Will Self

He was a wiseacre.

And having known his son very well and his daughter, I know the type.

And me.

But he was tall.

He was tall.

Tall.

My mother's first husband was a rather eminent literary critic called Robert Adams, expert on Milton, professor at UCLA, very eminent.

And he wrote a memoir that was never published with the description of my grandfather in it.

And the fascinating thing about this description is

is he describes my grandfather brilliantly, and it is completely anti-Semitic, the portrayal.

It is a cartoonish depiction of a flashy, wiseacre Jew who is unscrupulous, has no morals.

What's true about my grandfather is that he was a bit like that.

My mother said that they survived in the Depression because my grandfather...

would go to a small town where the department store was about to close, and he'd say, I'll organise the stock sale, I'll put up the banners, and I'll make sure that you can realise there's much money out of the... So he actually sort of was a vulture that preyed off the... And my mother was very struck by this.

She didn't like him, clearly.

She would describe him as a vulgarian.

She wanted to be Virginia Woolf.

That was her, including the insanity, probably.

Yes, very much so.

Oh.