He long ago decided that the best way to pursue the latter was to write about it. His subject has always been how much of ourselves we are prepared to risk giving away, and the consequences of that self-exposure. He writes, in other words, like a poker player. It is tempting to think of his character at the card table as revealing. Everything about him was close and quiet, his gestures were short and cleared with no wasted movement.
Writing is, of course, another option.
Marber grew up in suburban Wimbledon, but wished he could say he came from Camden Town or Islington. In his teens he was the kind of boy who would go to the National Theatre on his own and sit in the foyer writing notes in the margins of Camus or Bukowski. Eagelton recalls Marber as not a brilliant student 'but someone with a lot of imaginative flair, and always this wry and melancholic air'. It was a kind of toothless satire,' his tutor recalls, approvingly. After university Marber followed his ambitions single-mindedly, writing and procrastinating by day, gambling at night.