Selfy
(Maybe there ought be a self-help group for people who, reading the name 'Will Self' on a column or a review, are powerfully moved to heave out a codfish? Or is this an entirely understandable shared reaction?)
Anyway, Mr W.S. has writ a memoir, entitled Will, reviewed here, and as, in the sidebar, there is a link to Mr Self's interview in which he declared he does not write for readers, and I consider myself a reader, I do not feel obliged to read the memoir.
Especially as there are words in that review (the reviewer is clearly among Mr Self's admirers, for he must have some), that made me go, 'Oh, this is privileged white guy's [self-inflicted] misery memoir' - i.e. 'trapped... in Hampstead Garden Suburb' (o, the anguish!), 'tarnished Oxford days', 'post-university gap year of sorts, when he is miserably sweating out drugs in a Delhi YMCA'.
And anyway, this all led me think about that thing about 'ye artiste needs to suffer', which is really pernicious, and I suspect comes out of a group of C19th privileged white boys who did drugs and caught syphilis and so on but one suspects that their sufferings were as nothing to those of the women and servants around them. (I place a lot of blame on Flaubert, myself, but he was far from alone.)
I am not dissing on all drug memoirs or all works by posh young men, some of whom may have had Really Dysfunctional Backgrounds and Actual Problems. But is there perhaps just a touch of this being the equivalent of The Gritty Travel Book I Got Out Of My Gap-Year Experiences?
We concede that we are helpless in the face of our desire to diss on Self. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2998354.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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