For every reason excites to this, that my lady loves me.

In the summer of 2005 I was playing Malvolio in an open-air production of Twelfth Night. I spent lazy days lolling in the garden of the producer's house where I was staying – Hazzard, her dog, bounding around me looking for entertainment. I'd left my previous digs the day before rehearsals started, leaving most of my things in storage in Hammersmith, and arriving in Kent with just a suitcase, a well-thumbed copy of the play and one other book: Like a Fiery Elephant.

Jonathan's Coe biography of the English experimental novelist BS Johnson kept me amused for most of the run of the show (I'm a slow reader and Hazzard was demanding). It's a dazzling book, as experimental and surprising as its subject. Johnson was an avant-garde polymath: novelist, poet, playwright, critic, filmmaker and football reporter. I loved the picture of him looking bored senseless at a Dulwich Group poetry reading.

What I loved most about the book, though, was how its shape and form seemed not only to reflect Johnson's complex life and work but also to tell the story of Coe's exploration of that life and his obsession with it. It felt like a new form of biography where the shape of the book and the journey of its making are vital. It left me compelled to read as much of Johnson as I could, and I even found myself, strangely, holding the book in the air – to Hazzard's amusement – looking at its three dimensions and marvelling at how the thing was made.

Johnson's life is told through three movements, the first an examination of his seven novels, the second a series of 160 biographical fragments, and the third "44 voices", a series of interconnected original interviews with those who knew him. A deeply profound portrait emerges of a troubled man, a brilliant innovator and a fiercely honest maker of fiction who believed that "telling stories is telling lies".

All this might not seem ideal summer reading material. And while the story of this pessimistic, frustrated life, is ultimately tragic, the lugubrious Johnson of the film Fat Man on Beach is also playful and wonderfully childlike – a sad clown with flashes of piercing humour and a serious sense of fun.

The Hammersmith Beckett, as he became known, was obsessed with chaos and the random order of things (he famously published a novel with unbound chapters to be read in any order) and I think back fondly to chancing on Coe's book and the chance meeting that was about to change the course of my life.

You see in the summer of 2005 something else was happening. I was getting to know the actor playing Maria. Through publicity stunts in the drizzle on Rochester High Street and yellow-stockinged gallivanting around the box tree, Malvolio and Maria became friendly.

That was the summer of 2005 – Shakespeare and BS Johnson – and in three weeks' time, at a football ground in Dulwich, we're getting married.