Self and I: A Memoir of Literary Ambition

by Matthew De Abaitua

A unique, remarkable and hilarious portrait of one our most talked-about and controversial literary figures.

1994. Matthew De Abaitua, fresh out of university, is being interviewed for a job. The interview involves discussing literature, honking on a special cigarette and shooting at empty whisky bottles with an air rifle. The job in question is that of amanuensis, or live-in personal assistant. The employer is Will Self, the enfant terrible of the literary scene.

For the next six months, De Abaitua and Self share a remote cottage in Suffolk, working on their literary ambitions. They are distracted by hikes to Sizewell nuclear power station, opium tea and the allure of Soho. Thanks to Self and his library of bad influences, from JG Ballard to William Burroughs, De Abaitua undergoes a rite of passage that changes him forever.

Caught up in vital threads of the early Nineties, from the rise of New Labour to the slow decline of the literary establishment and the emergence of the internet, Self & I is set in a time that burns brightest in its final hour. It is a frank and very funny account of a young, hopeful writer who finds himself alongside one of his heroes only to discover that literary ambition comes at a price.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Writing, British Literature, Autobiography, 21st Century

224 pages, Hardcover

First published March 24, 2018

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

Having recently begun Will Self's own forthcoming memoir, I was reminded this exists, and it turns out to be vastly more engaging. De Abaitua was Self's 'amanuensis' – for which read dogsbody, housemate, minder and general sidekick – during Self's nineties heyday as the designated countercultural emissary to mainstream literature. Back then, de Abaitua was an aspiring novelist; now he's a disillusioned one, who's realised that a literary memoir is more in keeping with the spirit of the age, and one which can be pegged to a more famous figure is better still in terms of actually selling any bloody copies. So around the hijinks and the media parties with Self, a general tone somewhere between Black Books and the Ironic Review, de Abaitua sneaks in his own life story, from childhood dares, through the godawful holiday job as a security guard on the Liverpool docks, to the name-change (from Humphreys, and not just because de Abaitua sounds better) which Self was the first to confirm as a definite improvement. The passages with two arseholes getting arseholed in a country cottage inevitably suggest Withnail, but elsewhere are nods to everything from coming of age stories (and how seldom real youth lives up to them) to the old-fashioned campus novel (there's even a guest appearance by Malcolm Bradbury). De Abaitua has always had a knack for the perfect encapsulation; here, I was especially taken with his description of the Idler's early days as "a quest for a usable past", but there's tons more on that level. As much as anything this is a eulogy for a time when the literary novel was still at the heart of the culture – a proposition with which one can argue on wider grounds, but where de Abaitua may have the trump card simply through having seen the royalty statements. And even if I came to London five years (which was also a decade, a century, a millennium) later than him, and in somewhat less exalted circles, there's definitely something I recognise in his freewheeling, rackety city which now seems to have been smothered. Although as with any such lament, it's important to acknowledge that this could of course just be because we're both getting on a little.

[Jackie Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

Self & I, by Matthew De Abaitua, is a cautionary yet always engaging tale, ideal for anyone who dreams of becoming a published author. Written in the form of a memoir it recalls true events and interactions from the author’s earlier years. It offers a reflection on a bygone era capturing how life was experienced without the maturity of hindsight. It remains mindful of those involved at the time.

In July 1994, twenty-two year old Matthew Humphreys was employed by Will Self as the newly divorced enfant terrible of the British literary scene’s amanuensis, translated as slave-at-hand. Matthew lived alongside the in-demand author in a remote cottage in Sussex. He was eager to learn from his new employer and develop his own writing. Matthew grew up in a Liverpool dormitory town, took a holiday job as a security guard on the city’s docks, attained an English Literature degree from the University of York, and studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia under the tutelage of Malcolm Bradbury. He was still waiting for his expected coming-of-age moment that would define what he would afterwards be.

1994 was before the internet and social media. Authors expected to be revered, to have readers accept whatever they were given. Writers sought validation from other writers, feeling anger and frustration when readers didn’t pay their work the attention they believed it deserved.

