars in the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road. Young, blonde and original, unclaimed by her Ottawa upbringing or her mother’s social hopes, Smart came to lean against those London bookshelves as if they alone contained all the answers. That day, she drew her finger over a line of volumes, took one down and read the poems where she stood, deciding by the last page that the author was the man she was put on earth to marry.
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Andrew O’Hagan’s The Atlantic Ocean, a collection of essays on Britain and America, many of which were first published in the London Review, will be published in June. Be Near Me, his last novel, won the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize award for fiction.
Other articles by this contributor:
The God Squad · Andrew O’Hagan in Bushland
A Journey in the South · Andrew O’Hagan travels to New Orleans
Iraq, 2 May 2005 · Two Soldiers
Blame it on the boogie · In Pursuit of Michael Jackson
The Nominee · With the Democrats
Everything Must Go! · American Beauties
Good Fibs · Truman Capote
In His Hot Head · Robert Louis Stevenson
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