Well, it was always going to be called Will. More than once in this terrifying, terrific book, Will Self refers to ‘nominative determinism’ — the idea that a name somehow foretells a life. That he chooses Will, not Self, is indicative and ambiguous. This memoir — not an autobiography — starts in May and ends in August 1986, but also spirals back to 1979, 1982 and 1984 in the kind of chronological fracturing that has typified his later fictions.
It is a chronicle of addiction, and the ‘will’ is everything, from the insistent desire, to a futureless future, to the psychological horror of being called ‘Little Willy’ by his mother. Throughout, he normally refers to himself as Will, but this is not Caesar-style self-aggrandising. It is more like a form of dissociation, where the writer cannot reconcile himself to his past self.
It is absolutely unflinching.
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