“A sympathetic protagonist, an easy and unassuming prose style, and a strong plot – these were marks of weakness. Signs of pandering to the reader. And who wants to hang out with that loser?”

Matthew was a naive young man full of big words and little understanding. Now a creative writing lecturer at the University of Essex he may well have written this book with his students in mind. It is very funny in places and offers an insight into the mindsets of both an aspiring and an established author. Will Self was well aware of how the world viewed him and worked on maintaining his reputation despite the personal costs. He offered the young Matthew practical help and advice whilst warning him against the excesses in which he himself regularly indulged.

“Play up the vivid persona and use it to smuggle the work into the culture. The side effect of such a public persona is that it becomes the object of other people’s frustrated ambition, and they take out their grievances upon the work.”

In the period covered Matthew is attempting to find his place in the world whilst learning to accept his own inadequacies. At times he struggles with the lonely life in the cottage and his relationships with the people he interacts with, including those from his home town.

“The people you leave behind, the life you reject. Old friends are signposts down an untaken path. Ambition requires betrayal.”

Matthew worked for Will Self for six months although they remained in contact for longer. As well as relating thoughts and incidents from this time he offers the reader pivotal periods from his background, and what came after. He recognises now that he didn’t yet have the lived experiences needed to strengthen his writing. He was impatient for the life he craved to begin.

“I was a young man who compared the books I read with the books in my head, and found them wanting.”

He quotes author Jenny Offill who wrote

“You are not allowed to compare your imagined accomplishments to our actual ones.”

The ups and downs of living with a big personality like Will Self is fascinating but the insights in this book come from the author’s musings on his own thoughts and actions at the time. He has captured the intense certitude of a young person alongside that giddy concern encountered when they realise achievements beyond qualifications do not come with a map. In time Matthew will become a published author. That path is but one in a life chequered by mixed experiences and not coming to an end with the longed for publication.

As a reader with no illusions of ever acquiring the skills needed to write a book I am probably comparable to the nineties authors’ derided fans. I wonder if, in private, we are still thus perceived.

“Novels give us access to other lives, a few of which might be our own. Literary ambition belongs to readers as well as writers.”

An original memoir that is both absorbing and highly entertaining. Recommended to all with an interest in the world of creative writers, their yearnings, perturbations and conceits.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was lots of fun. I remember the 90s era when Self was a bit of a self-styled King of the Groucho and he lorded it on TV show panels as literary London's rebel wunderkind. Matthew de Abaitua, now himself a novelist does a great job at capturing the mood of those times, during which he lived and worked with Self, as his "amanuensis" (but of course, he couldn't be a mere assistant, could he?) in an authentic rundown old Suffolk cottage near Aldeburgh.

Along the way and amidst tales of trips to London to make merry on Self's penny at the Groucho, the French House and so on, we also get Suffolk tales worthy of (and deliberately homaged to) Bruce Robinson's Withnail and I: harvesting the local opium poppies for "tea", swimming by the Sizewell nuclear power station to cure a hangover, erratic and dangerous driving habits, pub drinks coming in "pair of pints" Withnail lingo, and so on. Or, "Will spends his birthday in the cottage . I give him a VHS of Tarkovsky’s Solaris to watch when he is next in London . Victoria has bought him a pullover , a knitted patterned thing , and he strides around the cottage wearing it , while I mash some opium heads for Horlicks Plus . Bugs leap for freedom out of the boiling water . It’s a good - natured evening". It works.

The other thing is the interleaving all throughout of de Abaitua's own biography; his family characters, his search for identity and tales of an earlier job at the Mersey Docks with the strange and often hard working conditions that entailed were brilliantly and often movingly penned.

I loved his descriptions of Turnmills from back in the day and that whole culture around The Idler, "Andy had stumbled on the vital truth about the Nineties : it may have been a soft - headed , heaving mass of meretricious triangulation but it was also a great place to have a party ." De Abaitua is younger than Self and he is perspicacious in his observations about their age gap and his own naivety, "Will is silent . The fire in the night expresses his fury in a way I am too young to understand . I am very much on the outside of his story whereas he is at the centre of mine ."

