Question: What would you get if a skinny six foot six Brit seasoned his hits of smack with the spirits of William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson and Paul Bowles?
Answer: William Woodard Self aka Will Self.
By all means read Will: A Memoir but this is one memoir where you'll definitely want to listen to the author read his own bloody, fuckin' book. I can assure you, listening to the audio will make for a high-speed, rollicking jolt. Harrowing, hellish, humorous - the Will pulls it off as only the Will can, talking about himself in the third person in five fiery chapters:
WILL, AGE 25, PART 1
Addiction has reached the point where Will needs drugs the way a drowning man needs air. However, there's a problem, a colossal problem: life in London with all its shitfaced little women and men stand between Will and his next fix, exacerbated by the fact Will lacks the scratch to pay for what he so desperately craves.
Will zooms back and forth across London in his Volkswagen Fastback, his "Veedub," in a desperate, frenzied, frantic attempt to score, his fuckin' mum's eternal admonition, Waste not want not, endlessly repeating in his dope starved noggin.
How desperate is Will to get his fix? "Will thinks: You're seriously going to buy two apples Danish then take them back across the road? You're seriously going to offer them to John through the letterbox." Will does indeed reduce himself to such saccharine grovelling.
Will told his boss where he was working a crap blue collar job "I think I can do better for myself with an Oxford degree" and transitions to a white collar crap job - telemarketing for IBM. But crap is crap, a job is a job, and Will knows it.
"He's time to regret the drugs and the debts and the betrayals - the weeping, the wailing and the rotting of teeth. He's wanted to be a writer - to lounge about in a silk suit, smoking opium . . . . but, clearly, that's not going to happen now." Sorry, Will, you're poor not rich - and you've found out the hard way that without money to bolster your dreamed lifestyle, your Oxford degree means shit.
What I write here expressed in book reviewer language can only hint at the smarmy, snarly intensity Will serves up in his seventy-two page rant re his life at age twenty-five.
WILL AGE 17
"The book recreates the skittering druggy consciousness presumably inhabited by Self at the time, presenting episodes novelistically without any clumsy sentimentality or redemption." This MJ Nicholls snatch particularly strikes true when the Will depicts a day in his Naked Lunch life as a teenager. Ahhh, dope addled Will Self at age seventeen - can you imagine? One direct smacker:
"Days seem to float on the surface of reality, film and insubstantial, with nothing to fill them but the crude black doodles of Will's desires: he's found himself, wheezing in the empty, airless house, longing for a bomb with which to blow it all to smithereens - he sees tatty paperbacks and broken crockery strewn across the road, his father's voluminous flannel underpants draped over a rose bush in Mrs Cohen's front garden."
WILL AGE 21
Rage on, rage, on, Will! Dope and sex, sex and dope turbocharged when Will teams up with fellow Oxford student Caius (Edward St. Aubyn). "Caius has, besides his vast trust fund, untold reserves of built-in orphan power. Will's mother says what defines chutzpah is the ability to murder your mother and father, then claim clemency on the grounds you're an orphan."
WILL, AGE 23
Adventures with Caius, from Sydney to Varanasi, from Kashmir to Manhattan but some things (like dope) remain constant: "Indeed, back-and-back . . . as he ranges over the week he's been traveling in India, it occurs to Will that Death - and the fear of death - have been his constant companions."
WILL, AGE 25, PART 2
"Will's a dreamer - he knows that. A dreamer who strongly identifies with what De Quincey said of his own opiate-addicted-nature: that it took up residence in some secret chamber of his brain, and from there engaged in a sickening commerce with his heart."
How will it turn out? Sacrifice and bliss, Will? Can literature count as a higher form of ecstasy?
Read all about it.
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