Will Self

No, it's self-adopted.

My father, being of the grey flannel trouser tweed jacket profession, called me Little Willie, which was a sobriquet, interestingly, in the playgrounds of the 1970s I was keen to lose.

So I called myself Will rather than William.

I thought it was dashing and Shakespearean.

And it is.

I've always been interested in nominative determinism for obvious reasons.

I love Stoppard's play Jumpers for that reason, which has an obsession with nominative determinism and philosophy.

And of course, my mother was an abject Freudian.

She'd been in an analysis when she was pregnant with me, with Anthony Storr.

So...

The idea of self-will came at me from so many different domains as a young person.

The most signature name event for me, though, wasn't when, as a child, we were in a hotel in New York and William Self was paged because he was the producer of Batman.

But actually, when a friend of mine called O'Shaughnessy when I was in my teens said, there's nothing that remarkable about your name.

There's more of you in the phone book than there are O'Shaughnessy's.

And actually, the London phone book is something we've all lost because it allowed you to get a feeling for demography instantly.

You can flip through it.

And we went to the book, and indeed there were more selves than O'Shaughnessy's.

And that appalled me.

There were only about 20 selves.

Yes, many smellies.