And, perhaps more than any other 90s-characteristic moment in the book, this, on recounting the night Self smoked a joint with the train driver, in the drivers cabin, while their train was in transit from an event in Brighton back to Victoria: "‘ Did they arrest you ? ’ I ask . ‘ No . The driver caught me on the platform . He said , “ You can’t smoke that there . You can only smoke it in here , ” and he showed me into the driver’s cabin . So I rode up front . ’ Will shows me the special cigarette , takes another drag on it . ‘ The driver asked if I wanted to drive the train into the station while he had a puff . And I did ."

[Andy Theyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

To say that I approached this book with trepidation would be an understatement. I am not a great one for non-fiction of any kind, particularly biography or memoir. Nor am I one for literary criticism. I am, to use the author's own words, a "reader".

But, I am of the same generation as the author (so much so I was at the same university at the same time, although we never met) and back then I cared about books in a way that seems impossible now. It was a time when writers were - briefly at least - on a par with rock stars. When the Booker Prize mattered, when Canongate were cool and when Damien Hirst was commissioned to encase individually numbered hardbacks in mirrors and $100 bills. A heady time. And a time when writing mattered in a way it just doesn't any more.

This book is part memoir of that time.

It's also part creative writing course; a discourse on the how and why we write. I can imagine a good chunk of it being delivered if not in the lecture theatre in the back room of a pub to the few who've stayed behind to listen.

It's also part literary criticism of Will Self's work; fascinating in its own right, particularly if for you - like me - those novels, novellas and short stories are just as rooted in the nineties as ecstacy, Cool Britannia and Tony Blair, and you've forgotten them just as easily.

But that doesn't do the book justice at all. It makes it sound fucking boring, in fact. It is so much more than those things. It is a deeply personal exploration of ambition. Of the difference between the writing and my writing. Of success and failure and how it's often impossible to tell them apart. And it is extraordinarily beautifully written, hallucinatory in its ability to render the landscape, both internal and external.

I inhaled this book, and briefly it overwhelmed me. The detail is already fading but the feeling is still there.

I have no doubt I will return to it in the future.

[Matthew Abaitua · Rating 5 out of 5]

'If you love Withnail & I, you must read this.' Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller


'I love the perfectly wry balance Matthew De Abaitua achieves between innocence and knowingness, between apprenticeship and ambition. It’s a delicious peek into the "Will Self industry" and the vanished publishing world of the Nineties, but it’s also a wonderful, highly readable book about love and dedication, and coming of age as a process of learning to be honest with ourselves.'
Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse


Self & I ups the stakes on both U&I and Withnail and I to offer an utterly compelling account of what it means to read, write, live and breathe literature. Anyone interested in the world of letters will devour this book with delight.' Matt Thorne'Very funny but with an undertow of melancholy, Self & I is at root a hymn to the vocation of writing and, as such, sings to all us nearly-writers, wannabe-writers and sometime-writers (i.e. all writers) with the ecstasy of scripture.'
Will Ashon, author of Strange Labyrinth

Self & I is a little classic. A unique insight into the mindset and working methods of one of the key writers to have emerged from the post-Thatcher years, it is also a manifesto, in a sense, for beginning writers, a wrestling over some of the questions of what it means to be a writer in today’s Britain.
Nina Allan, author of The Rift

[Richard Luck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cards on the table - I had the pleasure of working with Matthew De Abaitua for four years in the mid-2000s. During that time, he spoke occasionally about the months he'd spent as Will Self's amanuensis (look it up). Now he's written account of that time and how it shaped him as a writer. Equal parts amusing and melancholy, Self & I provides a rare opportunity to discover what makes authors tick. Book of the year? Hard to say, what with it still being only April. Instead, let's just say that the bar has been set so high, even Sergey Bubka might think it beyond his range.

[Vuk Trifkovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times, enjoyed this even more than De Abaitua's SF novels. Really great stuff - a glimpse into a what proved to be a transition to another world. I've migrated to the UK roughly at the same time, so it really helped me understand it better. The vignettes from 1970s / 1980s Northwest are also great, as is stuff on literature.

