Self & I: A memoir of literary ambition
- Submitting institution
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The University of Essex
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 2806
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Eye Books
- ISBN
- 9781785630798
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- February
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This memoir uses de Abaitua’s original research into the novels of Will Self and de Abaitua’s experience working as his amanuensis in the 1990s. This experience is connected to wider themes of literary ambition, and this cultural and political period. With allusions to Withnail & I and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, the memoir is written in present tense to exclude retrospective interpretation: ambition is an experience that is shaped by our ignorance of whether we will succeed or fail. The memoir was extracted in the Sunday Times, widely reviewed in the national press, and received a full-page review in the Times Literary Supplement. It was shortlisted for the New Angle Prize for Literature.
Will Self was and remains an avatar of literary notoriety: his last novel Phone was described by the New Statesman as “one of the most significant literary works of our century”. The memoir’s insight into his formation and struggle with his literary persona will be a key resource for future criticism of his work.
Writing a memoir about a notorious living author determined form and style. In the memoir, the de Abaitua distinguishes between knowledge gained through the texts written by “Will Self” and de Abaitua’s experiential knowledge through his interactions with “Will”. This distinction between the lived experience and the written work and literary persona influenced Will Self’s subsequent memoir Will, in which he uses the third person to refer to his past self as “Will”.
Assembled from de Abaitua’s personal archive of letters and diaries, along with contemporaneous interviews between Will Self and various authors, many of which de Abaitua transcribed, and the novels and journalism that he published during this period, the memoir records the counter-cultural resurgence and literary culture between 1994-97 from an original literary perspective.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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