Will: A Memoir is an odd trip of a book, as it appears that Will Self was only thinking in odd bursts of words, and indiscriminately alternating many of them in italics. The italics seems to randomly show up (sometimes several times in a single sentence), and they just seemed scattered and many times meaningless to this reader. Though I’m currently living with a former heroin user, I’m personally ignorant of living in a mind on smack, but his stylings seem vague and off the mark. I wondered if to Self these stylings somehow revealed how his mind misfired on the drugs, and how they slanted his words. A Kirkus review is quoted on the book’s jacket calling it, “[A] heady stew of J.G. Ballard, Hunter S. Thompson, and Philip K. Dick.” In my opinion, this book could well be a collection of those writers’ most unsuccessful and least interesting writing experiments.

In another review, it first quoted Self from the book, “there’s nothing remotely exciting about heroin addiction” and then went on to say, “Which begs the question, then why has he decided to inflict nearly 400 pages of this indulgent paean to his former junkie self on the reader?” I would love to take that reviewer out for a drink and salute them.

Will Self is writing about himself abusing drugs as a teenager and in his twenties. He writes in the third person and in almost four hundred pages, I never found myself engaged or interested in the times of his life that he was describing. I have liked several of his unique novels, but this experiment of a memoir never worked for me. I’m now zero for two in appreciating recent books dealing with addiction. Maybe I need to kick drugs for a while. ( )

I have been an admirer of Will Self ever since I read his first collection of short stories, [b:The Quantity Theory of Insanity|119117|The Quantity Theory of Insanity|Will Self|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1456505872l/119117._SY75_.jpg|1146883] (1991). As a writer, Self is smart and acerbic, grimly funny in the way in which he cuts through the nonsense and bullshit of the world. His intelligence comes through in numerous ways - the extensive literary and cultural references, the dazzling vocabulary that has even the most seasoned reader reaching for the dictionary, and a sense that there is a never-ending stream of narratives flowing out of his creative mind and onto the page.

The only problem with Self's fiction, as if often the case with people of this ilk, is that he has a tendency to push things too far. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it just results in work that is shrill, annoying, and tedious - [b:How the Dead Live|119115|How the Dead Live|Will Self|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348857817l/119115._SX50_.jpg|1207243] is a perfect example of that principle. For all his brilliance, there is something of the annoying and rebellious little boy in Self's adult persona that really turns some people off.

This book, thankfully, manages to avoid this pitfall, mostly because its author is now almost sixty years old and, while no less acerbic than before, he is at least able to regard his younger self with a degree of wry detachment. Indeed, Will Self is so detached when recounting the stories of his younger days that he exclusively refers to this character in the third person, as though it were someone else.

It is the perfect choice for a book in which young Will spends all his time taking drugs, scamming the men and women in his life (mostly the women), traveling to places like Australia and India, going through rehab, and just being an all-round c***. It should be mentioned, too, that he befriends a trust-friend junkie by the name of Caius, who is quite obviously the author Edward St Aubyn, a portrait that somehow manages to be even less flattering than the main protagonist's.

I listened to Will on audiobook, which is read by the author, and I would highly recommend for others do the same. There is an extraordinary cadence to Self's writing that makes it feel like poetic word association on speed. It's well worth your time, and I hope (and expect) there will be more installments of this sorry but fascinating tale. ( )

Like Amis, it’s the death of others that gets Will in the end. 4* because, very good though it is, it’s not Umbrella, Shark or Phone. ( )

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:

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 . . .’

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.

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. ( )