[Peter Haynes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honest and illuminating. This brisk volume packs in a lot of wisdom on creativity, ambition, and the I Know Everything/I Know Nothing dichotomy of youth.

[Vicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for fans of Will Self, the aggressively intellectual, drug-using bad boy of British books. The author worked as amanuensis to the famous novelist, performing menial domestic and professional chores in return for accommodation and a meagre wage. At this time Self was mostly living in Suffolk after splitting from his first wife, and there are shades of Withnail and I, an influence De Abaitua acknowledges at the end.
The author gives interesting and helpful critiques of some of Self’s fiction, which he uses as a roadmap to understand his boss, and himself, and his chosen career.
Even though not an avid follower of Self, I found the descriptions of his domestic and working life riveting. (Perhaps I should say that I am bound to be fascinated by an author’s MO because I am a book editor. I also declare familiarity with the landscape of Suffolk, where much of the Selfish stuff takes place, and the London literary ‘scene’, and indeed a glancing connection to a particular strop, referenced here, that Self threw in the direction of another author.)
Self is famous as an ex-junkie, and has just published (2019) an account of his addiction, but at this period was merely dabbling with other drugs than heroin. ‘Special cigarettes’ are pretty much a daily ritual. The coy term ‘special cigarette’ is used throughout, but instead of being tedious it becomes very funny. There is a hilarious episode in which Self gets off a train to smoke a joint, is invited into the driver’s cabin and ends up guiding the train in to Victoria while the driver has a relaxing puff.
De Abaitua is funny about Self, but more so about his own life. He weaves in his childhood and adolescence, a journey from lower-middle-class Liverpool to the allegedly more glamorous world of literature, with anecdotes about Self, and learning to drive, and his girlfriend, and the general growing-up that he did in this period. This is a very good description of being in one’s twenties, embarking on the adult world while usually feeling adrift in it. For my money, this is a good way to deal with said embarkation: 'All the time I've been trying to catch a glimpse of something meaningful out of the corner of my eye, I've denied the real world its due. Ambition, intoxication, dreams, books -- I have used them as ways of ignoring the world.'
It is also superbly constructed, engaging, amusing and sometimes rather boring, evoking De Abaitua’s existence when he was left alone in the rural cottage for days.
After leaving the job, De Abaitua worked on The Idler magazine and partied 90s-style in London, a section of the book that made me slightly envious.
Essentially this is the autobiography of someone of whom you haven’t heard; but it is much more, and much better, than that.

[Tim Atkinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having just read 'The Butt' I thought I'd read a book about, rather than by, Will Self next. Suffice to say it's quite a contrast. There are some moments of real insight, some passages of memorable prose and some less-than-commonplace observations. But most of them don't have anything to do with Will Self. And, to be fair, De Abaitua does flag up the fact that it's more about the author than The Author, so no complaints there, I suppose. There are some peculiar turns of phrase, some embarrassing over-writing. The hot water pipes ‘lament the filling of the bath’; mould on the window frame ‘advances another spotted inch’; the author's penis ‘is an opium poppy reared in Martian soil, heavy with narcotic sensation.’ Something is certainly heavy with narcotic sensation, that's for certain. Elsewhere there is an easy flow, especially when De Abaitua talks of his Liverpool childhood, comparing the boy he was then with the man he has become, wondering how such obvious changes could happen at all and yet hardly be noticed. Only at the end can you see how far you are from the beginning, I suppose. And this is a book about beginnings, if nothing else. Beginnings in boyhood, beginnings as a writer, beginnings as a lover, partner, father. In at least one of these senses, we're still waiting, I suppose, to see how far we might ultimately travel - where, in other words, De Arbaitua might end up.

[Andrew Crofts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lessons in how to be a writer

There is no better way to learn how it feels to need to be a writer than to hear the experiences of those who have been through the process. This book certainly has much of the comic romantic squalor of Withnail, but also some of the warning notes I remember hearing in my head when reading “Down and Out in Paris and London” as a teenager with literary ambition and a terrible fear of both discomfort and ultimate failure. Highly recommend this insight into a real writer’s mind.

