Will Self

Will Self’s memoir, Will, is published today by Viking. Duncan White in The Daily Telegraph said: “Self writes with the same propulsive prose that he has deployed in his masterful recent trilogy, Umbrella (2012), Shark (2014) and Phone (2017), replete with riffs, puns, recursive loops and characteristic ellipses and italics. Perhaps Will is just another Selfian character, subject to absolute authorial control, the fragmented derangement of his youth woven into an intricate and coherent whole by the mature author.”

The Independent said: “Will Self’s memoir about addiction is an intense, stream-of-consciousness-like account of his life as a young addict, told through five ‘episodes’, starting from when he was 17. Self refers to himself in the third person throughout – in sentences such as ‘Will likes to quote Turgenev on the subject of enlightenment: What’s the difference between a white void and a black void’ – as he casts a jauntily honest eye over his once anarchic lifestyle.”

Alex Preston wrote in The Observer: “Darkly angelic prose… a joy to read, with the final part in particular recalling David Foster Wallace at his best… If, as he says early on in the book, ‘there’s nothing remotely exciting about heroin addiction’, there’s more than mere nostalgic pleasure in this gleefully self-lacerating memoir of drug abuse and rehab.”