the words weren’t mine

Self is enraged by the literary world. JK Rowling is a “dreadful fucking writer” who courts controversy in her “Harry Potter castle of money”, afraid of “a straw man with a giant cock who’s going to fuck up everybody’s arguments and moral reasoning”. Bernardine Evaristo is “the woman who said life’s too short to read Ulysses” and a “shit writer.” Giving her the Booker “wasn’t the thing we needed to do” for Britain to “live up to its imperial past”. Irvine Welsh and Hugh Grant campaigning for youth literacy were “Johnny-come-latelies. I’ve been fucking campaigning on this from the get-go.” He asks how many books I’ve read. About 400 since 2020 is “Not enough. By the time I was your age, I’d read 4,000.”

Still, when I ask who he talks to these days, he laughs and says, “You!” He has “no friends.” When you get seriously ill, people are “fucking horrible; I mean, you would not believe how bad people are around serious illness.” But Self had mostly broken with his acquaintances anyway: “Peers of the realm, senior publishers, people active in literature and the arts, senior newspaper and media people, all behaved like prize shits towards me.” In the wake of the divorce, he felt betrayed. “When my ex and late wife attacked me publicly during the year of Me Too, they wouldn’t say anything publicly because they were so frightened of social media. Older people were more frightened than young people. But imagine what it’s like when people you’ve known for 25 years are gaslighting you.” read more

IMAGE: Brooke DiDonato