Chapter 1: What was Will Self's childhood like?
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. There's a new guest waiting with quite a lot to say. So I'm going to shut up and say welcome to another episode of Rosebud. We do indeed have a very special guest for you. Cue the music. They're ready. Hello, I'm Giles Brandreth, and a warm welcome to another episode of Rosebud. I always say every guest is special.
This one is extra special to me because I have been reading his work now for, well, since the early 1990s. And I love the way he writes. I love his way with words. I love the way he writes. I love the way he plays with ideas. I love the fact that he is a satiric writer, but also can touch the heart. He is Will Self, and he's a controversial writer to many.
He's been up for every award that you can imagine. Booker Prize, Whitbread Novel of the Year, you name it, he's been there. I've just been reading, I think, the 20th novel by him that I've read. It's called The Quantity Theory of Morality. I think that's probably inspired by his first big breakout novel, which was The Quantity Theory of Insanity back in 1991.
This is an episode, I suppose, that should begin with a bit of a trigger warning because there's going to be sex, drugs and rock and roll. Well, no, certainly drugs, certainly sex. I don't think there is much rock and roll. There's a roller coaster life. So there's so much packed into this conversation. But here is a very funny, I think, very wise, very interesting character.
please do if you haven't read his latest i do thoroughly recommend it i haven't got to the end of it yet i'm halfway through it's made me laugh out loud at times it's called the quantity theory of morality it's published by grove the hardback is out now you'll certainly find it fascinating welcome to rosebud cue the music William Woodard Self, born 26 September 1961. Yes. So far, so good.
What, have you always been called Will, for short?
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.
We'll come on to that in a moment. Yes.
So I called myself Will rather than William. I thought it was dashing and Shakespearean. And it is.
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Chapter 2: How did Will Self's adolescence influence his writing?
Well, I feel I know her quite well. I wrote a novel about her that came out when I was in hospital called Elaine about her life in the 1950s. She was born in 1921 in Columbus, Ohio. Her father, Jack Rosenblum, was... Looked quite like me. He was a loud wiseacre, is what you would call Jack. 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.
So what was she like? What's the essence of her personality?
She wanted to be Virginia Woolf. That was her, including the insanity, probably.
Was she an aspiring writer?
Yes, very much so.
And was she a good writer at all? No.
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Chapter 3: What experiences shaped Will Self's perspective on drugs?
She also was incredibly depressed, you know, almost to the point of psychosis. She was on Valium a lot when I was a kid, and she had a filthy temper. Like a cataclysm, which I unfortunately inherited. Because if you have that bomb going off in your life, particularly if it's the person who is also your world. I mean, my father was totally absent. He was totally absent.
I ran away from home all the time. I was a bolter.
You better describe your father quickly then. Who was your father?
Peter Self, he was in my childhood, he was professor of public administration at London School of Economics. And he was one of Harold Wilson's activators. So he was the post-war generation of public servants and policymakers who drove modernization. His field was urban planning, urban and regional planning. His first book was called Cities in Flood. about the unrestricted growth of London.
If you think of a novel like Orwell's Coming Up for Air, his description of the salesman's life in the 30s, that was the environment in which my father had grown up, and he was obsessed by the idea of rational urban planning. That's why we lived in Amsterdam.
And that was the passion of his life. Was your mother the passion of his life? How did they meet? No, not at all. I mean, how did they meet? Why did they get married?
They were drunk and had sex, and she got pregnant with my immediately older brother when she was recently divorced from Robert Adams, her first husband, and obviously a bit of a gay divorcee, though not very gay. And there was a drunken encounter. I know so much about it.
From her diaries? Yes. Were they ever happening?
Including the fact that she knew she had condoms in the drawer.
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Chapter 4: How did Will Self navigate his early career in journalism?
He was married to Diana Pitt, who worked for many, many years as Rocco Forti's right-hand woman, very successful businesswoman. My father's first wife only died very recently in her late 90s, Diana. Very beautiful and extraordinary story. She was unable to have children because her mother had been a Christian scientist and wouldn't let them operate when she had appendicitis.
So they had to perform a hysterectomy. married my father knowing that she was unable to have kids he knew as well but then he got broody he wanted children that's the condom so he got he got broody he got drunk yeah brother is we drank a lot he drank all the time my father drank all the time how long is it before you come along A couple of years. A couple of years. Yeah.
By this time, they've moved back to the UK.
Yes, they're in the UK. He's divorced. I've got all the divorce papers. I can look at it all, correspondence and everything.
So there's the brother, there's you, and there are these parents. Are they, in the early days, getting on?
No, they never got on.
They never got on? Never. But they decided to have a second child? Were there any more than that?
They had a story. I think they enjoyed sex. They were both quite sexy. Yeah. And I think that's the trouble with marriages, isn't it? So that went on, but it was a very stormy. And my father first left when I was nine. So he walked out. He walked out. And that was it. No, it wasn't. He came back. Oh. He was semi-detached then for several years. And that was bewildering.
I mean, people wonder about, you know, I often get asked as a satirist, you know, where this huge contempt for the English comes from. And I don't really have a huge contempt for the English. What I am is a proper satirist. So I see societies from outside. The English take it amiss because they think I should be one of their own and not see it.
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Chapter 5: What impact did Will Self's health challenges have on his life?