[Jack Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very literary memoir

As the author is more or less the same age as me there’s a lot of this memoir that’s very recognisable. The painful awkwardness of your early 20s, the desire to find where you fit. The noisy messy party of the 1990s. Of course I never worked for Will Self and I probably wouldn’t have wanted to. The sections about childhood and adolescence are particularly good; the Self bits, I guess, are what makes this more unusual. A thoughtful examination of the desire to write and also the desire to ‘be a writer’.

[Oryx · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, like, I'm the first to review this on here?

Oh dear. The PRESSURE. Matthew(?), Matt(?), Matteo(?) Mat(t)rimony(??)... I don't know what to say.

Maybe that the cover quotes are justified? Especially the one from Lauren Elkin?
Yeah, I'll say that, leave it at that, leave it at that and add my customary arbitrary assortment of numbers.

3.6754336272829

[Tim Ewins · Rating 5 out of 5]

90s nostalgia, and a great read for writers

Part nostalgia, part withnail humour, memoir, and part reflection on ambition and literature.

All entertaining.

I would totally recommended this book to anyone, but particularly writers!

[Susan King · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some real laugh out loud moments, particularly De Abaitua's recollections of himself as a young, would-be author finding his way in the strange world of literature. I will carry the hilarity of his driving lessons with me for a long time to come!

[Jacob Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will Self is a phenomenon to me. A phenomenon only. I have not read any of his work but have been aware of him as a significant literary figure renowned for his novels as much as his whacky antics. The Self that De Abaitua presents in his memoir, which details six months in close quarters as his “amanuensis”, is an interesting but unsurprising peripheral figure.

That Self was not more of the focal point is something for which De Abaitua has been criticised; expectation seemed to be geared towards the exploration of a tragicomic friendship similar to ‘Withnail and I’, a classic movie that inspired De Abaitua’s title. Similarities and differences aside, the title ‘Self & I’ is cleverly justified by its quasi-appropriate cultural reference AND the Jungian allusion which is pertinent to his identity-as-writer theme, more obviously encompassed in the subtitle: ‘A memoir of literary ambition.’

When Self is absent from 1 Hall Cottages, doing whatever he’s doing in Brazil and Australia, De Abaitua details periods of idleness leading to contemplative biographical sections which, though engaging, feel detached from the main body of this memoir.

It’s clear by the end though, that these seemingly ambling sections are attempts to incorporate previously misunderstood or rejected experiences into the self, a glimpse of the shadow figure that concludes De Abaitua’s term as amanuensis with Self, and semi-tragically orients him in his journey as a writer.

This sort of satirises the pretentious posturing (all creative writing students are guilty of this) that came before but doesn’t alleviate the showy academic tone of his discourse on Self’s oeuvre, and other writers’ novels which, despite impressive analysis, verges on pomposity (another thing creative writers are guilty of).

De Abaitua knows a lot about the literary tradition in which Self is situated, and a lot more besides that, including what it takes to be a writer. His honesty and candour in this memoir is proof of that, and for anyone wanting to be a writer, it’s a useful and inspiring tool.

[John Fullerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully enjoyable, hilarious, witty, erudite, self-deprecating. Here's a taste: 'As a vehicle for ambition, the novel is a fucking jalopy. The wheels come off before you are even out of the garage. If you want to earn the admiration of your peers and a steady income without the need for a steady job, then do not accept a lift from the fucking novel. If you seek self-doubt, the indifference of your peers, long hours of unpaid labour behind the wheel then, by all means, climb on board.'
There are turns of phrase I want to remember (and filch for my own purposes) and here are but a few: 'my head a waltzer', 'curmudgeonly frown of an ignored genius', 'tasty in a fight', 'cockshrunk' and dithery', 'phatic speech', 'draw and pinch' (or was it 'pinch and draw'?), 'the men with writing on their trousers', and the fat man's dilemma. 'By the 1970s, there were so many parrots going mad in squalid two-up-two-downs that the city could support a parrot psychologist'.