Will self open honest raw.He shares all exposes all a very interesting look at his life very well written very entertaining.#netgalley#groveatlantic.

What can be said about Will Self that he doesn't say about hisself? Full of his signature turns of phrase and wit, this is a powerful memoir.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I requested this book with no prior experience reading Will Self. The main draw was the subject matter: I'm usually a big fan of memoirs that speak of and confront addiction. Unfortunately, "Will" just did not end up doing it for me and was a bit of a chore to finish.

I have no doubt that Will Self is a skilled writer. His over the top verbosity and witty remarks were the best thing about this book, but for me what typically works in an addiction memoir is the ability to empathize with the author and I never once did throughout this meditation. For me, this seemed like a continuous chain of set pieces with diminishing returns. Perhaps if I had read Will Self prior it would have resonated with me a bit more, so if you're already an established fan of the author, give it a read and see what you think.

**I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to Grove Atlantic**

It's an interesting and informative read, well written and engrossing.
Will Self is a controversial and fascinating character and I'm happy I read this book.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

One part of me thinks Will Self is an absolutely astounding writer and another thinks he's an overrated, solipsistic, far-too wordy, gaudy, show-offy and wasted talent.

This is what I guess constitutes the first part of more than one of his autobiographical books. None may follow, but this one covers his earlier years throughout addiction.

He references William S. Burroughs enough times to make me think he not only wanted to write this book as though he actually were Burroughs—which would be strange, as Burroughs himself wrote quite a number of autobiographical books in the midst of addiction—but then again, the book is so Self-ishly (pun intended) written that it's impossible to know.

The result is a book that is written by an intelligent and acutely self-aware author. Self has created a book that delves into how people can act when in the throes of addiction. I guess many readers can loathe his experimental style plus the fact that the entire book is written in the third person:

<blockquote>The May morning sunlight detonates against 1916’s façade, and its diamond-shaped windowpanes . . . explode. Will senses the build-up of commuter traffic behind him, as the cars, trucks and vans hump along the Clapham Road towards the city centre: a steely testudo, ever forming, dispersing and re-forming. Will thinks of the desperate manoeuvre he pulled off on the way from Kensington: ‘You coulda fucking killed yourself . . . No, really, you could’ve . . .’</blockquote>

<blockquote>Will’s fond of La Rochefoucauld’s maxim: God invented sex in order to place Man in embarrassing positions – yet none, surely, are as shameful as his own, for he lurches across town, hobbled by his half-masted trousers and underpants, from one impulsive liaison to the next.</blockquote>

Self is currently quite sober, and as such, he's delved into a domain that I feel is always a pain for writers: soberly trying to describe the feeling of being intoxicated. While I think Self pulls it off for most of the time, his "psychogeography"—a word he uses often—seemingly can't dissuade him from adding difficult words while creating a solipsistic world that the addict is almost always in.

I feel that writers like William S. Burroughs and Alan Moore have handled descriptions of mayhem and debauchery far better than Self has, mainly due to my personal dislike of Self's style in this book. Sure, the made-up words and stylistic slurs probably describe how Self felt at the time, but grate on me; I wish he'd have tightened-up and hence produced a more effervescent look back. I'm quite sure Self knows what he's doing.

This book was very easy to read, which made me wonder what's wrong with me; ultimately, Self's style is quite easily digested if one is able to circumvent all the trappings, of which there are quite a few. I can't say I enjoyed this book, nor that I will remember it fondly, but it's an interesting look into the current mind of an intelligent person who was a massive drug addict a couple of decades ago.

I used to love Will Self; I was just the right age to find the appropriate tinge of outlaw glamour in things like doing heroin on the prime ministerial plane. Whereas these days one can only assume the leaders themselves are all getting high on considerably dodgier stuff than that, probably along the lines of that Torchwood story where the aliens are basically huffing human children. Anyway. The past decade or so, I've drifted away; that last trilogy sounded a lot like a middle-aged lunge towards respectability, following McEwan's tedious trajectory from enfant terrible to shortlist staple, and all those columns about the death of the novel, those young people and their screens, really didn't help. Much like Morrissey or Bret Easton Ellis, he seemed not to have noticed that without very careful management, what came across as puckish outrageousness in a young man can seem a lot more like Blimpish bullshit in an older one. Still, much like those arseholes who haven't bothered with a singer's last 20 years of music, but still get the celeb memoir for Christmas, I thought I might as well give this a punt. I really wish I hadn't bothered. At one point I even had to neck a whole other Will Self memoir (Matthew de Abaitua's one, a far more rewarding read) to check if there was anything I still liked about the guy or whether it was strictly something for my younger palate. Turns out yes, I still like Self as he was and as he wrote in his pomp – I just really don't like this. Obviously, it's in the nature of a memoir of one's younger self that often we'll be mired in the perceptions of said younger self, but there are ways to do that such that we still get the benefits of experience, whether in the wisdom or the prose, counterpointed with the callow prototype's misdeeds. And right at the close we do get one wonderful moment of that. Until then, alas, Will feels more like it was bashed out by the tyro at the time, an unloveable early attempt at the Self style – or at least, that's the charitable reading, because better that this be the unformed early version of Self's prose than a flabby late form into which it has deliquesced. The recondite vocabulary for which he's famed is here, but without the rightness one could once expect – I've never encountered a use of the word 'entelechy' that didn't feel fatuous, and the example here is no exception. There are occasional glimmers of the sickly, fascinating worlds he could once weave – in particular, the two cousins whose ghastliness is sufficiently novel that they'd have been at home in one of the novels – but too often, while the account may be true, that doesn't excuse how desperately overfamiliar it is. In particular, the childhood friend's family with no books, a big colour TV and lots of fruit machines, counterpointed with young Will's own, more bourgeois household, is exactly the sort of clunking litfic detail I used to read Will Self books to avoid. As for the insights, dear gods the insights. Junkies are fucking boring. Narcotics Anonymous is a sinister cult. The attempt to maintain a Western-style civilisation in Australia is completely insane. You get the idea, except that if those three examples were quotes rather than paraphrases, the last two words of each would be in <i>superfluous italics</i>, with which this book is littered as if to capture <i>an absolute beginner's idea of conveying emphasis<i>.

(Netgalley ARC)

Didn't enjoy this at all, but still gave it 3 stars as I didn't get through it all, and it MAY have got better. The quarter that I did read seemed to be all about drugs, drugs, and drugs. Is there a more boring topic. I have read some of Will Self's fiction and greatly enjoyed it, so I was very disappointed.

With intensity and honesty, Will Self shares his experiences. The writing is no-holds-barred and will sit with you for a long time.