And the joke was I would get up in the morning in a good mood and I'd just get into a better mood all day.
Lovely.
And actually, I'm quite like that now. What did you do all day?
what were the games you were playing to make you happy what were the books you were reading what made you happy
I loved Alice in Wonderland particularly, and I would say that more than anything else, it is what made me immediately want to write stories. I mean, I already wanted to write stories at three. I've never... At three? Yeah. I've never seriously doubted my vocation, and certainly by the time I was 11 or 12, it was insupportable.
What school did you first go to?
I went to what we would call in those days a dame's school, run by Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Davis. And just to give you a portrait of how brilliant my mother was, these two old dames, who were perfectly all right old ladies who ran a school for about 80 kids in Golders Green, and we all had little uniforms, Golders Hill School. At the end, when you left age seven...
You were meant to go up to them both. They were standing on the steps. The house is still there. And you would shake their hands and say, thank you very much, Miss Davis, and thank you very much, Miss Fitzgerald. I said to Mum, seven, I said, I hate Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Davis. They are authority figures I have no confidence in. So Mum said, fine.
I'll have the car waiting at the bottom of the steps, gunning the engine. I'll have my foot on the accelerator. When it becomes your turn, say whatever you want. Piss off, Miss Davis and Miss Fitzgerald. And then you can run down the stairs and leap in the car and I'll drive away.
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Chapter 6: What are Will Self's thoughts on love and relationships?
Can you, because you say you were, broadly speaking, quite happy as a boy, broadly speaking.
Up until I was, my father left, yeah.
Was that your first encounter with unhappiness?
I think so, yeah. I think in the sense that mother was histrionic. She told me after my ninth birthday party,
on the day of your life for my birthday uh and she was devastated and just completely lost and and immediately you know i knew that i had to look after her before that and and now she was like a zombie in the house and the next few years were disastrous while he was gone there were money troubles it was the miners strikes do you remember the power cuts in the early 70s
And mum, to be histrionic, would light the whole house with oil lamps and say, we didn't have any money. Turn the heating off.
What happens to you? How do these... I go feral. Literally feral. What does that mean? That means going wild.
Yeah, gradually. I go wilder and wilder.
What's your first encounter with going wild? What's the first thing that happens?
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Chapter 7: How does Will Self define satire and its purpose?
No, I remember just shinning up the playground equipment, which got me excited. So it was even pre... And my brother was precocious sexually, and he was masturbating, so there was a certain amount of circle jerk. And then there was sex games at school with the boys. And including some sex with boys, you know.
And were you taking this as part and parcel of your, this is what life is like?
I wanted to be gay. I was rather disappointed not to be gay. I thought, I saw women were essentially unattainable.
And also, they were the teachers because this is a boys' school you were at.
Yes, no, all the teachers were men. And, of course, they'd all been in the war. We were terrified of their trauma. Mr Dean had been held prisoner by the Japanese. We were terrified for him. We were worried for them, all the teachers.
Do you look back on this period? Obviously, it's been wonderfully rich material for your books. It's one of the reasons that I love them, because I didn't dare do any of the things that you were doing, but I've loved in retrospect at one remove. LAUGHTER At least you're honest, Charles. Yeah, getting a taste of it. It's fantastic. This is why I have this self-shelf.
When feeling a bit low, pull down one of them.
I can't say I was sexually very precocious at all. It was just like everybody else. I was desperate to fool with girls' bits, getting girls to come back with me, rolling around with them. But what I didn't realise, and it sounds odd to say it now, and people don't often talk about themselves with this degree of honesty, was that I was quite attractive. So I couldn't understand.
I didn't feel attractive. Nobody does. And I was spotty. But by the time I got to Oxford, I didn't really have any problems in that direction. And probably it wasn't a help. What about love, though?
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Chapter 8: What insights does Will Self share about his latest book?
This guy then went to Brian Mawinney, because I didn't do anything untoward. I would admit to this, when we got back to Birmingham Airport, I thought, time for a spliff.
on the tarmac oh oh my god oh the wind's blowing that way i'll just go downwind of the security detail i'm afraid i've i've always been a high risk merchant but still i didn't think i was busted until i got back from ireland the following week i'd been to stay with my brother who lived in ireland
And as I drove down Latimer Road, guys came, the paps came from behind the parked cars, cameras, everything. And all that had happened was this guy had gone to Brian Mawinney and said, I suspect he may have been using... He was the chairman of the Conservative Party at the time. Mawinney had gone public with it. My editor, Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian, then said, did you do it?
And I denied it, of course, because there was no evidence. Then he came back to me again and said, this has become a political matter because you were representing the Guardian and the Observer. The Tories want to make something out of this. So I want you to sign a legal affidavit now. Well, I wasn't going to purge them myself.
Now, you must be very clever indeed, because despite a troubled mother, an absentee father, the exhaustion that comes with excessive masturbation, drugs, smoking and drink, you nonetheless... I always found masturbation invigorating myself.
That was one of the things that all the anti-masturbation propaganda failed with me. I mean...
We're moving on, because what I want to know is, despite all of this activity, you managed to get a place at Exeter College, Oxford. I did, yes. Congratulations. You have got superhuman energy.
Unconditional place. Well done. When I was 17, so I didn't even have to get A-levels.
Well done, clever clogs.
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